The Dead Don't Die

Director Jim Jarmusch

THE DEAD DON’T DIE                  C+                  

USA  Sweden  (105 mi)  2019 d:  Jim Jarmusch             Official site [United States]

Kind of a cheesy and lightweight comedic genre film by this director that somehow got selected to open the Cannes Film Festival, receiving less than stellar reviews, surviving apparently on the fumes of this director’s reputation, though it has a remarkable all-star cast.  It’s not a particularly good zombie flick, but it distinguishes itself by being reverential to the masters of the genre, where snide and sarcastic references to George Romero’s subversive commentary run throughout the film, but there’s very little actual story.  Instead it’s more of a mood piece that uses apocalyptic zombie references to comment on oversaturated consumer culture, with individuals spending all their time on self-centered social media, where their smartphones are literally attached to their bodies, inseparable, doing all the heavy lifting that their brains used to do, rendering mankind into a brainless state of confusion completely reliant upon their electronic gadgetry to survive, without which they have no significant life to speak of.  This comment on passivity may be the key to the film, as too much of it lends itself to overly dire circumstances, suggesting a certain fatalism (like the current state of our nation), where we begin to resemble the walking dead.  Jarmusch already made a vampire flick, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), a gangster flick, GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999), and a western, Dead Man (1995), so he’s tinkered with genre films before, but this is easily his least effective as it barely scratches the surface.  In typical Jarmusch style, however, the film is so deadpan that the characters themselves barely come alive throughout the film, which may itself be a commentary on the state of our lives, where the high point may be a mysterious conversation that makes mocking, self-reverential humor about the director himself, which is completely out of character from the rest of the film, or even this director’s career, with Bill Murray as himself calling him “a dick” at one point after he feels slighted by what he perceives as unequal treatment, offering behind-the-scenes insight into the personal relationships, which is amusing, but it can’t save this film from its startling deficiencies, where many may find this a complete waste of time.  It does, however, have its own theme song, Sturgill Simpson - The Dead Don't Die [Official Video] - YouTube (3:51), heard on the radio by two cops making their rounds, Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and his partner Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver), where the chief thinks it sounds very familiar, only to be told by his partner that “it’s the theme song,” where everyone in the film feels a connection to the song, as if they’ve all heard it before, giving the film a déjà vu theme.  Set in the tiny Pennsylvania town of Centerville (from Frank Zappa’s 1971 surreal mockumentary 200 MOTELS), population 738, described as “a real nice place” on the sign driving in, while Zappa’s film describes the town as “a real nice place to raise your kids up.”  When it doesn’t get dark at night despite the lateness of the time, with watches and cellphones all going dead, there are signs of an impending apocalypse, though few are capable of anticipating the enormity of the situation, despite calamitous warnings from newscaster Posie Juarez (Rosie Perez) that no one takes seriously, as who really believes in a zombie infestation?

When half-eaten bodies are discovered laying in their own blood on the floor of the diner the next morning, the chief knows something is up, but it takes Ronnie to figure it out for him, as all signs point to zombies, the undead, ghouls.  Meanwhile, a local gas station run by Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones) is also a haven for the occult and all things weird and strange, selling vintage comic books and horror paraphernalia, where he’s also an expert on how to deal with the undead.  It’s surprising that in times of real apocalyptic need, it’s the fringe characters that know how to survive, as the rest are overly predictable conformists who refuse to believe this day is any different than any other.  This film is more about cameo appearances than storyline, where there’s a certain delight in who shows up next.  Rounding out the police crew is the straight-laced Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny), who’s a bit freaked out by what she sees, serving the role of the screamer when the time is right.  While there’s never any real accumulation of suspense, the first zombies we’re introduced to happen to be Iggy Pop and Sara Driver, Jarmusch’s longtime companion rarely ever appearing in his films, not since MYSTERY TRAIN (1989).  They also happen to be caffeine addicts, where we learn zombies return back to what they liked best about the living, mumbling out a desire for “coffee,” with Carol Kane making an appearance as an undead with a thirst for “chardonnay,” or Sturgill Simpson has a hankering for a “guitar,” while others cry out for “Xanax” or “Wi-Fi,” carrying iPhones that are mysteriously charged even though no one else can get a signal.  When a group of unsuspecting kids driving on the road head into town to fill up on gas, Zoe (Selena Gomez), Zach (Luka Sabbat) and Jack (Austin Butler), described by locals as hipsters from the city, they happen to be driving a Pontiac LeMans, the same vehicle featured in Romero’s THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968).  Meanwhile there’s a group of teenagers housed at the Juvenile detention center, Maya Delmont as Stella, Taliyah Whitaker as Olivia, and Jahi Winston as Geronimo, with the running gag being these big beefy security guards continually remove Geronimo from the women’s quarters as a violation of rules, as the three of them are inseparable and continue to hang out together.  Glued to the television news reports, their astute commentary is among the more intelligent in the film, completely unrecognized by anyone else, apparently, though they have the wherewithal to survive in the end when everyone else fails.  The star of the show, however, is none other than Tilda Swinton as Zelda Winston, the funeral home director, who weirdly has her own habits that others find strange (Murray attributes it to her being Scottish), like decorating the corpses in colorful make-up, speaking to them as old friends, like playing with dolls, or always walking in straight lines, or better yet her mysterious samurai sword routine performed before a golden image of Buddha, carrying the sword with her wherever she goes, easily decapitating zombies as she walks down the street unobstructed.  Her fearlessness sets her apart from the rest, easily mingling with the undead, viewing them as little different from the living.       

