Night on Earth

John Hartl

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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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