Dead Man

Year 12, Day 322 - 11/17/20 - Movie #3,695

BEFORE: So the initial plan was to stop after "Seraphim Falls" and save the rest of this year's films for December, but that meant stopping right between two "revisionist Westerns", or so I'm being told, so I've decided to keep the thematic momentum going, and now I'll watch two films this week, then put the blog on pause for a month.  But we are still very, very close to Christmas movies - I think the Lifetime channel is already running them - just like we're very, very close to a new President, and not one but two effective vaccines.  Better days are ahead, we have to believe that, or else we're in danger of losing what little hope we have left.  

Michael Wincott carries over from "Seraphim Falls" - there was an alternate plan if I'd watched "Mr. North", and it involved Anjelica Huston and Robert Mitchum, but there are so few slots left in 2020 that this plan is off the table now - and several films are now being shoehorned into slots in 2021, much like the release schedules of all of the major studios right now, I'll wager. 

THE PLOT: On the run after murdering a man, accountant William Blake encounters a strange aboriginal American man named Nobody, who prepares him for his journey into the spiritual world. 

AFTER: And so it came to pass that in the closing days of the weirdest movie year ever, and in many ways the weirdest year ever overall, that I found a way to squeeze in three films directed by Jim Jarmusch, two of them off-beat horror films and one alternative/revisionist Western.  And that's all OK, everything happens for a reason, every film somehow gets watched at the right time.  This one's been in the back of my mind for YEARS, for example, without actually appearing on any of my lists, largely because it hasn't been seen on cable - not by me, anyway.  If any channel ever ran this, I missed it - or I wasn't yet curious enough about it for its presence to register.  A few months back I noticed it on IMDB.TV, which is a free service screening films (I don't think with ads, like Tubi, but I'm not sure...) and the IMDB web-site is connected to Amazon, so that means it could have appeared on Amazon Prime soon after.   But instead it ended up on HBO Max, which is a NEW streaming service that I automatically get now because I pay for HBO every month.  The streaming wars give, and the streaming wars will eventually take away - right now, they're still in "giving" mode.  So this now becomes the very first film I've watched on HBO Max, beating out "An American Pickle", and all the other films on my HBO Max playlist, which are all also available through the DVR, for now.  

And I know this film came to me, eventually, at just the right time, because it shares some DNA with "Seraphim Falls", beyond the fact that they're both revisionist Westerns.  Both are stories about a man on the run, accused of murder (rightly or wrongly) and pursued by a group of several men who are just as likely to kill each other as they are to kill him.  In both films, the lead character encounters a Native American who seems to have a mystical connection, and who (either literally or symbolically) serves the function of ushering him into the afterlife.  Both films dispose of characters quite liberally, sometimes introducing characters JUST to kill them, it seems (Hey, the Old West was a rough place, for sure...) and both films feature, at one point, someone attempting to remove a bullet with a very large knife.  

(The other option was to put this film in between the other two Jim Jarmusch films, though it wouldn't have fit thematically in the horror chain.  But since Jim Jarmusch tends to use some actors more than once, it shared two actors (Steve Buscemi and Iggy Pop) with "The Dead Don't Die", and another actor, John Hurt, with "Only Lovers Left Alive".  But I didn't realize that at the time, because both of those films linked to each other via Tilda Swinton.  Instead, this film goes HERE, and allows me to connect to Christmas movies.  See what I mean?  Every film gets watched at just the right time.) 

In the end, I don't know what's weirder, that Jarmusch directed a vampire film, a zombie film, or a Western.  They all seem like they're way out of his NYC-indie comfort zone, so good for him, I'm glad he hasn't limited himself to just one genre or one style.  It's good for a director to challenge himself, stretch those muscles, and he didn't just keep making "Down by Law" or "Coffee and Cigarettes" again and again.  That being said, there's so much Jarmusch-y like dialogue in this one, in between all the horse riding and gun shooting, that is.  It starts like one of those "fish out of water" stories, where Depp plays William Blake, an accountant from Cleveland, wearing a very unfortunate plaid suit, traveling by train from Cleveland out West (the state is unnamed, but the train crosses the desert, and the film ends in a redwood forest?  Perhaps in the Pacific Northwest?)

