Any viewing of trhis movie starts with those credits; you see that cast; Bill Murray! Adam Driver! Tilda Swinton! Chloë Sevigny! Steve Buscemi! Danny Glover! Rosie Perez! Caleb Landry Jones! Selena Gomez! And Tom "I'll whittle you into kindling" Waits! And you think; this movie can't lose.
Well, you'd be surprised.
Yes, a lot of people showed up to play with Jarmusch but Jarmusch was not ready. The script, especially in the third act, is a mess, full of fun moments but never gaining any narrative momentum. It's like Jarmusch had to start rolling on a particular date to get all these actors lined up, and so they started shooting though there was no third act in sight.
Maybe Jarmusch always works like this. Certainly Murray, Swinton, Driver, and Waits have all worked with him before. Maybe they trusted in the old Jarmusch magic to conjure something out of those blank final pages but alas, it was not to be.
The setting is Centerville - a village of 738 people whose inhabitants are just trying to go about their daily lives when the dead start rising from the grave. There's no Presidents or scientists in this movie - just the locals trying to get through the night, not understand why it's happening.
Although it's billed as a zombie movie, this is best thought of as a hangout movie. If you watch this purely for the pleasure of seeing Murray and Driver slowly trade lines with each other, or to see Swinton good-naturedly act out the offscreen uber-image of her as some sort of strange alien, or to see Buscemi be all crotchety, then you will find some small pleasures here but there is a pervading sense that the film makers had bigger hopes for their movie.
The shame of it is that you can almost see how it could have been great. There are clues all over about what this could have been. There are the signs of an environmental crime de coeur beseeching us to treat the planet better in the polar fracking which sets everything going. There are traces of a Romero-esque critique of consumerism in the zombies dedication to the rituals they engaged in when alive. (Most hilariously as some stumble about with phones mumbling "wi-fiiiiii".) There's hints of a a small-town big-city clash with Selena Gomez and her city slicker pals arriving into this sleepy hollow, and making fun of Landry Jones. There's the slightest whiff of a political commentary being tossed into the mix with Buscemi's red hat wearing farmer. There's hints of a detached observation of these ridiculous humans in the near-poetic ramblings of Waits as he observes the town from afar.
Jarmusch clearly thought he could stir these elements into one big, hilarious horror stew but when you stir this much into the pot, you need a surer sense of what you're making, and it sure feels here like Jarmusch did not.
To cover the gaps, he tried throwing in some meta-commentary on the zombie genre - Landry Jones' character is a big geek who has seen all the movies, and knows what to do. This is a route that could work (it did for "Scream") but that knowledge never leads to any new insight into the underlying tropes or fears of the genre.
Most bafflingly there is a meta bit where Bill Murray asks Adam Driver how he is so sure about what's going to happen, and Driver responds that it's because Jim gave him the full script and he's read it all. It's the kind of dumb-meta joke that does nothing for the film, and which a writer throws in when they really don't know what to write next. (And the ending suggests the same.)
Jarmusch, taking his cue from the pace of village life, directs everything at a crawl. We observe characters arriving and having conversations. People take their time. At first, it's a very welcome change of pace from a lot of similar movies, and if Jarmusch had been making a movie about the characters and goings on in this little village, I would have been all in, but the narrative becomes a fight to the death with flesh-eating zombies and yet the same indolent pace permeates throughout. It just doesn't work.
If Jarmusch thought he was making fun of horror movies, he needed to dig deeper into the urges underlying them, not simply suggest we're all so jaded now that the earth being thrown off its axis and the dead rising would be greeted with a shrug.
The truth is Jarmusch comes off as making a movie in a genre he doesn't love. It's almost crazy how he thought he could just tack on a few of the trappings and play in this sandbox. His lack of interest in zombies rings out loud and clear.
