Movie: Down by Law

Another Jim Jarmusch film (i'm quickly running out) featuring Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni and John Lurie (from Stranger than Paradise). I've been searching for this one for a long time and finally found it. What sparked my interest, outside of Jarmusch being my favorite film maker, was the presence of Tom Waits as a main character. I've only seen him play such short rolls before and it was worth the wait to see what he can do center stage.

The movie is about three men, a pimp, a radio host, and an Italian who has a very loose grasp of the English language, who get arrested and spend time getting to know each other in a jail cell. Two men are set up for unknown reasons and are ultimately innocent for the crimes they're convicted for, but the third (the Italian and most harmless of the three) is brought in on murder charges.

As with all Jarmusch films, there's hardly any story to speak of, very little is explained, the plot is incredibly simple, and there are only four or five sets in the entire movie. The focus is on the characters. Not who they were, not how they got to where they are, not where they're going in the future, but who they are and how they interact with other characters now. Jim Jarmusch seems to love how complex individuals are, sometimes achieving a level of complexity that makes them unable to exist outside of their places of comfort, unable to interact with anyone outside of their close group of friends. The three actors exhibit this complexity perfectly.

What makes Jarmusch my favorite film maker is the conversations he constructs between characters. He fills dialog with awkward pauses, confused looks, sometimes complete silence and it feels real. If you look at an average movie, there's always something happening and the dialog always has a purpose. Jarmusch wants to portray reality, where hardly anything happens, memorable moments are based on only a few seconds in an expanse of time and people sometimes can't even come up with the words to correctly express themselves which at times might explain more than words ever could.

It's hard to recommend any Jarmusch movie to anyone, however, because film making like this is commonly perceived as boring. They would be wrong, but different people, different tastes, as always.

5/5