NIGHT ON EARTH
As the most popular American independent filmmaker around, Jim Jarmusch carries a special burden: his reputation makes his work particularly hard to evaluate. Other American independents who haven’t enjoyed his commercial success–he’s the only independent who comes to mind who works mainly in 35-millimeter and owns all his own pictures–envy and even resent him, questioning whether he offers a serious alternative to the commercial mainstream. Indeed, Jarmusch has come to be so identified with artistic freedom that it’s difficult to see how any of his movies can live up to his reputation.
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Jarmusch himself seems acutely aware of this paradox, and in some ways Night on Earth is designed to break free of these repetitions. But it also either breeds or trades on other routines that are every bit as shopworn by now as those underlying Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train, his three previous 35-millimeter features, though they may be familiar in more mainstream ways: Night on Earth employs more dialogue and close-ups and cutting, more Hollywood casting and pacing. But however you look at it Night on Earth is as much a product of New York minimalism as any of Jarmusch’s features from Permanent Vacation on, and nearly all its strengths and limitations derive from this fact.
Composed of five sketches, each of which runs for about 25 minutes and is played in the language of the city it’s set in, Night on Earth focuses on the interactions between taxi drivers and their passengers during rides taking place simultaneously in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. These five cities occupy four time zones, and the film emphasizes this global relativity at the outset by beginning in outer space and approaching earth spinning in its orbit. After the camera penetrates the atmosphere it glides over a global map, and this transition from the cosmic (the solar system) to toylike banality (an obviously man-made globe) perfectly encapsulates Jarmusch’s ironic angle of vision throughout. Indeed, relativity is the principal theme of the existential encounters between strangers in all five of the movie’s episodes.
The postmodernist references in the casting throughout Night on Earth suggest a heavy reliance on the tried-and-true–mainly in the dubious form of the “homage.” This serves as Jarmusch’s commercial safety net by guaranteeing various kinds of recognition in the international market while raising the question of whether such references are genuine expressions of artistic freedom or ready-made labels partly designed to conceal strategic flights from that freedom. The LA episode seems constructed to exploit Cassavetes’s aura–even the agent’s destination, Beverly Hills, alludes to the site of the Cassavetes-Rowlands homestead, and the film’s cinematographer, Frederick Elmes, shot two Cassavetes features, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night (in addition to three David Lynch features). But there’s little in the style or content of the sketch that suggests any detailed or meaningful attention to Cassavetes’s work; Jarmusch’s reference to him is like a job reference–an “objective” credential meant to enhance the potential employee’s appeal.
The final sequence, set in snow-filled Helsinki (5:07 AM), is pointedly the bleakest. Here Jarmusch refers to the films of Aki and Mika Kaurismaki; three of the four lead actors–Matti Pellonpaa, Kari Vaananen, and Sakari Kuosmanen–have appeared in films by these Finnish brothers as has Jarmusch himself, and to make sure that we get the point, two of the three drunken passengers are called Mika and Aki. But the episode may well be more somber than the films of either.
