Ghost
Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Rated
R
Opens Friday, March 10
Jarmusch has
been acting in films as long as he's been making them. He
can be spotted in Blue in the Face and Sling Blade,
among others.
Few American filmmakers understand the potential of silence
as well as Jim Jarmusch. His 1984 breakthrough, Stranger
than Paradise, launched Jarmusch's reputation for iconoclasm
and brought the overused adjective "quirky" back into the
critical vernacular. Few knew what to make of a film in which
desolate New York buddies (John Lurie and Richard Edson) spend
countless scenes quietly staring at their blank apartment
wall while Jarmusch captures them in stark, anxious three-
to four-minute takes. Jarmusch's approach rejected everything
conventional and obvious: The film's "story" is little more
than premise; its tone shifts drastically from ironic to bleak,
and structurally, instead of climaxing, the film just stops.
Although Stranger didn't feel American-made--stylistically
it had more in common with Japanese minimalism and the German
New Wave--its mixture of sublime humor, entropy and silent,
stifling isolation tapped into ideas that were wholly American.
The movie, which predated Generation X angst, was an art-house
hit and kick-started the American independent film movement.
Jarmusch's rejection of mainstream cinema never mellowed
with age. He continued to confound viewers with his stylish
explorations of fringe American culture in films like Down
by Law, Mystery Train and the poetic, revisionist western,
Dead Man. The filmmaker's newest effort, Ghost
Dog: The Way of the Samurai, again bears his offbeat
sensibility while holding the irony in check; it feels like
nothing you've seen before. On the surface, this
is another Jarmusch foray into genre filmmaking, but Ghost
Dog is about as customary a gangster action thriller
as Dead Man was a western. The title character, subtly
played by a hulking, scowling Forest Whitaker with corn
rows, is a hit man for the Italian mob. Unlike your typical
hit man, however, this modern-day samurai warrior lives
on a roof, doesn't speak for the film's first 40 minutes,
and communicates with his employer, Louie (John Tormey),
only by carrier pigeon. Jarmusch derives his hit man from
existential killers made famous by Jean-Pierre Melville
(La Samouraï) and later, Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine),
except Ghost Dog is even more detached. He's more akin to
the other bewildered outsiders and insignificant anti-heroes
who populate Jarmusch's America, characters incapable of
conforming to normal American ideals. He's also full of
contradictions: a detached stranger who kills for a living
but is also a gentle lover of animals, who's feared by the
Mafia but respected by the neighborhood.
Like his characters, 46-year-old Jarmusch is a bit of an
outsider himself. He has worked strictly outside of the
Hollywood system his entire career, which has allowed him
to take all the time he needs to develop movies (Ghost
Dog was more than two years in the making). During a
recent telephone interview, the soft-spoken filmmaker admitted
that focusing on outsiders seems natural.
"It is subjective on my part," he acknowledges. "I've always
been drawn to things on the margins, rather than the mainstream,
and those things speak to me deeply. Also, most of my friends
are...well, most people would categorize them as 'weirdos.'
But, interesting things happen in the margins, and my imagination
lives there as well."
You could also argue that hiding in the margins allows
Jarmusch more freedom to attack what's in middle of the
road. For example, Hollywood uses violence more than any
other device to sells tickets. In his last two narrative
films, Jarmusch has taken the two bloodiest American film
genres--first the western and now the gangster hit man--and
turned their mythology inside out. Instead of bloody escapism,
both Dead Man and Ghost Dog choose to meditate--sometimes
poignantly, sometimes whimsically--on the cyclical relationship
between death and the physical world. Jarmusch draws us
through our habitual expectations of what these respected
genres offer--character motivations, setting, tone, traditional
payoffs--and then layers so many ideas, influences and conflicting
emotions into the mix that they become completely unclassifiable.
In Ghost Dog alone, Jarmusch takes the hit-man film
premise and combines elements of samurai movies, gangster
pictures, martial-arts and 18th-century Japanese philosophy,
'90s-era urban street drama, the western, and Native American
mysticism. Jarmusch even features cartoons as he depicts
ruthless Mafia thugs repeatedly watching ultra-violent animated
TV shows like Felix the Cat and Itchy and Scratchy,
much in the same stoic manner that Ghost Dog performs his
hits. Funny and sad, highbrow and lowbrow, Jarmusch obliterates
familiar territory with an inspired stream of consciousness
and substitutes any "need" for plot (never his favorite
device) with moments of quiet reflection, suggestive expression,
and sudden narrative shifts as a result of chance events
and encounters.
The key to this illusionary hodgepodge may be the bond
between Ghost Dog and Louie. During a rare moment of conversation
between the two, Louie says despondently, "We're both almost
extinct." Though deceptively simple, the phrase links several
cultures and acknowledges that these once-infamous renegade
icons (samurai, mobster) are not only dying out but killing
each other off. And yet they remain impervious to change
because they're bond to strict, violent codes of behavior.
Jarmusch's inspiration for this parallel may seem odd, especially
considering his last film was Year of the Horse,
the Neil Young and Crazy Horse rockumentary.
"Oh, yeah, I saw those ideas first mixed [together] in
hip-hop culture," he says. "There's a lot of Eastern philosophy
mixed with the Mafia mixed with American street culture.
I was mostly inspired by Wu-Tang [Clan], because I was listening
to a lot of their stuff when I was first writing, and the
lyrics and philosophy has a strong Eastern element." Jarmusch
eventually approach Wu-Tang Clan's leader and founder The
RZA, and persuaded him to write the hypnotic score.
But outside of this musical inspiration, as far as discussing
the meaning behind his craft, Jarmusch admits that he's
not really the guy to ask about it.
"I'm not very analytical," he says. "I'm more intuitive,
so my process is, while writing, I collect disparate details
and then weave them together. But why and where they come
from, I'm honestly not conscious of that--which I like."
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 8,
2000
|
