Film Review: DEAD MAN (1995, Jim Jarmusch)

Stars: 5 of 5.
Running Time: 121 minutes.
Tag-line: "No one can survive becoming a legend."
Notable Cast or Crew: Johnny Depp (CRY-BABY, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS), Gary Farmer (ADAPATION, GHOST DOG), Crispin Glover (BACK TO THE FUTURE, WILD AT HEART), Lance Henriksen (NEAR DARK, ALIENS, PUMPKINHEAD), Michael Wincott (THE CROW, ROMEO IS BLEEDING), Eugene Byrd (SLEEPERS, THE SUBSTITUTE 2: SCHOOL'S OUT), John Hurt (ALIEN, I CLAUDIUS), Robert Mitchum (CAPE FEAR, OUT OF THE PAST), Iggy Pop (TANK GIRL, ROCK AND RULE), Gabriel Byrne (THE USUAL SUSPECTS, MILLER'S CROSSING), Jared Harris (NATURAL BORN KILLERS, THE WARD), Billy Bob Thornton (ARMAGEDDON, TOMBSTONE), Mili Avital (STARGATE, THE END OF VIOLENCE), Alfred Molina (RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, SPECIES).  Music by Neil Young.  Cinematography by Robby Müller (REPO MAN, DANCER IN THE DARK, BODY ROCK, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., and PARIS, TEXAS).
Best One-liner: "That weapon will replace your tongue. You will learn to speak through it. And your poetry will now be written with blood."

Welcome to DEAD MAN, the metaphysically brutal 90s art-acid-Western you didn't know you needed, and quite possibly the enduring masterpiece of indie auteur Jim Jarmusch.
 
You could call it 'the ERASERHEAD of Westerns,' or perhaps 'Franz Kafka-by-way-of John Ford,' or maybe 'an Ansel Adams horror movie.'  It shuns Western nostalgia and renounces Hollywood aesthetics. It's tangibly authentic and usually frightening.  A collage of dirty, vintage Americana set to squealing Neil Young soundscapes.  A movie of dark textures, of grease and grit and gristle, of cesspools and ink wells and open wounds, of smoke and gears and timber and bone.






It goes without saying that cinematographer Robby Müller (REPO MAN, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., BARFLY; PARIS, TEXAS) really outdoes himself here.  And for reference, let me remind you that the Academy Award for cinematography that year went to John Toll, for BRAVEHEART.

Our story follows the accountant William "no, not that William Blake" Blake (Johnny Depp) as he journeys from Cleveland to a job out west in the company town of Machine.
 
In a twist that would feel at home in THE TRIAL or THE CASTLE, there is no job––only an endless stream of bureaucratic contempt, paranoid behavior, and existential menace.

Said stream is initiated by an aggressively weird and soot-covered Crispin Glover:

continued by a surly, greasy John Hurt:

and brought to a crescendo by a latter-career Robert Mitchum who, naturally, continues to not give a damn.

My only question is: who got to keep that painting after the shoot wrapped? I'm only asking, cause there happens to be a Mitchum-painting-sized empty space on my living room wall.

Quite obviously, to anyone with even a vague conception of my interests, I think this is magnificent––and we're only about twenty minutes in.

After Blake is forced by circumstance to become a murderer (of Gabriel Byrne, no less!),

he goes on the lam

with a man named Nobody (Gary Farmer), a Native American who came of age after being kidnapped by a "savage circus" traveling show.
 
 Gary Farmer, pictured here doing a Slash impersonation.

The film at this point develops into an episodic, memento mori-style picaresque; an extended meditation on death and dying.  Jim Jarmusch thrives on textural juxtapositions and combinations of actors with different flavors (see also:  MYSTERY TRAIN, NIGHT ON EARTH, COFFEE AND CIGARETTES), and DEAD MAN treats us to several of these bizarre tableaux.  For instance, in one scene, Iggy Pop (wearing a LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE dress),

a molest-y Billy Bob Thornton,

and Jared (son of Richard) Harris share a campfire with Johnny Depp, in turns petting him and being generally terrifying.


