Not So Strange: an Evolution in the Films of Jim Jarmusch by Riz Koross

In a career that has thus far spanned almost forty years and from which thirteen feature films have emerged, any attempt to trace the evolution of the ground-breaking American independent director Jim Jarmusch using only three as representative of his entire career is an especially tall order, since his signature style, tone, atmosphere, pacing, and what film critic Calum Marsh calls “his indelible sense of place” [

*7] are constants, which run through all of his works, together defining what is unmistakably “a Jim Jarmusch movie”; any attempt to single one out based on its surface differences only leads the viewer to appreciate more of what they have in common.

Still, there are enough differences between three of his more noteworthy ones—Stranger than Paradise (1984), Broken Flowers (2005), and Paterson (2016)—to provide evidence of his personal evolution more than of his filmmaking. The differences between the films are relatively subtle (particularly between the latter two), but their nuances may hold clues as to the director’s outlook on life, which he reveals in the guise of his protagonists’ manners, dispositions, and outlooks.

Almost all of Jarmusch’s films have loose narrative structures and ambiguous endings, the result of his taking his inspiration from life—“from real people experiencing real emotions”, as noted by Geoff Andrew, a writer and lecturer on film and a programmer-at-large with the BFI (British Film Institute). [

*1] Critic and author J.D. Lafrance points out that Jarmusch himself has explained, “Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?” [

*6] Andrew contends, “His works may be cool and absurdist (Stranger than Paradise), droll and melancholic (Broken Flowers), or upbeat and approachable (Paterson), but they are all about America and the people who live there” [

*1]—their relationships to one another and to the places they inhabit. In order to capture the deeper and ever-evolving layers of his characters, he favors long takes, minimal camera movement, and abrupt endings.

Stranger than Paradise, his breakthrough film, won the Camera d’Or (for the best first feature by a director) at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, proving the commercial viability of independent films [

*6] and inspiring a generation of film school graduates who chose a similar path of independent filmmaking in order to retain creative control of their works. (To this day, Jarmusch has never produced a film for a studio.) Like most of his films, it involves characters that have no real direction in life and, as Lafrance puts it, “documents the mundane events that most people take for granted and shows why they too are filled with fascinating moments.” [

*6]

A road film centering on two down-on-their-luck small-time con-artists living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the newly arrived Hungarian cousin of one of them (whose arrival disrupts what Lafrance refers to as their “mundane, go-nowhere existence” [

*6]), and in their New York exhibition of it, the Museum of Modern Art felt that its low-key mise-en-scene and grainy black-and-white cinematography “simplifies the content of the film frame” [

*10], which allows the viewer to concentrate on the psychology of the characters and how their fractured communication epitomizes what it means to be an American. The camera rarely moves, silence often holds more meaning than speech, and the Lower East Side, residential Cleveland, and the Florida coast all look the same—bland—which film and TV critic Vikram Murthi found to be reflective of the characters’ tendencies to be outsiders in their environments and estranged from themselves. [

*9]

When the three of them get to Florida, a series of comic misunderstandings and misconnections leads to each of them unwittingly traveling in very different and far-flung directions. One of the men—Willy—who attempts throughout to deny his Hungarian roots by adopting all things American, boards a plane bound for Hungary that he mistakenly thinks that his cousin is on, just before takeoff, in an attempt to keep her from flying back to eastern Europe, and fails to disembark in time. We viewers are aware of the irony, although the characters are not. Earlier, when they look out at the snowy, white, and bleak expanse of Lake Erie, one character exclaims, again with no trace of irony, that “it’s funny. You come to some place new, and everything just looks the same.” Their responses to this situation, which for many would be rife with despair, illustrate one of Jarmusch's overriding themes—that despair comingles with hope.

Similar themes—an over-arching feeling of melancholy, an alienation from one’s self, an outsider’s perspective—are in evidence twenty years later in Broken Flowers, which won the top prize at Cannes in 2005. “Moving beyond hipster cool to something more like maturity” is how interviewer and reporter Lynn Hirschberg characterized it, which like Stranger than Paradise, is about a character on a road trip. [

*5] In the case of Broken Flowers, an eternal bachelor (played by Bill Murray) searches for the mother of a now-grown son he may have fathered, while trying to make good with some of his ex’s. As in his earlier film, Jarmusch is less concerned with the results than with the process and the in-between moments. [

*5] Here, however, the protagonist, Bill Murray’s Don Johnston, is beginning to understand and grapple with his profound detachment, which Jarmusch conveys through the introjection of long, pregnant pauses, “bouts of languishing silence”, and close-ups of Murray’s “craggy” face as we watch him just think.

THE READER IS INVITED TO TAKE NOTE OF THIS MESSAGE

                                 SARCASTICALLY NOIR FILMS

                                 Dreaming in Celluloid

                                 Independent Media and Production including:

                                                                                        Acting, Directing, Sound/Video/Film Editing,

                                                                                        Photography/Photoshop,

                                                                                        Videography/Cinematography

                                 https://www.youtube.com/user/SarcasticallyNoir

Broken Flowers has more of a narrative than does Stranger than Paradise; the dialogue between Murray’s character and those of his former lovers and best-friend is engaging, and there is obvious drama in the character’s journey. Still, as critic Joshua Tyler has observed, “the film is driven not by dialogue but by the turmoil in Bill Murray’s sad, aging eyes.” [

*11] Where the two male characters in his earlier film seemed so infernally sure of themselves as to possess no urgency for introspection, Murray’s character is only beginning to realize how, well, broken that he is, which accounts for the first word in the title of the film. The second word in the title—not incidentally—comes from the pink flowers he was instructed to present to each of his sons’ possible mothers while he searched for clues as to which of them—if any—sent him an unsigned letter, on pink stationery, informing him that his now-adult son had recently embarked on a quest to meet his father for the first time; together, the title is indicative of the process of Don being broken open as a result of his attempts at dealing with his past.

