Jim Jarmusch gives outsiders time to be funny and worth caring about. We rate his patient, deadpan cinema, especially the warmth of Dead Man, though some pauses give us too little to notice.
Fi1m perspective
An accountant enters a hostile frontier, and Jim Jarmusch makes room for how badly he fits. In Dead Man (1995), William Blake has little protection against the violence and exploitation around him, but the people he meets keep the film from becoming solemn. Jarmusch takes their absurdity seriously enough to make it funny. We recommend this disquieting Western with a reservation about its pace. His interest in outsiders pays off when he gives them company, and Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer supply the warmth that makes the journey worth following.
The breakthrough, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), established him in independent cinema. In Mystery Train (1989) and Night on Earth (1991), he used separate stories rather than a single plot driving everyone forwards. Dead Man took that taste for episodes into a black-and-white Western with a Neil Young score. It also marked a change of tone: the humour helps us stay with the brutality, but Jarmusch does not let it make the violence seem inconsequential.
Editor Jay Rabinowitz leaves space between Dead Man's encounters, giving the deadpan jokes time to register. We were moved by the companionship because Farmer's Nobody seems to have a life beyond Blake, rather than existing only to explain the frontier to him. Jarmusch allows that relationship enough warmth to make the thoughts about death bearable. The pauses are less reliable: some hold our attention, while others repeat how strange and brutal this place is. Those stretches could be shorter without losing the quietness, and they expose a recurring risk in a director who so often puts stillness before plot.
Broken Flowers (2005), with Bill Murray, brought broader attention without requiring Jarmusch to abandon his understated approach to actors. Paterson (2016), about a bus driver who writes poetry, gives his attention to small details an everyday setting. We want the pauses to reveal something about a person, as Farmer's presence does in Dead Man. Start there, provided an unhurried Western sounds like a reasonable use of the evening.
Biography
Jim Jarmusch is an American film director and screenwriter. He was born on 22 January 1953 in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.
Jarmusch studied at Columbia University and New York University. He has worked in independent cinema since the 1980s and is known for films including Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Broken Flowers (2005), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and Paterson (2016).