By the time he gets there, the job has been filled by someone else - that's the 1800's for you, travel took a long time, and so did communication.  Did William send a confirmation telegram?  It's unclear, but hey, lesson learned.  It took him a month to settle his affairs in Cleveland, buy a suit, pack and then take a probably weeks-long train ride to the frontier town of Machine.  Anyway, he's left stranded and jobless in a new (and very filthy) town, decorated with a lot of skulls and bones.  The death motif is everywhere from the start, plus the film is called "Dead Man", after all.  And thus we see a big difference between this film and the other two Jim Jarmusch films I watched in October - those were about zombies and vampires, creatures who die, but then somehow keep on living.  Today's film is more about a guy who's technically alive, but in many ways he's doomed.  Actions taken at the start of the film seal his fate, in some ways he's already dead, but just doesn't know it yet.  

This gets further punctuated when he meets a young woman outside the saloon (where he's spent his last bit of money on a small bottle of alcohol).  After forming a connection and sleeping with her, her old boyfriend returns to her, and he's not happy to find her in bed with someone else.  Gunfire is exchanged, and somehow two parts of the love triangle end up dead, with William Blake leaving the scene.  But he's now got a bullet lodged close to his heart, so that clock starts ticking.  This is where the Native American mystic enters the scene, and he can't remove the bullet, so instead he starts the long journey of delivering William Blake to the place where the sea meets the sky, and preparing him for the transition to the next world.  

However, the man Blake shot happened to be the son of the owner of metal works, the place that offered Blake a job, but couldn't wait long enough for him to arrive, and filled the position with another accountant.  I'd say this seems a bit contrived, but there are probably only a few dozen people in that frontier town, and so of course everybody's probably connected to each other in some way.  You can't shoot somebody in an Old West town without then having to deal with that guy's brother, or father, or some relative tracking you down for vengeance, right?  So old man Dickinson hires the three meanest, nastiest bounty-hunting killers he can find, and sends them after Blake.  Meanwhile he also puts out a reward the legal way, so every marshal in the county also ends up on Blake's trail.  

Then, things get weird.  Umm, that is, weirder.  Nobody takes peyote and goes off on a vision quest, Blake gets hungry and starts to have visions of his own, but also develops skills that help him defeat all the unsavory types that are tracking him, trying to kill him, or just take the tobacco that they think he might have. (Well, it is a Jarmusch film, in the end, I wonder if everybody seeking tobacco is some kind of callback to characters bumming smokes in "Coffee & Cigarettes"...). A lot of people get killed along the way, some of them accidentally, but this film never really falls into the comedy patterns of, say, a Coen Brothers film, or "A Million Ways to Die in the West".  I'd hate to see something like this go the slapstick route, after all, instead Jarmusch did a good job of maintaining the quite serious tone, while peppering the film with comic characters, like Iggy Pop wearing a frontier dress (cannot un-see).  Was the implication that he served as the pseudo-girlfriend for the two trappers he was traveling with?  

As the film wore on, I do admit that I couldn't take some things seriously - part of that was due to the too-modern attitudes of some of the characters, like a trading post missionary who's obviously racially biased against Native Americans, who themselves seemed keenly aware that the missionary's blankets were dangerous due to smallpox (I doubt that in real-life anyone on the frontier made the connection at the time).  Other elements were a bit distracting, like a trapper named Benmont Tench, and I know that's the name of a musician from Tom Petty's band, the Heartbreakers.  But apart from that, this was a solid piece of filmmaking that may have flown under most people's radar for far too long - I know that was the case for me. 

It's been quite a while since I made any progress on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die", bu this film is on that list - and so is "The Cabin in the Woods", which I watched in October.  (Films scroll off this list all the time, to make room for newer ones...). So updating my progress, this takes me up to 430 seen from that list.  I may be able to get to five more in January, if my plan holds out - that's if I watch four films directed by Ingmar Bergman, plus a fifth film, "Muriel's Wedding".  But January feels like a long way off, I've got to get through a whole month of down-time and then the Christmas movies first. 

Also starring Johnny Depp (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Gary Farmer (last seen in "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), Crispin Glover (last seen in "River's Edge"), Robert Mitchum (last seen in "The Grass Is Greener"), John Hurt (last seen in "Only Lovers Left Alive"), Mili Avital (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Gabriel Byrne (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Lance Henriksen (last heard in "Tarzan 2: The Legend Begins"), Eugene Byrd (last seen in "8 Mile"), Iggy Pop (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Billy Bob Thornton (last seen in "Faster"), Jared Harris (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Alfred Molina (last heard in "Frozen II"), Jimmie Ray Weeks, Mark Bringelson, John North, Gibby Haynes, Michelle Thrush, with a cameo from Steve Buscemi (also last seen in "The Dead Don't Die")

RATING: 6 out of 10 totem poles