Perhaps my favorite element of this scene is that Iggy Pop makes no attempt to conceal his conspicuous Detroit accent.

Elsewhere, we have Hurt, Mitchum, Michael Wincott (THE CROW, BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY), Eugene Byrd (SLEEPERS, THE SUBSTITUTE 2), and Lance Henriksen sharing the screen together,


an event that is clearly historic (and possibly on par with this Bill Murray/Robert Mitchum/John Glover shared scene).

I must give special mention to Lance Henriksen, whose résumé already boasts an entire rogue's gallery of frighteningly committed psychos.

He evolves into the film's major antagonist, death-angel of inevitability, a bounty-hunting cannibal of unimaginable cruelty who "fucked his parents," according to the gossip mill.

Perhaps needless to say, Henriksen is scary-good.  He has the look of a boogeyman who wandered beyond the confines of a cursed daguerreotype, and he fully embodies the role.  I'm reminded of the stories of from behind the scenes of NEAR DARK, when the method-acting Henriksen wandered the Southwest for real and picked up hitchhikers, all while in character as a Civil War-era, serial-killing vampire. Yikes! I really hope they had an SFX guy on set for the cannibal scenes...

Lance enjoys some takeout.

Perhaps betraying his Henriksen fandom, Jarmusch inserts a scene where a character says "God damn your soul to the fires of hell!" to which another replies, "He already has," which is a direct line from PUMPKINHEAD.

In connection with Henriksen, I also must make special mention of the film's unique visceral aspects. This isn't quite a gorefest, though there are some exceptionally vivid moments of violence that I remembered with terrible clarity.  That's especially surprising since this was only my second viewing, and my first must have been in 1996 or 1997, shortly after DEAD MAN hit the VHS rental shelves.
 
There is a brutal, dangerous beauty at play here, and the experience lays somewhere between "suffering from fever dreams" and "perusing a haunted taxidermy shop."  Depp, whom I've essentially neglected to mention thus far, brings it all together with a lyrical detachment worthy of his poetic namesake.  Five stars.


P.S.––Note the in-joke of two Johnny Depp-hunting marshals named "Lee" and "Marvin,"
 
a nod to Jarmusch's intense Lee Marvin fandom and notorious secret society, "The Sons of Lee Marvin."



–Sean Gill

Film Review: THE WARD (2011, John Carpenter)

Stars: 3.2 of 5.
Running Time: 88 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Amber Heard (ZOMBIELAND, DRIVE ANGRY 3D), Jared Harris (NATURAL BORN KILLERS, NAJDA), Mamie Gummer (JOHN ADAMS, HEARTBURN), Danielle Panabaker (FRIDAY THE 13TH reboot, THE CRAZIES remake), Lyndsy Fonseca (HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, BOSTON PUBLIC), Mika Boorem (HEARTS IN ATLANTIS, ALONG CAME A SPIDER). Music by Mark Kilian (TSOTSI, BONE DADDY). Cinematography by Yaron Orbach (THE TEN, PLEASE GIVE). Written by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen (LONG DISTANCE).
Tag-line: "Only Sanity Can Keep You Alive."
Best one-liner: I don't know, it's not really that kind of movie.

I'll take a break from the countdown to share my thoughts on Carpy's latest effort. I saw it two nights ago, in Times Square, in the only New York theater showing it, on the penultimate day of a week-long, mere seven-screening run. This screening was attended by myself and three other people, one of whom was a classic "frequent flier" who obviously had stumbled into the theater after a long day spent at the multiplex (at the cost of a single ticket). The others were, I assume, Carpenter die-hards, but one never does know about these things. I don't know if the poor attendance is due to bad marketing, or the fact that it's on-demand concurrently with the modest theatrical run (and with the DVD soon on the way), but it all sort of depresses me.
Now, THE WARD is not a bad movie; in fact, it's a pretty good one, all things considered. Sure, it's third-tier Carpy, but it's almost as good as VAMPIRES, and probably at the same level as GHOSTS OF MARS, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, and CIGARETTE BURNS, all of which grew in stature with the passage of time. In fact, that's one of the best things about Carpy's films- you can never really judge them in the year they came out; they almost all seem to improve with age, even MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN. Yes, even that.