I do still love him. There's no one making films like him. I suspect after the brilliance of "Only Lovers Left Alive"'s take on the vampire genre, Jarmusch, his cast and producers thought they could replicate that movies success here, but their hopes, and mine, were, like so many zombie brains, cruelly bashed out on the ground.
Well, you'd be surprised.
Yes, a lot of people showed up to play with Jarmusch but Jarmusch was not ready. The script, especially in the third act, is a mess, full of fun moments but never gaining any narrative momentum. It's like Jarmusch had to start rolling on a particular date to get all these actors lined up, and so they started shooting though there was no third act in sight.
Maybe Jarmusch always works like this. Certainly Murray, Swinton, Driver, and Waits have all worked with him before. Maybe they trusted in the old Jarmusch magic to conjure something out of those blank final pages but alas, it was not to be.
The setting is Centerville - a village of 738 people whose inhabitants are just trying to go about their daily lives when the dead start rising from the grave. There's no Presidents or scientists in this movie - just the locals trying to get through the night, not understand why it's happening.
Although it's billed as a zombie movie, this is best thought of as a hangout movie. If you watch this purely for the pleasure of seeing Murray and Driver slowly trade lines with each other, or to see Swinton good-naturedly act out the offscreen uber-image of her as some sort of strange alien, or to see Buscemi be all crotchety, then you will find some small pleasures here but there is a pervading sense that the film makers had bigger hopes for their movie.
The shame of it is that you can almost see how it could have been great. There are clues all over about what this could have been. There are the signs of an environmental crime de coeur beseeching us to treat the planet better in the polar fracking which sets everything going. There are traces of a Romero-esque critique of consumerism in the zombies dedication to the rituals they engaged in when alive. (Most hilariously as some stumble about with phones mumbling "wi-fiiiiii".) There's hints of a a small-town big-city clash with Selena Gomez and her city slicker pals arriving into this sleepy hollow, and making fun of Landry Jones. There's the slightest whiff of a political commentary being tossed into the mix with Buscemi's red hat wearing farmer. There's hints of a detached observation of these ridiculous humans in the near-poetic ramblings of Waits as he observes the town from afar.
Jarmusch clearly thought he could stir these elements into one big, hilarious horror stew but when you stir this much into the pot, you need a surer sense of what you're making, and it sure feels here like Jarmusch did not.
To cover the gaps, he tried throwing in some meta-commentary on the zombie genre - Landry Jones' character is a big geek who has seen all the movies, and knows what to do. This is a route that could work (it did for "Scream") but that knowledge never leads to any new insight into the underlying tropes or fears of the genre.
Most bafflingly there is a meta bit where Bill Murray asks Adam Driver how he is so sure about what's going to happen, and Driver responds that it's because Jim gave him the full script and he's read it all. It's the kind of dumb-meta joke that does nothing for the film, and which a writer throws in when they really don't know what to write next. (And the ending suggests the same.)
Jarmusch, taking his cue from the pace of village life, directs everything at a crawl. We observe characters arriving and having conversations. People take their time. At first, it's a very welcome change of pace from a lot of similar movies, and if Jarmusch had been making a movie about the characters and goings on in this little village, I would have been all in, but the narrative becomes a fight to the death with flesh-eating zombies and yet the same indolent pace permeates throughout. It just doesn't work.
If Jarmusch thought he was making fun of horror movies, he needed to dig deeper into the urges underlying them, not simply suggest we're all so jaded now that the earth being thrown off its axis and the dead rising would be greeted with a shrug.
The truth is Jarmusch comes off as making a movie in a genre he doesn't love. It's almost crazy how he thought he could just tack on a few of the trappings and play in this sandbox. His lack of interest in zombies rings out loud and clear.
I do still love him. There's no one making films like him. I suspect after the brilliance of "Only Lovers Left Alive"'s take on the vampire genre, Jarmusch, his cast and producers thought they could replicate that movies success here, but their hopes, and mine, were, like so many zombie brains, cruelly bashed out on the ground.
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