Down by Law is a funny, unexpectedly tender prison comedy, carried by three beautifully mismatched performances. Jim Jarmusch sometimes lets the sulking go on too long, but the company is worth the patience.
Jim Jarmusch approaches Down by Law as though the important business of a prison film were finding out how irritating a cellmate can be. The plot gives him somewhere to put three men, then leaves them to irritate one another. It is a funny, warm film, with a stubbornly slow pace that occasionally gets the better of its jokes. Anyone waiting for a brisk crime story should know that the conversations receive most of the attention.
Tom Waits, as Zack, and John Lurie, as Jack, give the bickering a useful weight: neither behaves as though being amusing were his responsibility. Their deadpan delivery makes the irritation seem quite sincere, even when the disagreement itself scarcely matters. Roberto Benigni plays Roberto with enough unembarrassed enthusiasm to upset both of them, and to prevent the film from becoming a competition in looking disenchanted. He makes friendliness awkward, persistent and difficult to dismiss.
We laughed at Roberto’s cheerfulness meeting such determined resistance, then found ourselves wanting the other two to be kinder to him. The pleasure comes from how long they take to respond; an immediate thaw would make the relationship feel cheaply arranged. Jim Jarmusch allows their irritation to survive alongside the beginnings of affection, so the comedy does not disappear when the men become more sympathetic. The performances keep small differences in temperament interesting even when there is little else happening.
Robby Müller’s black-and-white cinematography gives New Orleans a stillness that suits these prickly men. The emptiness around them is as noticeable as their presence, and the images are composed with a care that might have made the comedy seem precious. It works because the actors remain so unimpressed by their surroundings. Janet Densmore’s production design helps the prison feel like a place where there is nothing to do except get on each other’s nerves.
John Lurie’s score helps make the slow pace pleasurable, giving the quieter passages a pull that the sparse story cannot always provide. The music encourages us to settle into the film without insisting that every disagreement is important. Melody London’s editing is similarly patient about letting a conversation find its own rhythm. That patience is necessary for the comedy, although several exchanges continue after we have understood the joke, and the 106 minutes would benefit from a little more pressure.
The weakness is that the men can occasionally look like three carefully selected temperaments asked to fill out a story. Once we understand their differences, another stretch of friction does not automatically tell us more about them. The screenplay relies heavily on the appeal of the actors at those points, and they cannot make every pause revealing. Yet the director likes these men, including their less attractive habits, and gives us time to like them too.
This is a prison comedy for an evening when getting to know the prisoners is enough. Its loose construction will trouble anyone who wants each scene to move the story forward, and we would not argue them out of that objection. For once, the prospect of another conversation in a prison cell is a reason to keep watching.
