Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth is a film that sets its course for
nowhere in particular and sticks to it meticulously. Jarmusch's camera hops
across the globe, from Los Angeles to New York to Paris to Rome and finally to
Helsinki. In each city, a nighttime cab driver picks up one or more passengers,
and we sit in on their conversations and interactions for twenty or thirty
minutes before moving to the next city. In each case, there is a potential for
conflict between the driver and passenger(s), but, with one exception that I'll
discuss later, Jarmusch avoids making their behavior too extreme or bizarre and
does not produce earth-shattering revelations.
The two most effective segments are those in Los Angeles and Helsinki. The
former finds Corky (Winona Ryder), a tough-minded young driver picking up
Victoria Snelling (Gena Rowlands), a wealthy Beverly Hills casting agent. The
two obviously inhabit completely different worlds, and seem to regard each other
with curiosity more than anything else. The Helsinki segment, which
appropriately takes place just before the sun is about to come up, involves a
driver picking up three drunk men outside a bar as they exchange stories of
recent losses and tragedies. The harshest conflicts are found in the proceedings
in Paris, in which a cab driver first throws two drunk politicians out of his
car and then picks up a blind woman who is hostile to his questions about her
condition.
Jarmusch injects a note of off-beat humor to the proceedings with the New
York episode, in which a man named Yo-Yo (Giancarlo Esposito), tries to get a
ride with a German immigrant named Helmut (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who has
problems with certain aspects of driving such as the gas pedal and the gear
shift. Yo-Yo ends up driving the taxi himself, and along the way he picks up his
sister-in-law (Rosie Perez) and discovers that Helmut used to be a circus clown.
What all these episodes have in common is that they involve essentially normal
people that would probably be bit players in most films. They don't always get
along, but not because someone is obviously crazy or malicious: their conflicts
are just simple personality clashes, and not particularly drastic.
Which brings me to the one notable exception: the segment in Rome. This
piece--in which a cab driver picks up a priest, insists on confessing his sordid
sexual past in the cab, and causes the priest to have a heart attack and die--is
so inane and so out of sync with the rest of the film that I could scarcely
believe Jarmusch had written it. Not only does it rely on the dubious notion
that taking something vulgar and pushing it to ludicrous extremes is funny, but
it is not at all consistent with the relatively subdued tone of the other
episodes. It's not a conflict between two normal people: it's a conflict between
a neurotic sexual deviant and someone with a serious heart condition. This
segment, which is second to last, made me wonder if Jarmusch even knew what
Night On Earth was about or if he thought it was sufficient simply to cut
between random cab rides.
Fortunately, the Helsinki segment restored my impression that Jarmusch did,
in fact, have a unique handle on how people might act during a cab ride in
the middle of the night: he captures the lonely mood that would be lacking if
these scenes were shot during daytime and that sometimes allows for a little
more honesty between strangers than one would normally expect. The Rome segment
is awful, but it's a tribute to the rest of the film that it passes over this
bump in the road: by the end, Night On Earth does seem to arrive at
nowhere in particular, and somehow it's perfectly appropriate that it does so.
From
members.aol.com
<
BACK