No control
The Limits of Control / Director Jim Jarmusch has never been one to pander to an audience. The writer-director behind such enigmas such as Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Coffee and Cigarettes even refuses to record commentary tracks for DVDs, and has gone on record that he only watches his films once, anonymously in a theater eater once they’re completed.
That’s a shame, because Jarmusch could learn a lot from revisiting his newest film, The Limits of Control, and discovering what went wrong in comparison with his deconstructive approach to genre films. Like Dead Man and the Western, Broken Flowers and the romantic comedy, Limits is another tweaking of a Hollywood favorite–the gangster thriller. By design, Jarmusch made an action movie without any action, an espionage film without any intrigue, and the end result is an endurance marathon of tedium. It takes 12 minutes before the nameless Lone Man (Jarmusch mainstay Isaach De Bankolé) speaks, an hour before anything even remotely happens in terms of plot advancement and nearly two hours before reaching an end that can almost be viewed as a betrayal of its own design.
It’s an exercise in style over stylization, but the style is all about repetition. For example The Lone Man is all about routine. Working as a courier of sorts, he receives his instructions, always preceded with the statement “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” He sits in cafes, awaiting instructions with his two cups of espresso placed before him. Contacts wander up, say the code, wax philosophic in non-sequiturs and then exchange matchbooks with new coded message. After 20 minutes of shots of trains, changing locales and a lot of walking, the Lone Man is in a new town with a new suit, sitting at a new café. Cue the next contact. Repeat ad nauseum for two hours.
Jarmusch is quoted as saying the beauty of life is in small details, not in big events. Those details are there, with gorgeously shot locations throughout Spain and moments of beauty in museums and alleyways, off in the peripherals and in the form of the perpetually nude Paz de la Huerta. If any of these had anything to do with plot advancement, they might be considered details. Instead it’s an endless parade of walk on cameos spouting exsitential dribble more pretentious than an philosophy major who has just discovered Nitzchie. “Nothing is real. Everything is imagined,” says one character. “Among us, there are those who are not among us,” says another. The back of Gael García Bernal’s pickup reads “La Vida No Vale Nada” (“Life isn’t worth anything”). As sparse as the dialogue is, when Tilda Swinton shows up in her bleached white frightwig and admits, “Sometimes I like films where people just sit there not saying any thing,” you wish she would follow her own desires. When Bill Murray finally shows up with something to say, the audience (those that remain, anyway) no longer care.
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