DEAD MAN Jim Jarmusch

Dead Man


- USA - Western/Adventure Drama/Hybrid Western/Revisionist Western
Shot in black-and-white, the movie beautifully sustains a vision of the West as wild in the most primal and scary sense of the word.
Reviewed by Stephen Holden





Type:
Features
Distributor:
Electric Pictures
Starring Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum (last film),. Directed by Jim Jarmusch. (R, 134 minutes).

A dark, bitter commentary on modern American life cloaked in the form of a surrealist western, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man stars
Johnny Depp as William Blake, a newly-orphaned accountant who leaves his home in Cleveland to accept a job in the frontier
town of Machine. Upon his arrival, Blake is told by the factory owner Dickinson (Robert Mitchum) that the job has already been
filled. Dejectedly, he enters a nearby tavern, ultimately spending the night with a former prostitute. A violent altercation with
the woman's lover (Gabriel Byrne), also Dickinson's son, leaves Blake a murderer as well as mortally wounded, a bullet lodged
dangerously close to his heart. He flees into the wilderness, where a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer) mistakes
Blake for the English poet William Blake and determines that he will be Blake's guide in his protracted passage into the spirit world. ~
Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide











Dead Man," Jim Jarmusch's sardonic nightmare vision of the Old West, begins with a display of grotesquerie that is so sensational it sets up expectations that the movie might be the surreal last word on the Hollywood western and its mythic legacy.

Those expectations, unfortunately, are not fulfilled. The film's energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness. Audiences attuned to Mr. Jarmusch's drolly hip sensibility should be delighted with the film, but to the uninitiated, its drier patches are just as likely to induce yawns.

This story of a young man's passage through a frontier crawling with violence, death and decay begins on a train whose soot-faced fireman (Crispin Glover) delivers an ominous prediction. Appearing in the car where William Blake (Johnny Depp), the film's protagonist, is playing solitaire, he warns Blake that when he reaches his destination, the town of Machine, he will find his own grave.

As the train hurtles westward, Blake, incongruously duded up in a floppy bow tie and checkered suit, finds himself surrounded by silent, gun-toting geezers with wizened faces. Peering out the window, he sees the tattered remains of abandoned covered wagons and other signs of decay. When the train passes a buffalo herd, his fellow passengers clamber to the windows with rifles and blindly open fire.

Machine turns out to be a rutted backwater hellhole dominated by the Dickinson Metalworks, the company that is supposedly going to employ Blake as an accountant. But on showing up at the place, he is informed by the leering office manager (John Hurt) that the post has been filled. When he confronts the owner, John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), he is ordered at gunpoint to leave at once or else he will soon be "pushing up daisies."

Stranded and nearly penniless, Blake visits a bar where he meets Thell Russell (Mili Avital), an attractive woman who takes him back to her shabby rented room strewn with paper flowers she has made. While they're in bed together, Thell's distraught former boyfriend, Charlie Dickinson (the company owner's son, played by Gabriel Byrne), appears and shoots at Blake but kills Thell instead. Blake shoots Charlie with Thell's gun, and jumps out a window, but not before he himself is critically wounded. Blake suddenly finds himself a fugitive with a bullet in his chest and a bounty on his head.

From here, the movie changes from a horrifying evocation of the frontier into something more problematic and self-conscious. Pursued by bounty hunters and law officers, Blake makes his way westward until he reaches the Pacific, leaving a trail of carnage behind him. For much of the way he is accompanied by a gruff, facetious Indian guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who has dressed his wounds and believes his companion to be the reincarnation of the English poet William Blake.

When Nobody tells his story, it turns out that he, too, is a sort of fugitive. Captured as a boy by white men, he was taken East and exploited as a sideshow attraction and from there to England, where he was educated and discovered Blake's poetry. The Indian appoints himself the poet's guide back into the spirit world.

When "Dead Man" succumbs to its own allegorical pretensions, it becomes a slogging philosophic exercise whose dialogue never comes close to matching the energy of its malevolent characters and the novelty of its visual images. Shot in black-and-white, the movie beautifully sustains a vision of the West as wild in the most primal and scary sense of the word.

Its talk is another matter. Mr. Jarmusch's screenplay has Nobody address Blake in a joking profanity-laced slang that has a sly contemporary ring. That dialogue is right in tune with Neil Young's jangling, scraggly electric guitar score, which twangs portentously on the soundtrack. The clash between the film's two styles has little resonance.

The movie picks up a new flash of energy and humor whenever a weird new character stumbles into view. Some of its livelier moments focus on an eccentric trio of hired killers, the meanest of whom (Lance Henriksen) is rumored to have raped both his parents and eaten them. Equally intriguing are a trio of animal skinners whom Nobody and Blake happen upon as they are eating beans around a campfire. The oddest of the three (Iggy Pop) is a gaunt old hunter dressed in pioneer-lady drag who regales his comrades with the story of the Three Bears.

When "Dead Man" is imagining the Wild West as an infernal landscape of death, it is furiously alive.