In a film where irony is like a foreign language, accentuated by the music from Jarmusch’s own band Sqürl, what’s clear is no one has a strategy of what to do while under zombie attack, as handling a few is no problem, but handling a surge of relentlessly attacking living corpses feasting on your flesh is another story altogether, as they tend to overpower even those with the best survival instincts, where the best plan seems to be to stay away from them altogether.  Unlike Ruben Fleischer’s ZOMBIELAND (2009), still the most commercially successful zombie flick of all time (a sequel is coming out in the fall), zombies are not used for target practice, or wiped out in record numbers like playing some demolition derby video game.  Instead they become recognizable figures come back to haunt the living, including some of the living characters seen earlier in the film who return later in the swarms of the undead, where it’s hard not to still think of them as human and among the living, plaguing the consciousness of those that knew them.  This is a new twist on a familiar theme, but Jarmusch doesn’t do much with it.  Instead he uses a social misfit narrator to comment on what we’re seeing, Tom Waits as Hermit Bob, a scruffy outsider resembling Bigfoot who’s been living in the woods for decades, becoming a mythical creature, but also an expert on survival.  Watching it all through binoculars safely tucked away behind the trees, he offers a cryptic condemnation of the modern world, revealing a society that “sold its soul for a Gameboy.”  Jarmusch seems to be doing the same, using Steve Buscemi as Farmer Miller, an acknowledged racist wearing a red Trump MAGA hat that instead says “Make America White Again,” as he’s a loathsome and despicable character that no one likes, getting his just due by the end, completely clueless about the undead, where he sees no difference between the living and the dead, hating them all, making vile comments about trespassers on his property while they start eating him alive.  According to the news reports, all of this was caused by the unrestricted access energy companies had to drive exploratory holes into the earth through polar fracking, actually causing a shift of the Earth’s axis, literally altering the world as we know it, opening a Pandora’s Box of mythological plagues and turmoil suddenly unleashed into the world.  In this version, zombies spill burnt ash instead of blood, and must be decapitated to die, craving the blood and flesh of humans for which they have an unquenchable thirst.  While this may attempt to resemble Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) in terms of a nightmarish doomsday scenario, what’s missing is any element of dread or suspense, or a feeling like zombies are taking over the world.  It never really establishes that kind of momentous impact, feeling more like a bedtime story where it will all be different when we awake, perhaps needing an amusing end coda that never comes, instead leaving viewers sucked into a B-movie end-of-the-world scenario where it all just “ends badly.”   

Do the Right Thing

DO THE RIGHT THING         A  
USA  (120 mi)  1989  d:  Spike Lee

Motivated by a series of high-profile police cases involving the senseless deaths of black suspects, Spike Lee honed in on various stories that were repeatedly making the headlines, the first of which was on the night of June 22, 1982, when six white men were charged in the fatal beating of Willie Turks, a black subway car maintenance worker who, along with two other black transit workers, were literally pulled out of a car and beaten by a white mob that had grown to 15 to 20 youths in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, where at the sentencing hearing Judge Sybil Hart Kooper said, “There was a lynch mob on Avenue X that night.  The only thing missing was a rope and a tree.”  A succession of other incidents followed, such as the strangulation death of graffiti artist Michael Stewart while in police custody in lower Manhattan in September of 1983, the fatal 1984 Bronx shooting of elderly and mentally unstable Eleanor Bumpurs by the New York Police Department while enforcing a court-ordered eviction, shot twice by a 12-gauge shotgun, or the 1986 mobbing of three black men in the largely Italian community of Howard Beach, Queens. which resulted in the death of Michael Griffith when he was struck by a car after he was chased onto a highway attempting to evade a mob of white teenagers who had already beaten him and his friends.  All of these incidents occurred during the administration of Mayor Ed Koch, fueling racial tensions in the city.  It was this climate that led Lee to write his own script, where due to the volatile subject matter in which an Italian-owned pizzeria is burned to the ground in retribution for the unjustified killing of a black man, he was forced to scale back his budget from $10 million dollars to $6.5 million, but this gave him control of the final cut.  

