Jim Jarmusch’s films are often celebrations of blue-collar intellectuals who grapple with a classic balance between life and art, and, in his best work, his deadpan humor is revealed to be a pose that shatters, revealing longing and desperation. His best films (Dead Man, Coffee and Cigarettes, and Paterson) are about the limitations of even great art to soothe the tortured tides of the soul, while his worst suggest works of shrewd museum cultivation—that is, the indie director equivalent of brand management. (Ironically, The Limits of Control, whose title essentially sums up Jarmusch’s most astute preoccupations, is one of his most smug and lifeless films.)
Jarmusch’s 1991 anthology film Night on Earth is a sampler of his best and more mediocre instincts, an example of a production being less than the sum of its parts. The film has issues that are common of most anthologies: inconsistency and redundancy. After a couple of these vignettes, one becomes accustomed to Jarmusch’s rhythms and—despite the variety of terrific performances on display, as well as the usually impeccably hip artistic reference points—a certain tedium sets in that’s heightened by the reduction of each city to a series of pillow shots.
Night on Earth is hermetic—like all Jarmusch productions—and rigidly structural even for an anthology film, as every story concerns an odd-couple pairing between a passenger and a taxi driver in an iconic city. Every story begins with the passenger being picked up, and ends with their delivery to their destination, after an oddball pseudo-catharsis has occurred. In his own puckish, glancing way, Jarmusch is rather preachy here, riffing on what the protagonist of Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels might have termed the “universality of man.”
The film’s first vignette is its best, dooming Night on Earth to an anticlimax from the outset. Set in Los Angeles, the narrative concerns a Hollywood casting executive, Victoria (Gena Rowlands), who’s picked up from the airport by Corky (Winona Ryder). The contrast between these women is visceral and poignant without succumbing to cartoonish-ness, like the pairings of later episodes. Victoria is stylish and elegant, bringing to the cab all the gravity of, well, a legendary actress, while Corky is a small and spunky eccentric.
Jarmusch’s pared-down dialogue underscores a very truthful element of human communion, which recalls the meaning at the heart of the glorious scene between Jason Robards and Paul LeMat in Melvin and Howard: that people are most revealing when they don’t appear to be talking about much. Rowlands’s deliberate diction and guarded timing mesh evocatively with Ryder’s spitfire spontaneity. And Jarmusch ends this story with a beautiful punchline: Victoria offers to make Corky a star, but the girl declines. Corky wants to drive a taxi and to eventually become a mechanic. She wants to meet a man who will appreciate her soul. Unlike many of us, Corky knows who she is, and Victoria will probably never forget her.
Set in New York City, the second story pivots on a decent joke that quickly grows stale. Armin Mueller-Stahl plays an immigrant cab driver from Eastern Germany who can barely drive his cab, and who picks up a passenger (Giancarlo Esposito) who takes over the vehicle and drives them to Brooklyn. Mueller-Stahl and Esposito have lively timing, but the notion of a slow-on-the-uptake European and a brash New Yorker soon comes to feel as obvious as a sitcom—and, just when one wonders if Esposito has been intentionally instructed to reprise his frenetic performance from Do the Right Thing, along comes Rosie Perez, who repeats the profane shrillness of her own performance from the Spike Lee film.
Due to the charisma of the actors, this vignette nevertheless goes down fairly easily, but it still exudes a reheated quality. Equally glib, and quite a bit less palatable, is the episode set in Rome, featuring Roberto Benigni as a predictably oversexed Italian lothario who drives a predictably outraged priest (Paolo Bonacelli). In these portions of Night on Earth, Jarmusch falls prey to a problem that recurs throughout his filmography, congratulating himself merely on throwing “name” actors together in unexpected fashions.