I'll begin with the bad so we can end with the good. The script, by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, is often boneheaded, generic, and possessing a finale that is...well, I'll get to it in due time. The banter for the female mental patients ("Sorry, I don't converse with loonies," "If I were you I'd watch out, new girl!") sounds like it was written by a couple of dweeby guys who've played so many poorly-plotted video games and watched so much third-rate television that the half-baked ramblings of female clichés in Sci-Fi original movies begin to sound to them like poetry. This ties into larger theories I've expressed about the clandestine dumbing-down of society by inundating us with bottom-of-the-barrel programming– if you surround yourself with soulless, counterfeit "humanity," pretty soon you're going to be writing stories about soulless, counterfeit humanity, and because it's invaded your mind like a cliché of a cliché, you're going to think it's naturalistic; perhaps even poignant. Then there's a twist ending which cashes in on a craze which was just as hackneyed a decade ago as it is now– a twist for twist's sake, the sort of conclusion that elicits a collective groan, a shifting of seats, a rolling of eyes, and the desperate thought that If only they'd take back that dumb twist, this could be a much better movie!...but, alas, they can't take it back.
Also, there's a little unnecessary CGI (not a lot, but it becomes all the more maddening because it doesn't really serve a purpose), and the film employs a multitude of modern "flash-scares" (Carpy used them in CIGARETTE BURNS, for example), which are markedly different from his tried and true "jump scares" (like in HALLOWEEN, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, THE THING, etc.) in that they're extremely short, abrupt, loud, and not altogether successful. I suppose that a "flash-scare" is sort of like a mad-ape, homerun swing– but without the necessary follow-through.

But onto the good:
The opening makes ya tingle inside– low, ominous corridor shots like in THE THING,

and then WOOOSH!– that good old Albertus font that Carpy loves so much announces that we're watching:

It's just nice to see that on the screen again, ten years after GHOSTS OF MARS. I'd have given a standing ovation, but there were only four people in the theater, and I didn't want to out-crazy the frequent flier.

It's largely up to Amber Heard to carry the movie, and while it's nowhere near being a "genius horror-heroine performance" like Angela Bettis in MAY or Mia Farrow in ROSEMARY'S BABY or Sissy Spacek in CARRIE, I was still impressed by her ability to shoulder the burden through the dry stretches.

Jared Harris is solid, as usual, as a well-meaning (...or is he?) staff doctor, and the rest of the girls are serviceable as well, despite not quite looking era-appropriate (it's a 60's period piece).
The soundtrack, by Mark Kilian, ain't bad. It's sort of Danny Elfman-children chanting-by-way-of-Ennio Morricone, and it lends a ghostly vibe to the film that's quite effective, for the most part. And there are a few "thump-thump... thump-thump..." classic Carpenter bass riffs (think THE THING) which Carpy admitted to tapping out personally.
Yaron Orbach's cinematography isn't as good as Gary Kibbe's (and it goes without saying that it's not as good as Dean Cundey's), but it's still pretty evocative, and manages to inject a sense of menace into a film which is illuminated by sunlight at least 60% of the time.

There's foreboding exteriors, some nice Greg Nicotero makeup (though to a certain extent it's marred by that unnecessary CGI!), eye trauma worthy of Fulci, a clip from Bert I. Gordon's TORMENTED, a random free-style "impromptu wacky girls dancing" scene (long live the 80's!), some real jolts, and some genuinely exciting setpieces.
In the end, I have to say (while not sounding like too much of an apologist) that Carpy did the best he could with the material. Despite a cookie-cutter, straight-to-video style script, he's made a movie that's often gripping, occasionally frightening, and always bearing a stamp of Carpenter craftsmanship, even if it can't always live up to the days of yore standards of Carpenter quality. It's not a classic, but it's still a new addition to the Carpy canon, and after all this time, by God, that's GREAT. Here's to Carpy's next one– I only hope I don't have to wait until 2021.

-Sean Gill