Jim Jarmusch is one of the
jewels of independent American filmmaking, a writer-director who has
stubbornly and fruitfully pursued his own path for 25 years now.
From "Stranger Than Paradise" to "Broken Flowers," he has imagined a
fiercely personal world of missed connections and cosmic jokes, of
Zen grace and rock 'n' roll cool. He is irreplaceable.
And with "The Limits of
Control," he has come up with a dud.
The movie, both
hermetically obscure and schematically obvious, follows a hired
killer named the Lone Man, played by the African-born French actor
Isaach De Bankole with marvelous impassivity and a pretty slick
iridescent suit. He's initially contacted by a mysterious Creole
(Alex Descas) who sends him on an odyssey through the alleys of
Madrid and the arid valleys of Andalucia.
At each stop the Lone Man
meets a new contact, each of them eccentric, each played by a
signifier of indie-movie cool, each bearing a wooden matchbox
containing coded instructions. The most memorable of these are Tilda
Swinton, dropping Hitchcock references in white hair and a cowboy
hat, and Paz de la Huerta, insolently stark naked in the hero's
hotel room and framed to emphasize a derriere nearly equal to
Brigitte Bardot's in "Contempt."
Every so often, the Lone
Man ducks into Madrid's Museo Nacional, viewing artworks that are
mirrored or foreshadowed in the movie's vaporous story line.
Jarmusch seems very interested in doubles here, not to mention the
history of movies; he glances off the work of Godard, Orson Welles,
and Jean-Pierre Melville to no particular end. The film has been
shot to a fare-thee-well by the legendary cinematographer
Christopher Doyle ("In the Mood for Love"), and each frame is a
pristine work of art that could fit neatly into a coffee-table book.
You'd probably flip the pages a little faster, though.
That's unfair: This
director has always been more interested in stasis and process - in
the beauty and mystery of being someplace while going no place fast
- than on what's to be found at journey's end (what the natives call
"plot"). Even so, the no-places that "The Limits of Control" goes
become tedious in their affected emptiness, as do the sophomoric
koans Jarmusch sprinkles throughout the script. "The universe has no
center and no edges" - that one's dropped more than once, and it's a
reasonable description of the movie itself.
When "The Limits of
Control" does, at least, arrive somewhere, it's a letdown: Bill
Murray as a sort of Dick Cheney in exile, spouting angry platitudes
of power. Beyond its more obvious Buddhist implications, the film
can be read as the rest of the world finally taking the reins as the
aging white men of the Bush years discover "the limits of control."
That metaphor seems forced and shallow, though, when set among the
avant-spaghetti western posturings leading up to the final scenes.
Still, does that make
Bankole's Lone Man an Obama figure? If so, "The Limits of Control"
might work as a parable of the first 100 days. At times it feels
that long.
From
boston.com
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