MYSTERY TRAIN
Mastery is a rare commodity in American movies these days, in matters both large and small, so when a poetic master working on a small scale comes into view, it’s reason to sit up and take notice. Jim Jarmusch’s second feature, Stranger Than Paradise, won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1984 and catapulted him from the position of an obscure New York independent with a European cult following–on the basis of his first feature, Permanent Vacation (1980)–to international stardom.
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The fact that Jarmusch’s cinematic influences mainly come from abroad while his subjects are strictly American gives his films a kind of international sophistication that generally can’t be found in Hollywood products. (As his recent list of the ten best films of the 80s in Premiere magazine demonstrated, his taste in film is unusually discerning.) At his best, beginning with his second feature, he has used non-American characters as lenses to show us some of our own peculiarities–leading to a kind of two-way discourse about how we see others and how others see us. In order for this to work, however, Jarmusch has had to understand enough about his characters–Americans and non-Americans alike–in order to make this discourse informed and pointed. Within his chosen limits, he succeeded in this task in both Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law. In Mystery Train, his latest feature, the results are more uneven: some of the characters are beautifully imagined and realized, while others seem drawn from a more familiar stockpile, designed for reuse rather than discovery.
Down by Law (1986) repeated certain aspects of Stranger Than Paradise–which brought Jarmusch some complaints–with some significant differences. Another three-part black-and-white comedy about two hapless Americans (John Lurie and Tom Waits) and an unassimilated but resourceful European (Roberto Benigni) converging, coexisting, and diverging in changing yet similar landscapes (this time the Louisiana settings of New Orleans, a prison, a swamp, and a forest), the film made use of a similar low-life milieu and the same sort of strategic odd-shaped pauses in the dialogue. But the formal and thematic differences were in many cases just as significant as the similarities.
One of Jarmusch’s stated inspirations for the film is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales–separate stories being told during a religious pilgrimage–and he even takes care to stage the first Memphis street scene on Chaucer Street, and point this out in the dialogue. It’s a connection that makes a certain (if limited) amount of sense in the first part, entitled “Far From Yokohama,” about a young Japanese couple (Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh) traveling across the U.S. by train. Given their fervor for rock icons associated with Memphis–he prefers Carl Perkins while she stands by Elvis–their trip resembles a religious pilgrimage: specifically to the Sun studios (which we see) and to Graceland (which we don’t). (Their next scheduled stop after Memphis is New Orleans, where they plan to visit Fats Domino’s house.) But to all appearances, that’s as far as the Chaucer analogy goes: the other two stories have nothing to do with a pilgrimage, and while the characters in Chaucer recount their own stories, the characters here–with one exception–don’t.
Luisa is a widowed newlywed momentarily stranded with her groom’s coffin in the Memphis airport. (This sequence begins with a shot of the coffin, which may remind us that a hearse was the first thing we saw in Down by Law.) Turning up via taxi in the same neighborhood where we previously saw Jun and Mitzuko–which leads to some pleasurable visual rhymes, such as the moment she passes an empty lot where they had lingered–she gives money to a guy who tells her a story about picking up a hitchhiker who proved to be the ghost of Elvis. Then she winds up sharing a room in the Arcade Hotel with a stranger named DeeDee (Elizabeth Bracco), who tells her about coming to Memphis from New Jersey with her brother and her recent breakup with her English boyfriend. Later, after DeeDee goes to sleep, Luisa briefly glimpses and converses with Elvis’s ghost–a funny and delicately handled scene that enhances the film’s overall sense that Memphis is indeed haunted. (More subtly, this scene also relates to her recently deceased husband, whom she never mentions to DeeDee or anyone else in Memphis; the closest Luisa comes to alluding to her tragedy is her remark, “Sometimes even the greatest love can last only a week.”)
I certainly can’t object to his reductive approach to the locale–his excluding all the shopping malls and modern buildings that we can find easily enough in other American cities and concentrating exclusively on those gritty locations that point toward a mythic past. Perhaps the treatment of most of the secondary characters (and at least one of the principal ones) that I object to can be rationalized as a related form of reduction, although they’re not so much reduced as inadequately imagined, created more out of a void–or at best out of the cliches in a song lyric–than out of a real city like Memphis. They reek more of attitude than of personal acquaintance.
