From the Jim Jarmusch Symposium: Summer's Dog Days 2005, published at Reverse Shot Online.
Short Cuts
Tom Carlisle on Coffee and Cigarettes
“It’s not a very healthy lunch, just the coffee and cigarettes.”—one of the several lines repeated throughout the 11 short films that make up Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, and it stuck out in my mind when I thought back to my first experience with the movie. It was opening weekend, and the crew I was with was eager for their first taste of Jarmusch in quite a long while. Going in, expectations were unrealistically high, but nevertheless, after the end credits rolled, I knowingly and foolishly made the mistake of asking my companions what they thought of the film. The response was oddly hostile at first, as if some stark act of betrayal had just occurred. But after talking about how much they disliked the movie, and after enumerating the ways in which many of the shorts disappointed them, they finally got around to enthusiastically praising two or three episodes. This would occur again, over the weeks and months since that initial viewing, when Coffee and Cigarettes came up in conversation. It seems that most people were compelled to simply write the movie off, even if again and again they found the same two or three shorts to be particularly enchanting. And therein lies the problem: Just like the often delightful substances they use as connective tissue, the shorts that stand out in Coffee and Cigarettes are beneficial only in small doses. Too many small, seemingly inconsequential moments can lead to a sense of overwhelming malaise; an hour and a half of concentrated caffeine and nicotine use leaves one feeling slightly dizzy and perhaps a bit bored.
Ultimately, Jarmusch is working with such a thin premise—two to three people having a conversation over, well, cigarettes and coffee—that it seems perverse to have any expectations at all beyond what is promised out of an encounter at a café: some pleasant conversation, an interesting anecdote, a quiet moment away from the hustle and bustle of daily responsibilities. But Coffee and Cigarettes courts higher expectations than it can meet not only because of its status as a feature film but because of the high profile stunt casting Jarmusch engages in—Tom Waits meets Iggy Pop in the “Somewhere in California” episode, Bill Murray meets Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA and RZA in “Delirium,” rock stars du jour Meg and Jack White show up in “Jack Shows Meg his Tesla Coil.” It’s no wonder that these shorts are some of the least enjoyable, especially considering that even when they do show sparks of potential they are overwhelmed by a quirkiness that keeps genuine engagement firmly at bay.
The shorts that stand out from the lackluster pack in Coffee and Cigarettes have a natural flow and sublimely unspool at a lackadaisical pace. In “No Problem” old friends Isaach De Bankolé and Alex Descas skirt around some unnamed, and possibly nonexistent, issue that De Bankolé is convinced is troubling Descas while the ambient sounds of the Skatalites play quietly in the background; in “Cousins” Cate Blanchett does double duty as herself and her cousin, Shelly, the latter full of resentment over the former’s celebrity status which is met with the frustrating false humility that celebrities use to counter that inevitable reaction; and in “Cousins?” Steve Coogan, over the course of a cup of tea and a cigarette, makes a masterful journey from egotism to bald opportunism to embarrassment in the face of Alfred Molina’s giddy excitement over the shared bloodline he’s discovered between Coogan and himself. Each one of these shorts is remarkable in its own right, and each, individually, successfully explores the overarching themes that Coffee and Cigarettes as a whole tries (and often fails) to expound upon—paradoxically made all that much more powerful when taken alone, standing outside of the repetitiveness that hampers the feature. Each one, when considered by itself, tells us something about the way in which human relationships and their dependence upon ritual works; the uncomfortable, forced qualities of first time meetings or reunions; the rampant egos we often try to mask with politesse; and the desire, and seeming impossibility, of communicating your position to others. “No Problem,” “Cousins,” and “Cousins?” are memorable because they avoid the more forced qualities of the shorts that surround them, favoring instead a strong sense of reality. In fact, the one concession to unreality they do make is in the service of the other major theme of Coffee and Cigarettes: nostalgia for a time when you could conceivably have a cigarette with your coffee in New York or Los Angeles.
The juxtaposition of great filmmaking with substandard fare is a common problem in the omnibus films of Jarmusch. The first short film in the triptych Mystery Train, “Far From Yokohama,” in which a young Japanese couple explores Memphis in search of the roots of either Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins, depending who you ask, is by far my favorite Jarmusch film. The wistful romanticism of being in a foreign land, the poses of cool that dominate the youthful demeanor, the beautiful shots of the couple trudging around Memphis hit me every time. But the second two episodes fall completely flat. (And considering that Joe Strummer appears in the final part, that’s saying a lot.) In fact, the arc from great promise to sullied disappointment is so pronounced that I’m reluctant to even pony up the $3 to rent Mystery Train again, even if this means denying myself the pleasure of “Far From Yokohama.” This pattern repeats itself in Night on Earth, where each film follows a cabbie and a passenger in a different city. There seems to be less consensus as far as which of these shorts are the stand-outs (the episodes with Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands in L.A. and Isaach De Bankolé and Béatrice Dalle in Paris come to mind), but very few people are inclined to praise the film as a single piece. A cynic couldn’t be faulted for suspecting that Jarmusch has cobbled together more than one of these themed shorts in order to package some of his better shorter work for distribution as a full length feature film.
In many ways Coffee and Cigarettes and Jarmusch’s other short film collections remind me of much of the work of songwriters like Ryan Adams or Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard, who are by any definition masters of their craft yet almost completely without the ability to tell their masterpieces from their toss offs, and as a result put out one disappointing album after another, where the good to bad ratio leans inevitably towards the bad, and whose great songs are destined for mixes where the fans separate the wheat from the chaff for them. Perhaps the best way to take this strain of Jarmusch’s filmmaking, then, is as inadvertently ahead of its time, best suited for the age of bit torrent file sharing and DVD burning. One could make a pretty great DVD mix of the best of Jarmusch’s shorts, separating them from the clumsy features they once were part of, freeing them from the unwieldy sandbags of needlessly repetitive overarching themes. That way you wouldn’t just have the coffee and the cigarettes but a complete and balanced meal.
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also available at reverseshot.com