GHOST DOG

GHOST DOG
Cliff Gorman, Henry Silva, Forest Whitaker, Frank Minucci, John Tormey. Directed by Jim Jarmusch. (R, 116 minutes).

A surreal crime drama told as only Jim Jarmusch could, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai stars Forest Whitaker as Ghost Dog, a hit man living in an unidentified but run-down city in what license plates call "The Industrialized State." Known for his gift of being able to come and go without people noticing him, Ghost Dog is a self-taught samurai who is obsessed with order and his strict personal moral code, drawn from the philosophies of the Japanese warriors. As every samurai needs a leader to whom he swears loyalty, Ghost Dog has devoted himself the service of Louie (John Tormey), a low-level crime boss who once saved his life. When Louie's superiors decide he must be executed, Ghost Dog leaps into action, methodically wiping out his many enemies. Along with a dizzying series of stylized shoot-outs, Ghost Dog also features carrier pigeons, characters who read Rashomon, a French-speaking ice cream man, and a score by RZA from the top-selling hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, who have their own well-documented obsession with Asian culture. Ghost Dog was screened in competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In ''Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,'' Jim Jarmusch tries to do to the samurai epic and the gangster movie what he did to the western in ''Dead Man'' (1997), his dreamy, elegiac deconstruction of cowboys-and-Indians mythology. Like a postmodern magpie, Mr. Jarmusch likes to scavenge shiny bits of pop-culture flotsam -- mobsters in their sharkskin suits, gaudy cartoon animals, sleek imported luxury cars, iridescent CD's -- and weave them into quirky, ramshackle habitations.

Here he is aided immeasurably by the RZA (pronounced RIZZ-ah), one of the hip-hop masterminds behind the Wu-Tang Clan, whose dreamy, collagist approach to sound nicely mirrors Mr. Jarmusch's cool, allusive visual style. Whether the film's use of music will help make it accessible to audiences is an open question. Mr. Jarmusch is an acquired taste, and a lot of people seem to find him unpalatable. For each viewer who revels in the artistry of his slow, disjunctive scenes, his carefully composed frames and his penchant for symbolism, there is another who sees only artiness.

But even the most resistant moviegoer may be provoked by ''Ghost Dog.'' Indeed, the best way to appreciate this fascinating but uneven film may be to resist it, to watch it unfold in the persistent, persistently thwarted expectation that it will erupt into the hip-hop Mafia shoot-'em-up it stubbornly refuses to be. There is a lot of violence, but not much action; a plot involving vengeance, jealousy and double-crossing, but not a great deal of suspense. Mr. Jarmusch choreographs his killings with somber stateliness. His blood-drenched climax has an almost ritualistic inevitability, like the end of a Jacobean revenge tragedy or a Kurosawa film.

He has composed a ruminative, bittersweet visual essay on brutality, honor and tribalism, which may frustrate audiences expecting hyped-up intensity, fast-paced thrills or a story that makes sense.

But frustration can be a stimulus to thought, an aspect of discipline, which is one of the themes of ''Ghost Dog.'' Its subtitle refers to an ancient Japanese warriors' manual called ''Hagakure,'' passages of which fill the screen like intertitles in a silent movie and which also come to us in the gruff, sad voice of Forest Whitaker. Mr. Whitaker plays the title character, a modern-day samurai pledged to serve a master named Louie (John Tormey), a Mafia soldier in a decrepit, nameless American city.

Louie's bosses are a wheezing klatch of capos and consiglieres, compared to whom William Hickey's geriatric don in ''Prizzi's Honor'' looks as vigorous and decisive as the young Vito Corleone in ''The Godfather, Part II.'' These wasted, diminished figures -- call them the Mezzo-Sopranos -- can barely make the rent on their ratty private club. They don't seem to be involved in any illegal business or much of anything besides deciding whom to kill next. Almost by default -- he has carried out a hit in the presence of the chief mobster's daughter -- they decide to kill Ghost Dog.

Ghost Dog's world is an abstract, allegorical place, where cars have license plates from ''The Industrial State'' and ''The Highway State.'' From ''Hagakure,'' the film quotes the standard Buddhist teaching ''form is emptiness; emptiness is form,'' and Mr. Jarmusch sometimes seems intent on demonstrating the truth of this observation. He is rescued from his worst impulses largely by the RZA's score and by Mr. Whitaker's witty, moving performance. Mr. Jarmusch has told interviewers that he conceived the character Ghost Dog with Mr. Whitaker in mind, and it's hard to think of another actor who could play a cold-blooded killer with such warmth and humanity, or who could manage to be at once a mythic hero and a lonely young man with only books, music and pigeons for company.

Ghost Dog also finds some human companionship. His entanglement with the mobsters is paralleled by his blossoming friendship with a young girl, Pearline (Camille Winbush), and a French-speaking ice-cream salesman, Raymond (Isaach de Bankole). The meandering back-and-forth between these characters lends the movie some of the low-key, absurdist humor that animated Mr. Jarmusch's first two features, ''Stranger Than Paradise'' and ''Down by Law.''

It will not have escaped your attention that Ghost Dog is a black man who refers (and, at great cost, defers) to a white master and who is pursued by a mob because of his improper attention to a white woman. The revenge plot may be rooted in samurai legend, but Mr. Jarmusch also clearly intends for us to pick up a more disturbing and less exotic resonance.

''Ghost Dog'' is about race relations much in the way that ''Dead Man'' was about the genocidal dispossession of the Indians in the 19th century: unmistakably, but also obliquely. What are we to make of a middle-aged Mafioso doing a spastic Dean Martin shuffle in front of his bathroom mirror while he raps along with Public Enemy's ''Cold Lampin' With Flavor''? Or Ghost Dog's violent encounter with two white hunters in camouflage war paint that looks a lot like blackface? Images like these feel like the fever dreams of a culture obsessed with racial distinctions yet unable to think clearly about what race is or even to decide whether it is real. This movie seems to suffer from a similar indecision about itself.