Dead Man: Jim Jarmusch

Somewhere, in another universe cloaked by cigarette smoke and broken dreams of Bohemian Americana lies the mindscape of director Jim Jarmusch.  Where most directors seek to study the world and portray it accurately onscreen, Jarmusch uses his camera as a weapon of polarization.  His is a world of 16mm film stock and cheap lenses.  His films are like portals into a dimension almost like our own, but somehow slightly out of balance.  In Dead Man, Jarmusch resurrects the Spirit of the Old West with an infusion of poetry, post-Modernism, and peyote.  Johnny Depp plays William Blake, an accountant from Ohio who moves out West to take a job that he discovers has already been filled.  A bottle of whiskey leads to retired prostitute and a confrontation with her regular beau.  Before Blake can fully take stock of the situation, he is trapped in a room with two dead bodies.  He goes on the run from the authorities who blame him for their murders.  He is rescued by a Native American who believes him to be the reincarnation of the poet William Blake.  They flee from the police and bounty hunters only to embark on a killing spree, a drug-fueled vision quest, and a burial at sea.  I am reminded of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now in how it depicts a journey to an unknown destination as a metaphor for the destruction of society and civilization.  But this is a journey that Blake cannot return from, even if he stays on the boat.  In the end, he trudges towards his own doom, unaware that he's been a dead man since he first got off the train from Ohio.

Hey check it out! I wrote about this film professionally over here: theretroset.com/dead-man-tells-quite-a-tale/

9/10