But You’ll Wish You Could

The Dead Don’t Die a film by Jim Jarmusch.  With Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Danny Glover.  *

Early in The Dead Don’t Die, a UPS man makes a delivery to a gas station and convenience store (except it’s WUPS.  Clever, huh?), and the geeky manager asks him for some wisdom for the day.  “The world is perfect,” the driver says.  “Appreciate the details.”  That was the theme of Jim Jarmusch’s last movie, Paterson, one of my favorite in recent memory.  The story of a bus driver/poet (Adam Driver) who has an eccentric artistic wife, Paterson is all about enjoying and appreciating the small moments of life, whether they result in lasting art or not.  If Jarmusch had never done another thing, he should be remembered for that movie, which is unique and unforgettable.  I’ve seen it twice and would happily see it again.

How the same person could make this inert and dreadful comedy I do not know.

To put it another way: how can you take an all-star cast—which adds to the above names Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, Sara Driver, Iggy Pop—and make a bad movie?  How can you take waste all that talent?

It’s possible.  I just saw it happen.

The script, written by Jarmusch apparently with no help whatsoever—and he needed some—deserves a lot of the blame.  The idea sounds good on the surface: take his usual crowd of weirdos and misfits—this cast, basically—and do a spoof of zombie movies, with lots of veiled references to earlier films, especially the towering masterpiece of this genre, Night of the Living Dead (just as Don Quixote, generally regarded as the first modern novel, has never been surpassed—we should all just take our pens and go home—George Romero’s film stands atop the zombie genre.  Why would anyone else even try?).  This is, to a large extent, the generation that was formed by that movie.  Won’t they enjoy spoofing it?

They don’t seem to enjoy it at all.

It’s hard to spoof something that was already a spoof, of course.  Another problem is Jarmusch’s deadpan style, and the like-minded actors he’s found to deliver it.  One laconic guy like Bill Murray—the deadpan champion of the world—can be funny if he has someone to play off.  But when you pair him with Adam Driver doing the same thing, and Chloe Sevigny ditto, and throw in Danny Glover for good measure, it’s as if you have four Abbots and no Costello.  They offer openings for a punchline but nobody’s there to deliver it.  There was maybe one good laugh line every ten minutes in this movie (that may be a generous estimate) and you can’t sustain a comedy on that.  It’s like a bad Saturday Night Live skit.  It’s live from New York and you’re ready to roar, but they just keep falling flat.

Steve Buscemi is okay as an ugly conservative, wearing his Make America White Again cap, and Tom Waits has a winning role as a shaggy hermit who comments on the whole thing like a Greek chorus, but the only interesting character in the movie is an extremely pale Zelda Winston, played by the incomparable Tilda Swinton (one of the few shining lights in the last dreadful movie I saw, The Souvenir).  Swinton (who apparently gave Jarmusch the idea for the movie; maybe she had her own character in mind) is the only one of these fine actors who actually creates a character, a Scottish mortician who is also a Samurai warrior, seems to know the living dead are headed her way and is perfectly trained for the only way to stop them (decapitation, preferably with a Samurai sword).  She could be the comic foil to all these straight men, but she’s not in the movie enough, and when she is, she’s often alone.  When she disappears toward the end, we lose all hope.

I didn’t notice—must have been nodding off toward the end—but my wife suggests that Jarmusch may have had a semi-serious intent.  Adam Driver keeps repeating the phrase, “This is definitely going to end badly” (to which Murray replies, “Shut up, Ronnie”), and it becomes clear the zombies have returned because they are still greedy for whatever it was they craved when they were alive, junk food, booze, coffee, senseless violence.  It is greed that is causing all the problems—they are a bunch of hungry ghosts—and the movie indeed ends badly, perhaps suggesting our world is being poisoned by our greed, and we’ll end badly as well.  I realize that sounds pretty dumb, but we’re not exactly dealing with Jean Paul Sartre here, though the movie apparently received a standing ovation at Cannes, perhaps because of its timely message, also perhaps in tribute to the marvelous cast and fabled director.  Also maybe because they were so glad it was over.  Who knows?

The bottom line is that it’s a comedy with very few laughs.  The pace is like a snail heading down the runway, hoping to take off, and we sit there waiting for the punch line we know is coming (“Shut up Ronnie”) and that wasn’t funny in the first place.  Jarmusch has been an interesting director with some offbeat ideas.  This one was dead on arrival.  And it’s not coming back.