Ghost
Dog:
The Way of the Samurai |
DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
Jim Jarmusch
PRODUCERS
Richard Guay
Jim Jarmusch
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Robby Müller
MUSIC
The RZA
EDITOR
Jay Rabinowitz
CAST
Forest Whitaker (Ghost Dog)
Isaach De Bankolé (Raymond)
Camille Winbush (Pearline)
John Tormey (Louie)
Cliff Gorman (Sonny)
Henry Silva (Ray)
Victor Argo (Vinny)
Tricia Vessey (Louise)
Gary Farmer (Nobody)
The RZA (Samurai in Camouflage)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 116m
U.S. release: March 3, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Jim
Jarmusch films
reviewed on this website:
- Dead
Man
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Like Steven Soderbergh, the
idiosyncratic director Jim Jarmusch has been drifting into mainstream
genres lately: his past two narrative films (excluding his Neil
Young rockumentary Year of the Horse) have been, respectively,
a Western and an urban gangster drama. Yet nobody could really
think of 1996's Dead
Man and Jarmusch's new one, Ghost Dog: The Way of
the Samurai, in those reductive terms. Jarmusch has developed
a taste for iconic loners -- men who find themselves drawn into
violence, "writing poetry with blood," to paraphrase
the Native American sage Nobody from Dead Man. It's probably
no accident that both films, from their titles to their sadly
resigned heroes, are preoccupied with mortality. Yet both are
also, viewed together in context, two of the driest deadpan comedies
ever made. With a straight face, Jarmusch places cherry bombs
under the cliches of the genre, while seriously attending to
the larger themes that the explosions open up.
On the surface, of course,
Ghost Dog is simply one of the coolest movies to come
down the pike in years. Stylistically, the film is smooth and
immaculate: Robby Muller's lush dark photography and the propulsive
hip-hop soundtrack by the RZA mesh beautifully. When Forest Whitaker
strolls down the street carrying his case full of weapons, it's
hard not to draw a direct line between his Ghost Dog and Toshiro
Mifune (and every iconic figure, from Eastwood's Man with No
Name to El Mariachi, that Mifune and Kurosawa inspired).
Yet Ghost Dog isn't just a stoic hard-ass; he loves his pigeons,
and he likes ice cream -- there's a wonderful shot of the imposing
assassin sitting on a park bench nibbling a cone. A group of
rappers nearby seem to be paying homage to him -- everyone in
the hood apparently knows and respects him -- and there's an
odd little dog who shuffles over and stares at him. Jarmusch
loves these obscure little touches; he likes working with a genuine
man of mystery, an unknowable assassin who has taken the code
of the samurai to heart (we never really find out why) and reminds
himself daily that he must die.
Ghost Dog has pledged his life
and services to a rather unremarkable master -- Louie (John Tormey),
a saggy Italian mobster who saved Ghost Dog's life years ago.
Ghost Dog carries out hits for Louie and his Mafia crew until
a mishandled kill provokes the wrath of the top guys (Cliff Gorman,
a 50-something gangster who loves Public Enemy, and Henry Silva,
who never loses his skull-like scowl even when watching cartoons).
So the mob puts out a hit on Ghost Dog -- he's too weird anyway,
too much of a loose cannon, even though he has performed twelve
"perfect hits."
This is what Jarmusch offers
by way of a plot. But Ghost Dog is more about mood and
moments -- the tenderness that develops between Ghost Dog and
a bookworm little girl in the park (Camille Winbush); the unlikely
but strangely touching friendship of Ghost Dog and an immigrant
who drives an ice cream truck (Isaach De Bankolé), who
don't even speak the same language; the way Ghost Dog makes car
theft look as easy as operating a cell phone (he always picks
fancy cars with kick-ass stereo systems); the dedication with
which he practices with a sword we never see him use; the sight
of Mafia guys in their sixties wheezing up a flight of stairs
to whack Ghost Dog (this particular crew seems to include nobody
under, say, 55); Forest Whitaker's sad, eloquently still features,
which are brightened by a warm smile more often than you expect
-- Jarmusch could not have picked a more soulful actor to play
this samurai who seems to belong to no particular century.
Greil Marcus, writing for Salon's
online magazine not long ago, worked up a list of top ten reasons why Dead Man
was the ideal movie for the end of the century; he and I are
probably the only ones who enjoyed that film, with its soporific
pace occasionally shattered by repulsive violence (who can forget
Lance Henriksen crushing a man's head under his heavy boot?).
Dead Man was a slow, meditative essay on the brutality
of Western "civilization"; Ghost Dog is a less
leisurely paced second chapter. Ghost Dog, like all the heroic
mass murderers before him, takes no pleasure in his prowess or
his killing; it's just his duty. The movie's tongue-in-cheek
treatment of racial relations is probably more sophisticated
than anything in Romeo Must Die, which seems thrown together
to please all sections of the urban market. Its brooding on life
and death, and the gray area in between, is more probing than
anything in The
Matrix, and it doesn't need kicky Oscar-winning special
effects, either. Like Run
Lola Run, Ghost Dog is a cool art-house artifact
-- deceptively simple eye candy that invites analysis and defies
classification.
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