With uproarious derisiveness yet also empathetic warmth, Jarmusch borrows a small but solid batch of horror-movie tropes to evoke an existential tabula rasa with (almost) no way out.
Though Jim Jarmusch is only sixty-six, he is nearly forty years deep into his career-and “The Dead Don’t Die” can be considered his first “late” film, reflecting the kind of radical repudiation of conventions, of familiar practices, of settled ways, of ordinary life and ordinariness as such, that directors make with a sense of end times. “The Dead Don’t Die” is also a film of extremes. Jarmusch’s film is an exuberantly imaginative comedy that’s also as fervently, vehemently, bitterly political as Wiseman’s documentary. “The Dead Don’t Die” is an actual zombie film about the American center-or, rather, dead center-set in the fictitious Pennsylvania town of Centerville, where the population is seven hundred and thirty-eight but soon turns out to fluctuate rapidly.
In its mournful and death-steeped view of Monrovia’s somnolent and baffled residents, Wiseman’s film struck me as a documentary version of a zombie film. The film that Jim Jarmusch’s new horror comedy, “ The Dead Don’t Die,” most reminds me of is Frederick Wiseman’s “ Monrovia, Indiana,” a 2018 documentary about social life and civic routines in a small Midwestern town.
0 kommentar(er)