The stories set in Paris and Helsinki, respectively, have the ambition and some of the gravity of the Los Angeles segment. As a Parisian cab driver who originally hails from the Ivory Coast, and who suffers racist and classist remarks even from African diplomats, Isaach De Bankolé radiates a ferocious sense of anger and emotional repression that shakes Night on Earth to its core, and he’s matched in intensity by Béatrice Dalle, who has the film’s single best absurdist joke. The cab driver asks the young woman, who’s blind, why she doesn’t wear sunglasses like other blind people, and she says she’s never seen other blind people. The remark is inherently funny, and it also encapsulates the obsession with connectivity that runs through the film.
The Helsinki segment concludes Night on Earth on a heavy, melancholic note, tonally counterpointing the deceptive, multifaceted lightness of the Los Angeles narrative. A gaggle of drunk men (Kari Väänänen, Sakari Kuosmanen, and Tomi Salmela) pour into a cab, plying its driver, Mika (Matti Pellonpää), with a sob story of losing a job and finding out that a teenage daughter is pregnant. Mika proceeds to top the story with a remembrance of losing a baby in childbirth, which Pellonpää delivers with a magnificent and heartbreaking stillness that reflects an ongoing struggle to soldier on against hopelessness.
This monologue is one of the most vulnerable and straightforward scenes in Jarmusch’s career, and it reminds one once again of the lovely surprises that can be uncovered via the filmmaker’s penchant of collecting actors he likes and bouncing them off one another. Jarmusch allows Rowland, Ryder, De Bankolé, Dalle, and Pellonpää to bloom, expanding on performances they’ve given in other films. Meanwhile, Jarmusch reduces other actors to stereotypes. The uncertainty of Jarmusch’s vision complements the driving obsession of his narratives, then, evincing a struggle for purity of empathy.
Image/Sound
This high-definition digital restoration, approved by Jim Jarmusch, has a healthy vitality that honors cinematographer Frederick Elmes’s stunning images. The nightscapes have a lush, enveloping sense of darkness that recalls Elmes’s work for David Lynch, and the faces of the various actors sport striking detail. The clarity of this restoration further underscores the subtle visual differences between the film’s various vignettes: New York City, for instance, has hot, bright colors, while Helsinki’s hues are more autumnal and depressive. There’s also a strong element of attractive grit that gives Night on Earth a shaggy lived-in quality. (The film looks so good that one wishes that Jarmusch, an aesthete and traveler, had worked each city more intrinsically into the various narratives.) The 2.0 surround DTS-HD master audio soundtrack is fairly unassuming, given Jarmusch’s wont, though it gives Tom Waits’s playful score a bass-y bounce that complements the gravelly tenor of the singer’s voice. The actors’ voices are clearer than they were in prior editions of the film, rendering it all the more vivid.
Extras
Disappointingly, there are no new supplements for this disc, but the featurettes ported over from the label’s 2007 edition hold up quite well. A selected-scene commentary featuring cinematographer Frederick Elmes and location sound mixer Drew Kunin details the making of an anthology-style production, which Elmes memorably likens to several “first weeks” of shooting. The visual symmetry of each vignette is discussed, and ample technical information is provided, along with poignant personal anecdotes. (Night on Earth was Gena Rowlands’s first film after her husband and collaborator John Cassavetes had died, and we learn here that Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and others called in to check on her.) A Q&A with Jarmusch, in which he reads through questions that fans have sent him, is charmingly conversational, allowing the filmmaker to riff on the making of Night on Earth, including how he dealt with shooting scenes in languages he doesn’t speak, as well as his favorite music and movies. A short Belgian TV interview with Jarmusch, from 1992, also includes some choice encapsulations of his reasons for initiating the project. Rounding out the package is a booklet featuring essays by filmmakers, authors, and critics Thom Andersen, Paul Auster, Bernard Eisenschitz, Goffredo Fofi, and Peter von Bagh, and the lyrics to Tom Waits’s original songs from the film.
Overall
Criterion offers a beautiful refurbishing of one of Jim Jarmusch’s more uneven films, which is nevertheless a must-see for a handful of beautiful performances.
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