The closest thing yet to an all-star Jim
Jarmusch movie, Night on Earth suffers from
the same problems as many a Hollywood all-star
production. It runs on too long, it works overtime
to make a universal statement, and it goes for the
common denominator, occasionally coming closer to
the broadness of Neil Simon than the deadpan
Jarmusch we know from such scruffy,
semi-underground comedies as Stranger Than
Paradise and Down By Law.
That said, Night on Earth makes inspired
use of its well-known cast, especially during the
first three of its five episodes about cab drivers
around the world and their fares. For all their
predictability, the stories are fun to watch
because the actors dig in and work them over.
In the first vignette, Winona Ryder plays a
chain-smoking Los Angeles cabbie who picks up a
rather desperate casting agent (Gena Rowlands) who
wonders if she'd like to try out for a movie role.
The makeshift mother-daughter relationship that
develops between them makes you want to see what
happens next.
The New York segment, about an East German
refugee (Armin Mueller-Stahl) learning on the job
while trying to find Brooklyn with his taxi, is
closer to a classic Jarmusch situation -
especially when he picks up the semi-hysterical
Giancarlo Esposito, who takes over the wheel and
turns the inexperienced driver into a delighted
passenger. Later developments involving Esposito's
completely hysterical sister-in-law (Rosie Perez)
are less endearing.
Next comes a Parisian segment about an Ivory
Coast cab driver (Isaach de Bankole) who ditches a
couple of obnoxious African diplomats and picks up
a blind girl (Beatrice Dalle) who takes perverse
pleasure in demonstrating her ability to handle
herself. Although the punch line is obvious, Dalle
freshens it with her go-for-broke approach.
You begin to feel the weight of the movie's
128-minute running time during episodes No. 4,
about a motormouth Roman driver (Roberto Benigni)
and a tired priest (Paolo Bonicelli), and No. 5,
about a Helsinki cabbie (Matti Pellonpaa) and his
three drunken passengers. Benigni is brilliant,
but his is the dopiest of the five stories.
What's missing from Night on Earth is
the sense that any of this much matters to its
creator. None of the stories carries the eerie
comic resonance of Stranger Than Paradise
or the wonderful middle episode in Jarmusch's
similarly constructed Mystery Train, in
which a foreigner spends a night in Memphis and
confronts the ghost of Elvis Presley.
Well-photographed by Frederick
Elmes, Night
on Earth does prove that Jarmusch can put
together this kind of package as well as any
studio - and for a fraction of a studio budget
($3.5 million). But that's not necessarily what
you go to see his movies for.
From
Film.com
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