A powerful, incendiary work that draws the lines of demarcation in misunderstood race relations, that beautifully follows the lives of ordinary people on a congested Brooklyn Bedford-Stuyvesant city block one hot summer day in New York City.  Lee, himself, plays an everyman, a guy defined by his lack of heroics or even ambition, but he’s completely likeable in this memorable performance as Mookie the pizza deliveryman.  He works at Sal’s Pizzeria under the domineering thumb of paternalistic Italian owner Sal, Danny Aiello and his two grown sons, one overtly racist, the older John Turturro, and his more impressionable younger sibling Richard Edson.  What becomes immediately noticeable is that the owners are all white while the customers are all black.  Turturro makes despicable remarks about the clientele all day long, a hothead who freely throws out the “N” word, without a clue as to the consequences.  Sal acts as an intermediary peacemaker, usually throwing out a few bucks to make the problems created by his son go away, but he also carries a baseball bat behind the counter threatening anyone who doesn’t follow his rules.  Mookie, meanwhile, has a tendency to prolong his delivery time, getting lost interacting with nearly everyone he meets, everyone that is except his girl, Rosie Perez, and his newborn son Hector that she complains he never sees.  Perez opens the film in a wonderful montage of nonstop Flygirl dance moves over the opening credits to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” that generates a fiery spirit of individualism and fierce determination, Do The Right Thing Intro - YouTube (3:40).

Into this picture walks three men on the edge, Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a black hothead who espouses black nationalism to a chorus of one, shown in fine form stirring up trouble here, DO THE RIGHT THING - YouTube (2:23), Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), a mentally challenged guy who carries around a picture of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but stutters to the point of incomprehensibility, so is shunned by everyone, and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), the proud owner of the largest and loudest boom box in the territory, that constantly plays the thundering Public Enemy hip hop anthem “Fight the Power.”  These three young guns form an odd collective of Greek chorus outsiders who are defined by the fact no one listens to them, balanced by an equally ostracized older set of three characters who sit and sarcastically comment on the world around them.  Add to this mix the wonderful casting of Ossie Davis, a stumbling drunk known as Da Mayor who occasionally lapses into moments of pure eloquence, and his harshest critic, Rubie Dee, known as Mother-Sister, who sits in a windowsill and oversees all.  What quickly becomes evident are the racial undercurrents that run beneath this neighborhood community, simmering just under the surface, waiting for an opportune moment to ignite, where the temperature rising eventually reaches a boil.  Perhaps the most important voice of the entire collective belongs to Samuel L. Jackson as Mister Señor Love Daddy, the local deejay whose voice of black dignity is heard throughout the day, a reminder of all things black and beautiful, with themes of love connecting everything he plays. 

In an inexplicable moment when a black kid gets senselessly shot by the white police, a spark of indignation sets off a free for all race riot in the middle of the night that leaves everybody in the middle of a melee.  What’s interesting is no one person is to blame, there are no heroes, no villains, though it gets confusing in the moment when all hell breaks loose and rage sets the neighborhood against Sal, who may be perceived as the villain and the victim.  All have something to do with the outcome, yet little is gained from this outburst, as it’s a fury seemingly without any real political context.  The film is notable for a theatrical staginess that includes a dream-like reverie of hatred pitting one race against another Do The Right Thing (Race Rant Scene) - YouTube (3:33), a race rant that reoccurs again in 25th HOUR (2002), also for the orchestral music written by the director’s father, Bill Lee, that occasionally sounds like the Aaron Copland Americana of OUR TOWN (1940), for accurately reflecting a natural sense of dialogue that isn’t heard in other films, that boldly dissects a small turf of a New York City neighborhood, filled with humor, charm, wit, and and a sly intelligence, as it refuses to be pigeonholed into something it isn’t, as it certainly doesn’t advocate violence, nor does it pinpoint blame.  What it does do is stimulate a multitude of points of view, taking the issues of race and police brutality head on, combining the ideas of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X instead of picking one over the other, where one preaches non-violence, the other that violence is needed in self defense, leaving the viewers to sort it all out after the fact.  When this film won no awards at Cannes, the Festival President that year, Wim Wenders, explained his view that the character of Mookie did not act heroically, believing he did NOT do the right thing, so the film did not deserve to be recognized.  As incredible as that sounds, this diversion of opinion is the beauty of the film.      

