Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1991 film, set in Warsaw in 1939, stars Crispin Glover as well as Iain Glen who as a 30-year-old suddenly starts being treated by those around him–his former professor, a nymphet, a female cousin–as if he had regressed back to childhood. Closer to a curiosity than to a success–the English dialogue and the period Polish setting make for an odd mesh at times–but a curiosity by Skolimowski certainly isn’t like anyone else’s.Read More »
Quote:
With Dead Man, his first period piece, Jim Jarmusch imagined the nineteenth-century American West as an existential wasteland, delivering a surreal reckoning with the ravages of industrialization, the country’s legacy of violence and prejudice, and the natural cycle of life and death. Accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) has hardly arrived in the godforsaken outpost of Machine before he’s caught in the middle of a fatal lovers’ quarrel. Wounded and on the lam, Blake falls under the watch of the outcast Nobody (Gary Farmer), who guides his companion on a spiritual journey, teaching him to dispense poetic justice along the way. Featuring austerely beautiful black-and-white photography by Robby Müller and a live-wire score by Neil Young, Dead Man is a profound and unique revision of the western genre.Read More »
Jonathan Rosenbaum Review:
When we speak of “seriousness” in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death. –Thomas Pynchon
Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, a disturbing, mysterious black-and-white western, opens with someone named William Blake (Johnny Depp), a recently orphaned accountant from Cleveland, traveling west on a train with the promise of a job at a metal works in a town called Machine. He keeps dozing off and waking to new sets of fellow passengers, including several who fire their guns out the windows at a herd of buffalo. (Such occurrences were common in the 1870s, encouraged by the government as a means of wiping out Indians by eliminating one of their staples; in 1875, over a million buffalo were slaughtered.)Read More »