Jim Jarmusch’s Cinema of Daily Life

Are you home for the holidays, and perhaps running out of things to say to your well-meaning parents and siblings? If so, then it’s a great time to pile in the car and go see Father Mother Sister Brother, the new film by Jim Jarmusch, which recreates (across three storylines) all the conditions that you’re escaping back at home—only more pleasantly, because they’re not happening to you. Often using an anthology structure to stage and restage seemingly meaningless encounters until something deeper shakes out, Jarmusch’s deadpan comedic style is perfectly suited to the theme of the family get-together.

Composed of three unrelated reunions in New York, London and Paris, Father Mother Sister Brother perceptively honors the odd rituals that millions of modern families adhere to around this time of year, from compulsory gift-giving (often of unhelpful or unwanted items) to conversations petering out into long spells of silence. The film, which won the Golden Lion at Venice this year, manages to be both awkward and elegiac, pointing to the overriding necessity of staying in touch with one’s relatives without necessarily making it seem worthwhile in the moment. It’s also chock-full of A-listers and the ineffably cool standbys of Jarmusch’s filmography—including Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling and Luka Sabbat. If one must suffer through the holidays, it at least helps to do so in good company.

Full of laconic performances and poetic speech, the films of Jim Jarmusch sometimes seem to be about nothing at all. A closer look at his career, however, reveals the director’s preoccupation with the ceremonies and obligations of family ties. The arrival of a long-lost relation, in fact, served as the inciting incident for the film that kicked off his career, 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise, which starred John Lurie and former Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson as two deadbeat New Yorkers visited by a Hungarian cousin (Eszter Balint). The casting of musicians, prioritization of interesting faces over strong performances and presentation of American culture through the eyes of foreigners all became hallmarks of Jarmusch’s subsequent films, which have grown in budget and cachet without much development in plot. Still, there’s a case to be made that movies about nothing are the best kind of movies, especially in a world that prioritizes information, action and meaning. Jarmusch somehow manages to slip through this gauntlet, and invites viewers to join him in a world where nothing is more or less important than just hanging out.

Down By Law (1986)

The closest Jarmusch ever came to a conventional plot was his jailbreak saga Down By Law, which makes it a good starting point for the uninitiated. Even so, viewers will be hard-pressed to locate the traditional signposts of character development through action and consequence. The film follows a pimp named Jack (Lurie) and a radio jockey named Zack (Waits), whose stories converge in a cell of New Orleans’ Parish Prison, after both have been apprehended for crimes they didn’t commit. They’re soon joined by Bob (Italian actor Roberto Benigni), a sweetly earnest oddball who nonetheless confesses readily to the murder he’s accused of. Without much effort, the three men escape from prison and run into the Louisiana bayou, where they bicker about which direction to head and eventually part ways. While the men’s conflicting personalities make for good humor, it’s hard to tell what they each get out of the journey (it’s not friendship) and there’s certainly nothing in the way of moralizing commentary about justice or crime.  

Still, it makes for a pleasant ride down the Mississippi River. It helps that Down By Law is incredibly beautiful, shot by Robby Müller (one of the best photographers of the modern American landscape) in dreamlike, high-contrast black and white. Müller’s patient tracking shots of desolate New Orleans streets and the dense foliage of the Delta become the defining characteristics of this slowly unfolding film, poetic counterweights to the confinement of the jail cell, which thankfully fails to detain Zack, Jack and Bob for too long. 

Mystery Train (1989)

My favorite film of Jarmusch’s is also his first foray into color, working with Müller again to stage a beguiling, elliptical portrait of Memphis, Tennessee. Like Father Mother Sister Brother, the film is divided up into three discrete stories animated by separate characters, the difference being that here all forces converge for one night at the same seedy hotel (overseen by night manager Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and moody bellboy Cinqué Lee). The ghost of Elvis Presley haunts every frame, at one point even appearing literally as a semi-transparent apparition. A young couple visiting from Japan (Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase) arrive on a train to see Graceland and Sun Studios, where The King recorded early hits like “Blue Moon.” An Italian woman (Nicoletta Braschi) is parted from her money by a stranger’s story about a hitchhiker, who turned out to be Presley from beyond the grave. And an English greaser (The Clash’s Joe Strummer), whom everyone calls Elvis, goes on a drunken rampage after getting dumped and fired on the same day.

Mystery Train is the most intricately interwoven of Jarmusch’s anthology films, and his direction evinces obvious pathos for the music of 1950s Memphis and the decay of the city in the intervening years. In the film’s iconic final shot, a car full of criminals, and the police cruiser chasing them, speed off in different directions, while a train containing several characters from the film’s earlier chapters pulls slowly away from the station. It’s a poignantly funny snapshot of Jarmusch’s love for missed connections. 

Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

The best way to appreciate Father Mother Sister Brother is to understand it in relation to Coffee and Cigarettes, his opus of aimlessness. Eleven discrete stories filmed over 17 years stage anticlimactic encounters between the likes of Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright, Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, Cate Blanchett and herself (disguised as an non-famous Australian cousin), and Bill Murray with the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA. In each vignette, two or more characters share coffee and cigarettes. Nothing else connects these short films, except perhaps their attendant awkwardness, as the folks across the table from one another never quite seem to see things eye to eye.

Jarmusch is an acute observer of small social discomforts, which is perhaps what makes him so unexpectedly well-suited for conducting British comedy. By far the funniest and most fleshed out vignette features Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan as themselves, two English actors meeting up in LA, and fittingly for once, the customary coffee is replaced with tea. Coogan, brashly self-absorbed after the success of 24 Hour Party People (2002), brushes off Molina’s suggestion that the men are actually long-lost cousins, only realizing the peril of his rudeness when the latter gets up to take a call from director Spike Jonze. The scene is silly in its skewering of show-business narcissism, but it also calls forth the implicit question of what family members owe one another by pure fact of their relation, and the culturally specific rituals (tea instead of coffee) that make faraway places feel more like home. Over two decades later, Jarmusch is still preoccupied by the friction of such encounters, as his latest feature amply shows.

Paterson (2016)

Jarmusch’s attention for much of the past two decades has been lavished on bizarre genre outings about vampires (Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013) and zombies (The Dead Don’t Die, 2019), where he frankly lost me. But in between, he made Paterson, a surprisingly moving film about poetry that may be his most personal work to date. Adam Driver plays Paterson, a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, the town that was once the subject of a five-volume epic poem by William Carlos Williams. Williams used ordinary language to revel in the beauty of the mundane, and Driver’s Paterson does the same in amateur poetry of his own. Jarmusch, who first moved to New York with the hopes of becoming a poet, and studied with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro as a student at Columbia University before turning to film, seems to be getting at something about his own style, which explains both its seemingly pointlessness and undeniable allure. Watching Jarmusch’s films for the plot is all wrong, like expecting conflict and resolution from a haiku.

The most memorable parts of Paterson are the least eventful: scenes of Driver’s character walking his dog, or driving his daily bus route. Careful attention is paid to these everyday events, and Jarmusch succeeds in his once-described goal “to approximate real time for the audience.” Masatoshi Nagase, the Japanese actor who previously appeared in Mystery Train (where his mesmerizing way of lighting cigarettes remains for me the apogee of Jarmusch’s visual language) reappears here as a tourist who hands Paterson a blank notebook, in silent encouragement to continue seeing and documenting the world as he does. At their best, Jarmusch’s films capture a poetry akin to those pages.