Stray Thoughts on Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law

Jim Jarmusch has made a career of never doing one for the studios. All of his films have always been for him. It’s hard to think of another contemporaneous American director who owns such a singular oeuvre and auteurist style while simultaneously creating a new film every three to five years starring pedigree actors, artists, and musicians. Emerging from first the experimental no-wave and adjacent New York scenes and then since supplanted within the American independent movement emerging from the mid-80s to mid-90s, Jarmusch’s style has become synonymous with this Americana chic. If you read ANY professional review of his films, even from the greats like Rosenbaum or Hoberman, you’ll see a litany of adjectives like “hip” or “cool.” This style is simultaneously offbeat but is home to a wry, funny sense of humor. This style is further supplanted with text and substance that is immensely well-read (poetry is a favorite topic) and focuses on materially marginalized individuals while not remotely sentimentalizing their ennui and struggles.

It’s hard to choose a favorite of Jarmusch’s filmography, as his films draw several comparisons between themselves, but each film is unique. Some are anthology films (Mystery Train, Night on Earth), some are artier genre films (Ghost Dog, Dead Man), and there’s a healthy mix between black and white and color photography. His work is constantly on my mind, but I would say that Down by Law is probably on my mind the most– which (by default) would probably make it my favorite of his body.

Down By Law follows three men (John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Begini) imprisoned under dubious circumstances in New Orleans and their subsequent escape. The film has an ingenious yet neat three-act structure. The first act consists of their life before and the incarcerating crime, the second act tracks their bonding and boredom in the “slammer,” and then finally wraps up with their bayou bog wandering post-escape in the last third. The film carries over the stylistic nerves of Jarmusch’s second feature and breakout hit Stranger Than Paradise. Stranger than Paradise has no conventional coverage, and the photography consists of lingering medium and long shots that inhabit the boredom of the film’s characters. These scenes can go on for minutes and then end with elliptical cuts to black; as a result, the audience does not know how much time has passed between scenes. Cinematographer Robby Muller takes over for Tom Dicillo in Down By Law. The result is a formally flashier film, but it carries over many of the same technical approaches (the same long takes, medium/long shots, and temporally ambiguous cuts to black). However, Stranger than Paradise’s goal is to supplant the viewer with the character’s deadpan and numb boredom through these techniques– whereas Down By Law seeks to create a lived-in mise-en-scene and subversion of jailbreak tropes.

This is not to say that Stranger than Paradise fails at creating a mood or sense of time and place, but it becomes the primary focus of the Jarmusch style in this film. Each character here is on the wrong side of the track. Waits’ Zach is a deadbeat disc jockey who can’t keep his job or partners, while John Luries’ Jack is a reluctant braggadocio pimp. Both men are incarcerated due to respective seedy setups, and upon sharing a cell they constantly butt heads/clash egos. Their masculine gruffness is offset by Benigni’s Bob, a happy-go-lucky Italian tourist with poor English who accidentally kills a grunt with a cue ball while escaping from a card game (in which Bob was cheating). The film doesn’t follow the typical structure of the jailbreak film (think Escape from Alcatraz or Brute Force), as the actual jailbreak is shown offscreen. Jarmusch instead draws in the audience with the peripheral characters and their world. Few films let their location breathe quite as much as the first act in New Orleans or the final act in the bog, and few would consciously redact the conventional pleasures of a typical jailbreak film (unless your name is Robert Bresson). 

Down By Law could very well be Jarmusch’s most ideological film; law enforcement is portrayed as callous imbeciles and oppressors while Jack and Zach are firmly stuck in the lower-class milieu of New Orleans, a direct product of their material conditions. But it’s also Jarmusch’s funniest (due to the constant silliness of Bob) and the one I find the most strangely moving. The way that Jack and Zach part the film’s end at an impasse of two opposite-facing roads in the woods reminds me of how so many friendships I’ve had in my life are entirely situational (and could maybe even be a little rocky ). But despite this, one can’t still help but feel a sense of tepid happiness for how these situational friendships kept you company. As Jack and Zach are left with ambiguous fates as they split on the road, one gets the sense that they are simultaneously free from their previous lives but could end up on the same path again. However, there’s a sense that Bob imparted an attitude change to them. As Bob says stumbling through his piercing Italian accent to Zach during their first chance encounter before incarceration “it's a sad and beautiful world.” And it’s difficult not to feel the same way about this movie and even the world once the credits cut to “Tango Till They’re Sore.”