Night on Earth

NIGHT ON EARTH                   B                  

USA  France  Germany  Japan  Great Britain  (129 mi)  1991  d:  Jim Jarmusch

I’m sorry I sound calm. I assure you I’m hysterical.
—Victoria Snelling (Gena Rowlands)

Jarmusch captures a rhythm of the night in five different international cities over the course of a wintry evening and night, following the exploits through the experiences of various cab drivers, where what begins in a whimsical manner in Los Angeles eventually turns colder and gloomier in points further East.  Jarmusch expresses plenty of painterly detail with his urban landscape shots, finding lines of palm trees, lone street lamps and solitary business establishments like hamburger stands or used car lots, featuring signs that appear to be art deco eyesores, with plenty of empty spaces and neon-lit streets, creating a sense of isolation and loneliness, using marginal characters whose stories are unfamiliar to moviegoers, continuing themes of displacement and alienation.  It’s a collection of five vignettes, where each segment is about 25 minutes long, all taking place on the same evening in different cities around the world, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki.  Jarmusch wrote the screenplay in about 8 days and the decision to film in certain cities was largely based on the actors he wanted to work with.

Using Tom Waits songs as bookends, sounding very much like a 1930’s Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil cabaret song, “Good Old World” opens the film with the music before we see anything, Night On Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991) - Part 1 YouTube (15:00).  The enclosed space of a taxicab allows various speech patterns to develop, each significantly different as the evening wears on, followed by slowly emerging personalities.  This is a minimalist theater of non-action, as there are no thrills and spills, little suspense, yet plenty of well-written, personally insightful dialogue that explores the four corners of the earth.  For the most part it’s well acted, though on occasion certain roles appear strained.  Shot by Frederick Elmes, who worked the camera for three mid-70’s Cassavetes films, also two decades with David Lynch (1970’s to 1990), the opening sequence accentuates the quirky individualism of LA, seen as an artificial wasteland of fast food joints and eccentric personalities, where gum-chewing tomboy Winona Ryder (never comfortable in the role) is an unconventional cab driver continually lost in her own funk, a women who sets her sights so low she may as well not have any ambition at all.  When Hollywood casting agent Gena Rowlands (who spends much of the time on a cell phone) gets into her cab, she’s a bit taken aback by her overly aggressive nature, thinking she might be perfect for a difficult role she’s thinking of, exerting youthful angst in nearly every sentence she utters, but Ryder prefers to keep her life uncomplicated, where easy street (in LA) is a life without aggravations or stress.

The transition to the streets of New York City is something of a shock, as the blustery winter cold is a reality check, where Giancarlo Esposito, from Spike Lee’s SCHOOL DAZE (1988) and DO THE RIGHT THING (1989), is a revelation in what is easily the most enjoyable segment, where the guy is a laugh riot throughout, where the sheer force of his continually likable personality dominates the segment.  Unable to hail a cab, literally exposing cash dollars to prove he has money for the fare, yet cabs pass by in droves leaving him stranded on the street mumbling to himself.  Finally when a clunker arrives in a permanent start and stop mode, we realize this is the taxicab from Hell.  Inside is Armin Mueller-Stahl, a driver who can barely speak English, who acts like this is his first day in the United States, looking around the city wide-eyed as if he’s never seen it before.  But the guy is such a horrible driver, out of sheer desperation Esposito is forced to take over the wheel.  However, on route he sees his sister-in-law, Rosie Perez, otherwise known as the mouth.  If Esposito was funny, Perez is hysterical, a non-stop battering ram of verbal insults using the F-word with utter relish, throwing it back in everybody’s face, where this may be the performance of the film, as her energy level is simply off the charts.  After awhile, once they’ve settled down, they actually start enjoying one another, where the “real” cab driver may as well be an alien from another planet, as he is so starkly strange and different from them, as are they to him.  A running gag on differing perspectives, this segment is a joyous romp, like a wild trip through the wilderness.       

