The Dead Don't Die. (15.)
Directed by Jim Jarmusch.
Starring Adam Driver, Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Selena Gomez and Tom Waits. 105 mins.
A Jim Jarmusch zombie movie starring Bill Murray - two masters of deadpan versus the dead - would seem to be a perfect match. Jarmusch's whole career has been about trying to remove all the extraneous clutter out of American moviemaking. Having attached a lead weight to the Vampire fad in the Only Lovers Left Alive, here he strips down the culture's dominant horror fetish. Perhaps inevitably, the match is just too perfect.
The problem with the film is that the joke is already made for you: it's a Zombie film where both the Living and the Dead are flatlining. Driver and Murray are two police officers who remain stony faced and stoical in the face of the onslaught. Apart from Sevigny, nobody shows much human emotion. It's all a bit too cosy, all the old familiar faces doing their old familiar turns: Driver and Murray are droll, Swinton is wacky, Waits is a wild man and Iggy Pop appears as a zombie.
Throughout his rather extraordinary career JimJar has made a virtue out of getting a little to go a long way, making a pittance seem like a fortune. Repetition has always been his go-to device. In Down By Law, three prisoners break out only to find a shack in the swamps that is identical to their old cell. Here three police officers, one by one, inspect the disembowelled victims of a first zombie attack and one by one each emerges from the experience to respond in exactly the same way. And it is a funny joke and I perhaps there might be enough here for a viewer to eke out a mildly entertaining evening from all this. But I found something in TDDD that turned me off.
I think it was always clear before that JimJar didn't hold humanity in especially high regard, but he always saw something in us. Here though there's a casual disregard. More than half the film is spent setting up the various groups of characters that will face up to the zombie hordes and the locations in which they will do it. But having made all that effort, he largely tosses them aside. The interest we have invested these characters and their survival is thrown back in our faces.
This zombie apocalypse is explicitly an ecological disaster, caused by polar fracking pulling earth off its axis. Zombie films have always been vehicles for exploring the end of civilisation and a metaphor for the deadening effects of consumerism, but here it is about how we have come to casually and complacently accept our own destruction, even feel a bit smug about it. The key is Driver's character who always knows what is happening, warns repeatedly that “This whole thing is going to end badly” but is not greatly bothered by it. He is us, resigned to our demise end. So everytime JimJar chucks in a casual 4th wall break, a credibility wrecking moment of wackiness or doesn't bother to show us what happens to characters the film had built up, it seems like he's saying he's given up on us.
Directed by Jim Jarmusch.
Starring Adam Driver, Bill Murray, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Selena Gomez and Tom Waits. 105 mins.
A Jim Jarmusch zombie movie starring Bill Murray - two masters of deadpan versus the dead - would seem to be a perfect match. Jarmusch's whole career has been about trying to remove all the extraneous clutter out of American moviemaking. Having attached a lead weight to the Vampire fad in the Only Lovers Left Alive, here he strips down the culture's dominant horror fetish. Perhaps inevitably, the match is just too perfect.
The problem with the film is that the joke is already made for you: it's a Zombie film where both the Living and the Dead are flatlining. Driver and Murray are two police officers who remain stony faced and stoical in the face of the onslaught. Apart from Sevigny, nobody shows much human emotion. It's all a bit too cosy, all the old familiar faces doing their old familiar turns: Driver and Murray are droll, Swinton is wacky, Waits is a wild man and Iggy Pop appears as a zombie.
Throughout his rather extraordinary career JimJar has made a virtue out of getting a little to go a long way, making a pittance seem like a fortune. Repetition has always been his go-to device. In Down By Law, three prisoners break out only to find a shack in the swamps that is identical to their old cell. Here three police officers, one by one, inspect the disembowelled victims of a first zombie attack and one by one each emerges from the experience to respond in exactly the same way. And it is a funny joke and I perhaps there might be enough here for a viewer to eke out a mildly entertaining evening from all this. But I found something in TDDD that turned me off.
I think it was always clear before that JimJar didn't hold humanity in especially high regard, but he always saw something in us. Here though there's a casual disregard. More than half the film is spent setting up the various groups of characters that will face up to the zombie hordes and the locations in which they will do it. But having made all that effort, he largely tosses them aside. The interest we have invested these characters and their survival is thrown back in our faces.
This zombie apocalypse is explicitly an ecological disaster, caused by polar fracking pulling earth off its axis. Zombie films have always been vehicles for exploring the end of civilisation and a metaphor for the deadening effects of consumerism, but here it is about how we have come to casually and complacently accept our own destruction, even feel a bit smug about it. The key is Driver's character who always knows what is happening, warns repeatedly that “This whole thing is going to end badly” but is not greatly bothered by it. He is us, resigned to our demise end. So everytime JimJar chucks in a casual 4th wall break, a credibility wrecking moment of wackiness or doesn't bother to show us what happens to characters the film had built up, it seems like he's saying he's given up on us.
