How the West Was Weird

Movie Review:
Dead Man

R / 2 hrs., 1 min. / 1996

I’d like to get inside Jim Jarmusch’s head. Or maybe I wouldn’t; I’m not sure. His neo-Western tale Dead Man is just bizarre enough that maybe I don’t want to know what he was thinking. The film is unusual, in the sense that a person can suddenly feel unusual stomach cramps or experience unusual pain in unusual places.

William “Bill” Blake (Johnny Depp) arrives by train at the western town of Machine where he has been hired to be an accountant for a metalworks shop. But he is informed twice, the second time at gunpoint, that due to his delay in reaching the town, another accountant has been hired.

Although jobless and nearly penniless, Blake’s gentlemanly nature earns him the attention of a saloon girl (Mili Avital) who takes him to bed, where they are discovered by her former fiancé (Gabriel Byrne) who promptly takes aim and kills the girl. Blake returns fire in self-defense, and manages by the third shot to fatally hit the man. Blake flees the scene in fear, leaving the townspeople to believe that he heartlessly killed both people.

Tired, wounded, and delirious, Blake is befriended by “Nobody” (Gary Farmer), an outcast Indian who once had a proper English education and therefore mistakes Blake for the poet of the same name. “Nobody” becomes Blake’s guide, both geographically and spiritually, leading him to an unknown destination that could be either real or mythical.

Somewhere behind Blake, three bounty hunters (Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, and Eugene Byrd) track him, along with regional law officers and, unofficially, a missionary (Alfred Molina). As Blake becomes more familiar with a gun and the body count rises, the price on Blake’s head rises as well.

As outlined here on my word processor, this sounds like a really good treatment for a movie. I can imagine anyone from Lawrence Kasdan to Kevin Costner swooping down with a sack of money to option the script. But don’t be fooled: There is a great chasm between the potentially exciting tale outlined here and Jarmusch’s particular vision that created the actual product. For my money, I’d like to see the version Jarmusch didn’t make.

The problem does not lie in Jarmusch’s technical abilities to manufacture a film. Shot in black and white with an A-list cast, the film is well assembled. I would not have thought of Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands) to appear in a western setting, but once he’s in costume, he looks satisfactorily like an east coast rube trying to impress the west coast frontiersmen. Depp is a talented actor who can turn himself into almost anything, as evidenced by his long list of eccentric characters: Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Cpt. Jack Sparrow, Hunter S. Thompson, and Willy Wonka, to name a few. For all his talent, here Depp plays Blake as, well, Depp. Depp in a plaid suit. While that may work, I find it hard to believe Depp didn’t find any quirks, tics, or backstory to use in enhancing Blake into something more memorable.

The supporting characters, including Gary Farmer (Adaptation), Crispin Glover (Twister), Lance Henriksen (Super Mario Bros.), Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade), and the great Robert Mitchum (Night of the Hunter), are all acclaimed character actors. They inhabit this film as somewhat bent interpretations of personalities from classic westerns. Glover and Thornton in particular perform with a unique edge to their characters that renders them slightly surreal and rather intriguing, albeit befuddling.

Jarmusch also successfully creates his mood, which is definitely moody. The film is not about chase scenes and gun fights; it proceeds slowly and deliberately on its journey, concerned more with atmosphere than action.

There is the lengthy confinement in a railway car, the sprawling vistas of the untamed West, the mesmerizing forests of beech trees. The metal foundry is bleak, junky, labyrinthine, and populated with stringy old men. The whole scene feels like the brainchild of Terry Gilliam. Jarmusch takes full advantage of these elements to create a solid sense of isolation and melancholy. But the question remains: To what good purpose? Or even, to what purpose at all?

This is the overarching problem. I reached the end of the film and had no clue what I was supposed to take from it. Or even if I was supposed to take something from it. I feel similarly clueless with anything Robert Redford directs, but at least with Redford’s films I do feel like he’s trying to tell me something, even if I don’t get it. With Dead Man, I really didn’t even get the sense that there was a message to find at all, though common sense tells me you don’t invest months of your life and a bucket-load of money in something that has no purpose whatsoever.

The film is a collection of oddities that are interesting on their own, but do not contribute to a cohesive whole. The opening scene on a train is not only interminable, but inexplicable. We fade in and out several times as Blake treks across the country. In each new sub-scene, the train is peopled with an entirely new set of characters. Is Blake dreaming? Is he already dead and this film is going to be a metaphor? Or is it just that the train stops at stations and lets on new passengers during each blackout? Although the third answer seems most likely, Jarmusch provides no clues and leaves us doing double-takes.

Before the train ride ends, the engineer played by Crispin Glover comes in, sits down by Blake, and provides the film’s first line of dialogue: “Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you’re in the boat, and then later that night you’re lying looking up at the ceiling and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?” If a train engineer, or any stranger for that matter, took a seat next to me and said that line, and said it with the strange tone of voice that Glover uses, I would be looking for the nearest police officer. This opening does not bode well for the film. But I shrugged off the worries and prepared myself for something a bit skewed.

And skewed it is: Parts of the film feel almost as if Jarmusch were a disciple of the Coen brothers. In particular I think of Blake’s encounter with three fur trappers, including Billy Bob Thornton’s character. The set-up and delivery of the scene is off-kilter, like something Joel Coen would direct. But it’s too weird. Coen characters have a rational eccentricity, if such a paradox is possible. The three fur traders are just odd: One wears a dress, they quote portions of the Bible that don’t relate to anything, and they have a fascination with Blake’s hair, none of which comes together for any definable reason. Unless it has something to do with that portion of the conversation in which the fur traders argue over which of them gets to “do” Blake, which in context could either mean kill him or sexually assault him; I couldn’t quite tell.

On top of all of this, the film is thoroughly marred by its music score. But calling the solo electric guitar that accompanies the entire film a music score is like slapping a giant glove to the collective faces of John Williams, Danny Elfman, and the entire Hollywood and independent film scoring community. Even no music score at all would have been more musical.

So what is the answer? Perhaps the shooting star outside the saloon girl’s room has something to tell us. Or the dead fawn Blake falls asleep next to. Or the lightning bolts “Nobody” paints on Blake’s face.

Perhaps it is in the references to the poet William Blake. “Nobody” quotes Blake’s poetry frequently, and at what seem to be relevant moments, but the relevance escapes me. I wonder if knowing more about the real William Blake would help. I grabbed a few things from Wikipedia to see what could be learned:

“Blake was an important proponent of imagination as the modern western world currently defines the word. His belief that humanity could overcome the limitations of its five senses is perhaps one of Blake’s greatest legacies. His words, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,’ were seen as bizarre at the time, but are now accepted as part of our modern definition of imagination.”

And this: “George Richmond gives the following account of Blake’s death: ‘He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.’”

While all of this is very informative in its own right, I’m not sure Dead Man has become any more clear to me. William Blake wrote: “Every night and every morn, some to misery are born.” I can point those people out to you: They’re the ones who sat through this movie.

My Score: 4