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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Cate Blanchett, Roberto Benigni, Bill Murray, Iggy Pop and Tom Waits are just a few of the familiar faces that pop up in Jim Jarmusch's 11 vignettes in search of a movie.
May 14, 2004 | Some of Jim Jarmusch's pictures have such maddeningly irregular rhythms that they threaten to throw your heartbeat off kilter: His 1986 "Down by Law," for example, was the kind of picture that sweeps its audience around like a limp rag doll -- the more rigidly you resisted its lopsided charms, the more likely it was to drive you crazy. But with later pictures like the 2000 "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" and the superb, lyrical "Dead Man," Jarmusch learned to marshal his storytelling skills without squelching what's individual or interesting about them. His movies tend to move rather slowly, but they manage to hold your attention -- they can be an invigorating narcotic.
"Coffee and Cigarettes" is less one big movie than a coordinated set of mini-movies -- something of a now-and-then knitting project that Jarmusch has put together in bits and pieces over the past few years. (He has another similar project in the works.) Jarmusch both wrote and directed the 11 segments that make up "Coffee and Cigarettes." Each one features two or three characters connecting (or, perhaps more accurately, misconnecting) over cups of coffee and, yes, those much-villainized pleasure-delivery receptacles known as cigarettes.
Most of the characters are played by people you've probably heard of, and the characters they play are something like themselves, and yet not. "Strange to Meet You" features jittery comedian Roberto Benigni and the much drier Steven Wright bouncing their lines off the walls around them more than off each other. In "Somewhere in California," Iggy Pop and Tom Waits butt heads, gently, each finding ways to slight the other's career: Waits brags about being an M.D. and a musician; Pop mentions casually that the coffee shop's jukebox doesn't have any of Waits' songs on it. Waits brags about having quit smoking and then announces, devilishly, that once you've quit, it's OK to start up again -- because, he says, as a way of validating his cheerfully warped logic, "you've quit!" He and Pop then proceed to light up, and the look of pleasure on their faces is almost obscene. ("Coffee and Cigarettes" is, thank God, a movie made for adults capable of making up their own minds about smoking. Former smokers, especially, sometimes enjoy living vicariously, seeing people in the movies do things that they themselves no longer can.)
In "Cousins," Cate Blanchett plays a sweet but vaguely self-satisfied movie star who deigns to meet her punkish cousin Shelly (also played by Blanchett) in the lobby of the hotel where she's doing a junket. Shelly resents Cate's success, and while Cate tries to be sweet to Shelly, she barely hides her condescension. Cate gives Shelly some expensive perfume; Shelly thanks her appreciatively and then asks suspiciously if it's swag; Cate finally admits, defensively, that it is. Their conversation wobbles and weaves, sometimes unsteadily and sometimes sharply; it's unmooring for us as well as for them, but it's funny too.
"Coffee and Cigarettes"
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Starring Cate Blanchett, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Roberto Benigni, Bill Murray
The vignette format suits Jarmusch: Working on a small scale frees him to explore the varying textures and strangeness of real-life conversations, the way our discourse sometimes worms its way into corners it can't work itself out of, particularly when there are stimulants (in other words, caffeine or tobacco) involved. Certain topics surface repeatedly and randomly: the idea of coffee and cigarettes as a decidedly unhealthy lunch, Nikola Tesla's theory of the earth as a conductor of acoustical resonance, and the practice of freezing coffee in ice-cube trays to make caffeinated ice-pops.
