Los Angeles Times -Friday, March 17, 2000
Jim Jarmusch's 'Ghost Dog,' the tale of an urban samurai, takes different genres and influences--and mixes them into a nearly pitch-perfect blend.
By ERIC HARRISON, Times Staff Writer
"Everything seems to be changing all around us."
This sentiment is expressed more than once in "Ghost
Dog: The Way of the Samurai," and on this thematic level Jim
Jarmusch's rueful, funny, deliciously off-kilter new film couldn't
be clearer. You have no doubt what this movie is about when you
walk out of the theater.
But as for what the movie is about--you
know, in the way your pal Mikey will mean when he asks about it--that's
likely to give you trouble. There's no way to tell him that makes
sense.
There's this hit man, see, and his
name is Ghost Dog. And he communicates with his boss by carrier
pigeon.
Chances are Mikey will stop you
right there. What year and country is this set in? he'll want to
know. For Mikey's information, the time is now, and the place is
New York City. But this is only the first of this movie's wacky
anachronisms.
"Ghost Dog" is a further
exploration of themes that Jarmusch handled in more solipsistic (and
less entertaining) fashion in "Dead Man," his 1995
western starring Johnny Depp. Both movies are, in part,
meditations on death and dying, spiritualism and ancient codes of
conduct.
(Jarmusch links the two movies by
having characters in "Ghost Dog" equate African
Americans with American Indians. And he includes a Cayuga Indian
actor from "Dead Man" in a small role here to utter a
more profane version of his "stupid white man" refrain
from that film.)
The filmmaker might be faulted for
exchanging one brand of exoticism for another and for making a
too-easy (and clichéd) correlation between pre-modern societies
and moral superiority. He does it so inventively, though (commingling
ancient Japanese culture with black inner-city life and an
antiquated Cosa Nostra moral code), that we're willing to take
the ride.
Cultures collide in "Ghost Dog,"
old ways of being fall before the advance of progress. Jarmusch
shows the Mafia as it has never been seen--a collection of aging
men in a changing neighborhood who can't pay the rent on their
hangout and who waste their days engrossed in vintage cartoons on
television.
The movie is full of Jarmusch's
trademark offbeat humor. Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker in a
gracefully minimalistic performance) is best friends with an
exuberant Haitian ice cream vendor who speaks only French.
Neither can understand a word the other says and yet they
converse anyway, somehow comprehending all.
One of the nice things about this
movie is the way it doesn't explain itself to you as it follows
its unpredictable path. The watchful, bearlike Ghost Dog lives in
a shack atop a tenement roof with his pigeons, and he's dedicated
his life to the study and practice of the samurai code.
We never learn how he went from
getting beat up on the street eight years ago (in what may or may
not have been a hate crime) to becoming this inscrutable hip-hop
warrior. But he has pledged himself in zen-like fashion to Louie
(John Tormey), the low-level Mafiosi who saved his life.
Also, while there is indication
that Ghost Dog communicates with animals--he's kind of a lord of
the urban jungle--it never is explained how he manages to know
all that he knows about the whereabouts and plans of the mobsters
who decide early in the movie that he must die.
People of honor in this movie live
by their own moral codes and respect the codes of others. Ghost
Dog carries around a book that he is always reading, the 18th
century Japanese warrior text "Hagakure: The Book of the
Samurai." Periodically, sayings from the book are
superimposed on screen. The movie is full of other texts, as well--novels,
rap songs, even cartoons--that reflect directly on what is
happening on screen.
The mobsters can't even absorb the
wisdom of Betty Boop or Felix the Cat, the texts they consume
daily. If they did, Ghost Dog wouldn't be able to catch them
unawares. In one scene, for example, he spies (and kills) a hood
who had been watching a cartoon character rain bullets on an
enemy by firing a gun into a rain spout. Minutes later, Ghost Dog
dispatches another gangster pretty much the same way.
The movie contains a big, vengeful
rampage scene that might remind viewers of Steven Soderbergh's
film of last year, "The Limey." Soderbergh won high
praise for his chop-and-dice technique in that movie even though
it had been done a dozen times better by filmmakers from John
Boorman to Alain Resnais. But what Jarmusch does here is wholly
original. It's a nearly pitch-perfect melding of genres,
influences and modes of expression--it's the first Mafia movie
for the hip-hop age. Or maybe it's a samurai western spliced with
rap and humor. (The movie is evocatively scored by the rapper The
RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan.)
Whatever you call it, it's so
wonderfully eccentric that it cries out for a new way of
discussing it. Gnomic epigrams, perhaps, scattered amid
promiscuously allusive, scat-like prose. Or a hyperlinked
dissertation on ancient warrior codes. (Yes, the new mode of
movie review this film needs necessarily would come at you from
cyberspace.)
And from the speakers while you
read it, some Earth, Wind and Fire, perhaps. "That's the Way
of the World"? You know it. But only for those not hip
enough for the RZA.
Self-indulgent, you say? Perhaps.
But as Ghost Dog tells Louie: "Everything seems to be
changing all around us."
Nothing makes sense anymore.
MPAA rating: R for strong violence and language. Times guidelines:
numerous scenes of bullets ripping into flesh.
'Ghost Dog: The Way of the
Samurai'
Forest Whitaker: Ghost Dog
John Tormey: Louie
Sonny Valerio: Cliff Gorman
Frank Minucci: Big Angie
Richard Portnow: Handsome Frank
Tricia Vessey: Louise Vargo
Henry Silva: Ray Vargo
An Artisan Entertainment release. Director and screenplay Jim Jarmusch. Producers Jim Jarmusch, Richard Guay. Cinematographer Robby Muller. Production designer Ted Berner. Editor Jay Rabinowitz. Music the RZA. Costume designer John Dunn. Running Time: 1 hour, 56 minutes. General release.