Once in Paris, the highly indignant cab driver Isaach de Bankolé (with a band-aid over his eyebrow, something never explained), an émigré from the Ivory Coast, takes offense at the drunk yet blatant stereotypical caricature coming from two black guys in the back seat, supposedly in the employ of highly placed diplomats from Africa, yet their broad-based racial profiling of black Africans borders on repulsive, yet they think it’s hilarious, enjoying every snide remark that continuously belittles others.  Isaach contemptuously throws them out of the cab, leaving them on a deserted corner in the middle of the night, refusing to accept any more abuse, eventually picking up Béatrice Dalle, a blind passenger who defiantly wants no sympathy for her condition.  When Isaach starts questioning her obvious limitations, suggesting blindness must make her life difficult, she counters with insults about his obvious mental limitations which must deprive him of a fuller life.  While their back and forth conversation is testy, it’s always surprising, where both actors find fully realized characters in a brief amount of time, where Dalle especially couldn’t be more delightfully feisty.  The two segments of passengers are an interesting contrast, as Isaach grew thin-skinned at the crudely insensitive suggestions of the former, where it turns out he was the instigator of callous remarks with the latter, yet rather than growing furiously temperamental, like Isaach, at what were obviously superficially silly remarks, Dalle deftly handles herself with utter nonchalance, growing annoyed, as if she’s heard it all before, but making fun of his obvious limitations.  It’s an interesting play on race and preconceived notions, made all the more appealing by the passing Parisian landscape where the lights over the river look particularly impressive at night. 

The sequence in Rome is an endlessly rambling monologue from Roberto Benigni as the cab driver, where easily the funniest part is right at the beginning when in a thick Italian accent he ridiculously attempts to sing the Marty Robbins cowboy song “Streets of Laredo” Marty Robbins - The Streets Of Laredo - YouTube (2:49).  This gives you some idea of what kind of loony character he is, where once he picks up a priest, Paolo Bonacelli from Francesco Rosi’s CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (1979) and Antonioni’s THE MYSTERY OF OBERWALD (1981), he starts right in and can’t stop himself from unleashing an excruciatingly detailed, sexually tinged confession of his earliest childhood sins in graphic detail, revealing every thought, every scent, every gesture, and every glance, a motor-mouthed display of delusional, self-serving confession, making a reality TV show out of it, where it has nothing whatsoever to do with seeking religious penitence, but becomes an exhilarating ride of an endless stream of near masturbatory verbiage.  While the priest attempts to dissuade his efforts, suggesting a taxicab is an inappropriate substitute for the church, but Benigni only gets more impressed with the idea of having such supreme luck to pick up an actual priest in his cab, ignoring the obvious medical affliction of his passenger.  This is another example of the two being on separate wavelengths, where an actual church official instills no sense of respect, honor, or interior contemplation, but is treated no differently than the whores he chases down on the street, where the driver always remains affable and friendly to everyone, but is too caught up in his own world to ever actually listen or hear what anyone else has to offer, where he will forever remain beholden to himself only, stuck inside a self-deluded prison of his own making, literally a stranger to the world around him.      

  

The sadly poetic final sequence is a brilliant tribute to the Kaurismäki Brothers, set in the frigid snow of Helsinki, where the depressive looking driver is appropriately enough named Mika (Aki’s brother), played by Matti Pellonpää, who appeared in 18 Aki Kaurismäki films and 7 of Mika’s.  This final episode carries with it the weight of finality, as it’s literally replete with the miserablism and doom that pervade all their films, turning Helsinki into the literal shithole of the world.  A night wouldn’t be compete without listening to a trio of drunken revelers boast about their world of woe, misfits one and all, each one more wretched than the next, where a well-lived life seems to be a collection of heartbreaking experiences, which gives one’s miserablist existence some weight.  This miniature perfection of storytelling, which completely captures the darkly comic Finnish state of mind, is told in two segments, where the drunken guys moan and wail about the pitiful life of their third partner (Aki) who is passed out in the back seat, a man much deserving of his semi-conscious state, who is the most drunk after suffering “the worst day of his life,” which they feel is like a badge of honor Night on Earth, Helsinki - Part 1 YouTube (7:32).  After hearing their tale of woe, there’s a brief pause, then Mika suggests with complete sincerity, “Things could have been worse.”  When the burden of proof is suddenly on his shoulders, he has them crying like babies within minutes, where they’re soon calling Aki’s life “so full of shit…some people have real troubles.” Night on Earth, Helsinki - Part 2 (13:18).  With the mood turning on a dime, Jarmusch has captured the essence of the fickle nature of humans, loyal to the very end, until they find someone new.  Showing the world with a comic-tinged winter glow, there’s a melancholic sadness about the bleak nature of existence, where misery really does love company, as a new day begins again with Tom Waits bringing home the finale with “Back in the Good Old World” Tom Waits - Good Old World YouTube (9:42).