Dead Man

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Dead Man a Jim Jarmusch movie. A western. A poetic satire on westerns. A journey. A contemplation. With some damn good lines of dialogue.

Story has William Blake (Johnny Depp) on the westbound train out of Cleveland. He’s an accountant with a job offer from Dickinson Metal Works in Machine Arizona. His journey on the train is the prologue, marked by the changes in the people who share the coach with him – they get rougher the farther he goes.

In Machine he finds the job is already taken. He is penniless but taken in by a whore. But her old boyfriend shows up and makes to shoot Blake. The whore puts herself in the way, and takes the bullet, but the bullet passes clean through her and buries itself deep in Blake’s chest. He shoots the boyfriend, steals his horse and escapes town.

Only, the boyfriend was Dickinson’s son, and the horse was Dickinson’s pride. Dickinson hires three vicious killers to hunt and bring back Blake’s body.

Out in the scrub, Blake is found by Nobody, a well-educated Indian. Nobody tries to cut out the bullet, but it’s too deep. Blake is now a dead man, his time running out.

When Nobody learns Blake’s name, he is impressed: he has lived in England and loves the poetry of William Blake. But Nobody knows Blake is dead, and so he takes it upon himself to shepherd Blake to the place where the water mirrors the sky and Blake can return to the Other Land where the spirits dwell.

Now Nobody leads Blake on a cross country journey (this one marked by the changes in the trees they ride under) to Oregon, where Nobody will find the water. Along the way many try to kill Blake, lured by the reward, but with skill and luck he dispatches them all. Only Cole Wilson, the evilest of the three vicious killers, who has murdered the other two killers, remains on the trail.

Nobody and Blake finally reach the place of the waters. By now Blake is very close to exhaustion and death. Nobody prepares the canoe and places Blake in it. Blake lies back in the canoe, watching the sky rain down on him as the waters draw him out far out from land. His last sight of land is of Cole Wilson shooting at him with a buffalo rifle. But Nobody draws aim on Wilson with a Winchester, and the two men shoot down each other. And the canoe floats out with the tide.

The music is by Neil Young, mostly electric guitar solos and duos with lots of feedback that at first annoyed me as anachronistic, but later won me over and added a lot to the trippiness of the finale.

Jarmusch got a pretty big budget for this one. He shot in black and white, another odd, uncommercial choice, but got Robby Müller for his DP and the result is excellent, though not up to the classic Hollywood cinematography – today’s film stocks just can’t do what the old, rich, fine-grained, slow stocks could manage, and Müller hasn’t enough experience with black and white (compared to those old guys who shot it every day of their working lives for decades on end).

The cast is full of interesting, even odd, choices. Cameos from great stars like Robert Mitchum as Dickinson, and rock stars like Iggy Pop as a trapper, Gabriel Byrne as the boyfriend who kills Blake, Alfred Molina as a bigoted preacher, Billy Bob Thornton as a foul-mouthed, funny trapper … the list goes on. They come and go from the movie, all watchable, entertaining, and so good you want to see more of them. Depp of course is always watchable, always good. I’ve not seen him hit a wrong note yet (though of course I did avoid the second two Pirates movies).

This is the sort of movie I never expect to like as much as I do, and always like a lot more when I see it. I wish I’d seen it back in the theaters when it first came out.

(7 April 2009)

For Aki’s translation of this post into Japanese, click here.