STILL LIFE
"Dead Man" by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Ray Pride
Snap judgments -- for a good critic -- should be as easy as responding to a
stranger's face on the street: Years of experience, contemplation and
composition should make intuition move at the speed of slight. Yet the
demands of most contemporary movie reviewing gigs often require ever-more
glib dismissals of the ambitious, the ambiguous, or the cryptic. It's great
and rare for a critic to find the room to dig in and examine, worry and
glory in a piece of singular work.
Jonathan Rosenbaum first wrote about Jim Jarmusch's dark, complex and
contrarian "acid Western," "Dead Man," for the Chicago Reader and Cineaste
magazine, and by my count, then reworked his ideas in Canada's Cinema Scope
magazine, another Reader essay, in his new critic-critique "Movie Wars," and
in compact, gem-like form for the ninety-six-page monograph, "Dead Man."
Rosenbaum combines interviews, script extracts, copious stills and a knowing
career overview, as well as his own reflections on the pilgrimage of Johnny
Depp's William Blake and Gary Farmer's Nobody toward Blake's slow death.
There is an awesome range of themes in Jarmusch's movie, and this slim book
is packed with reflections on its many byways, with an emphasis on
friendship, and on purity and innocence and its spoiling. Yet there is room
as well for thoughts on road movies; Jarmusch's haunting, hypnotic rhythm;
Neil Young's meditative guitar noise score; a knowing analysis of the
estimable literary qualities of Jarmusch's serene masterpiece; and for good
measure, even more of Rosenbaum's Miramax fixation, rightly deriding that
distributor for its disrespectful and jejune release of a picture that
Jarmusch, as holder of all his copyrights, would not cut to their
specifications. Compact and masterful, "Dead Man" reveals its years of
contemplation, like pebbles worn smooth at the bottom of a cool stream. This
is clear-headed stuff of an order too few cultural commentators have the
leisure or inclination to pursue.
(http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/words-2000-11-30-834.html)
NewCityChicago 30 Nov 2000