Dead Like Me

I never really considered myself a Jim Jarmusch fan, partly I had never seen anything other than the excellent Ghost Dog, but also because his movies always seemed to be a little too much sitting-around-and-talking-about-existential-stuff for my taste. But recently, when one of my daily music blog reads, An Aquarium Drunkard, posted a few songs from Neil Young’s spooky score for Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man, I decided to give more of Jarmusch’s work a shot. I’ve been on a big Neil Young kick lately anyway since I finally scored tickets to see him live, so based on the strength of what I’d heard of his soundtrack plus a vague memory of some good reviews from back when the movie was released, I was intrigued enough to add Dead Man to the top of my Netflix list.

A lot of times when I get “artsy” movies from Netflix, they”ll collect dust for days or weeks until I’m in the right mood to watch them. Today, however, I decided to watch Dead Man right away, and sometimes, it’s all about timing. Apart from a stellar cast (Johnny Depp, Lance Henriksen, John Hurt, Billy Bob Thornton, Gabriel Byrne, Alfred Molina, Crispin Glover, Robert Mitchum, and an excellent performance by Gary Farmer as the Indian named Nobody), what appealed to me was the sparseness and the “less is more” approach to Dead Man. Jarmusch shot the entire movie in black-and-white, and he captured some incredible landscapes and images as the characters travel across the West. The black-and-white was a terrific aesthetic choice, as it not only lent an Ansel Adams quality to the setting, it also brought out an impressive amount of character in the faces of the actors—there’s a reason photographers still shoot in that format. On top of the gorgeous cinematography, add a very limited amount of dialogue (something I usually appreciate when handled well) and Young’s sparse and haunting guitar, and this movie felt like a complete package. Stark but beautiful, violent but with purpose, and just a tinge depressing but in a meaningful way. I don’t know if it’s the approach of cold weather or the fact that I’m more appreciative of western landscapes now that I live out here, but every shot of dead trees and snow-covered forests hit me in the right spot. Tomorrow, I’m heading over to my local record store to see if they have the soundtrack, but based on how I feel after watching it, I might have to look for the DVD as well.