In the end, he is no closer to resolving any of the mysteries of which he had intended: the author of the note is still unknown, relationships with his former girlfriends remain ambiguous, and he is unsure if the young man he saw at the airport and met and bought lunch for the following day, is really his son. In fact, as is common in Jarmusch’s movies, he is left with an even wider sense of possibilities, as a second young man (who was previously unseen and unknown) stares intently at Don from the passenger seat of a car as it passes Don only seconds after the first one—to whom Don voices his belief that the two are father and son—bolts from the scene, either out of disgust or fright. (Exactly what causes him to leave so suddenly is another of the film’s ambiguities.) Might he be the one of whom Don is suddenly so covetous, or might it be neither of them?

Clearly Jarmusch understands that “the journey is the destination” and builds this realization into his films. The protagonist here is not as much of an outsider as those in Stranger than Paradise are; to illustrate this, the transitions from shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene are softened. Gone are the jump cuts and the full blackouts that he uses in Stranger than Paradise to transition from one scene to the next, making the characters in Broken Flowers (even Bill Murray’s Don Johnston, with his depressed and melancholic temperament) more inviting and accessible than aloof, as they are in Stranger than Paradise.

In that film, the characters’ lives do not appreciably change; only their circumstances do, and then only because of comic turns of serendipity and fate. There are no willful choices on their parts. In Broken Flowers, Don’s life changes only when change is forced upon him by the unexpected letter and the uninvited and initially unwelcome insistence by his friend that the mystery be solved. In Paterson, however, which exhibits all of the aforementioned qualities that are seen in Jarmusch’s earlier ones, the protagonists’ lives are immeasurably more settled, and without the self-deceptive arrogance which causes the (relatively) younger characters in Stranger than Paradise to avoid questioning themselves, or the self-conscious angst which causes Bill Murray’s to camouflage his anger with depression.

This emotionally healthier outlook may indicate that once people become more established internally, the life-events that were once impossible to foresee, and which often randomly and radically shift the course of one’s life, are not nearly so drastic or comic (as in Stranger than Paradise) or unsettling (as in Broken Flowers). It may also be indicative of the director’s evolving maturity as well. If Stranger than Paradise is intentionally downbeat and irreverent, and Broken Flowers more traditional but melancholic and introspective, Paterson (one of Jarmusch’s later works, the name of which is both that of the main character in the film and of the working-class city in which he and his wife live) is a much lighter fare—described as a “wistful, but not downbeat, meditation on poetry and place” by movie critic Peter Bowen. [

*2]

This is not to imply that its message is inconsequential, however. As with his other films, Jarmusch continues to explore, in depth, many of the various aspects of the American psyche. The serendipitously-named Adam Driver is a humble New Jersey bus driver and amateur poet, who is unusually aware of his surroundings and composes his poems when the opportunity allows him to do so: early in the morning while eating his simple breakfast of Cheerios and milk, in his bus before his shift starts, on his lunch break in his favorite location—in front of the city of Paterson’s iconic waterfall. As with Jarmusch’s other films, Paterson is more about mood and abstract ideas than narrative progression, with a main character who is (somewhat) unsettled in place and time. Here, as University of Cambridge film teacher, researcher, and editor Henry K. Miller puts it, what little action there is gently “unfolds over seven [for the most part, repetitive] days in Paterson’s life—each a variation on the others”—as it ever so subtly builds to the climax—the destruction, by his dog Marvin, of his “special notebook” of poems. [

*8] “The unending search for meaning and self-actualization link all of Jarmusch’s creations,” feels movie and TV critic Charles Bramesco [

*3], but unlike the main characters in the other films, Paterson alone feels at peace with the unknowable and thus is only slightly rattled when his cherished poems are destroyed.

All three films, contends author and editor with The New Yorker Richard Brody, hinge on suppressed masculine anger [

*4]—most obviously in Stranger than Paradise’s Willy but discernable in Bill Murray’s character’s depression in Broken Flowers as well. What little angst Paterson still holds is kept in check until he loses the only copies of his poems. Sensitive to his adored and loving wife’s feelings at the loss (which mirror his own) and too self-aware of the consequences of acting out violently, he turns his anger in on himself instead, becoming (for a short time) somewhat depressed, and doubting of his abilities and his commitment to his poetic endeavors. In the end (and in typical Jarmusch fashion), however, he is the serendipitous beneficiary of an unexpected, but entirely believable, coincidence: a chance meeting with a Japanese poet, who has traveled to the city of Paterson to pay homage to its great twentieth-century poet William Carlos Williams, concludes with the visitor bestowing upon Paterson the gift of a blank notebook.

Alone among Jarmusch’s characters in all three films, only Driver’s Paterson understands that the internal void that we all hold a share of is ever-present to some degree and is of our own making. By accepting the journal from the foreigner and thus choosing to resume his poetic undertakings, he shows us that the empty space, which is (metaphorically) within us, does not have to control our moods and our actions and can indeed be filled. To be aware of this (and to make peace with it, as Paterson does) makes one full, ironically—because the answers all of us seek are not in Cleveland or Florida or in one’s past (as Don Johnston thinks it is, for a while) or in poems that no longer exist on paper, but only in what one is doing and creating in the present. Paterson knows this, in a way that the protagonists in Stranger than Paradise (with the possible exception of Willy’s Hungarian cousin Eva) do not, and which Don Johnston is only beginning to glimpse.