May 20-26, 2004

movies

Cafe con Lazy

JAVA AND JAWING: Iggy Pop and Tom Waits chew the fat.

The laconic Coffee and Cigarettes takes its time.

by Cindy Fuchs

Coffee and Cigarettes is a return, of sorts, for Jim Jarmusch. It takes him back to the black-and-white vignettes of Stranger Than Paradise, the variations-on-a-theme riffing of Night on Earth, even the elegant looseness of Down by Law. Low budget and low-speed, in the sense that conversations over the titular substances don't move especially quickly, or engage grand-scaled philosophies, the film is really a set of 10 film-ettes, shot over a decade.

The collection is held together by thematic focus (the coffee and cigarettes, or more generally, the medicinal uses of addictions and obsessions), the weird ways in which most of the actors are playing "themselves" and some formal repetitions: the camera, wielded by brilliant cinematographers Tom DiCillo, Frederick Elmes, Ellen Kuras, and Robby Müller, returns to the overhead shots of coffee cups and ashtrays on checkerboard-patterned cafe tables, or close-ups of participants as they talk around what they want or show off what they might know while revealing what they can't.

The film opens with a signature Jarmuschian scene, Roberto Benigni (of Down By Law) and Steven Wright meeting in a busted-up, walled cafe, professing their deep affection for coffee, their hands shaking while transporting clattery cups of espresso to their nicotine-stained lips. Wright likes especially to drink coffee before he goes to sleep, he says, because it helps him to "dream fast." Benigni offers Wright an odd but telling gift, his dentist's appointment -- an offer at once generous and utterly strange. Wright's fine with the deal, and is left, at his scene's end, alone in the cafe, stirring his espresso.

Other scenes are as cryptic, though some are less successfully paced than others. Iggy Pop meets up in a diner with Tom Waits, their conversation circling celebrity as a kind of cover for identity. After briefly congratulating themselves on quitting cigarettes, they're quick to pick up smokes to go with their coffee. "I can now," boasts Waits, "because I quit," as Iggy enthuses, "I feel sorry for all those suckers, still puffing away." Waits tells a story about his day, revealing that he's a doctor as well as a musician. "There's nothing worse than roadside surgery," he mutters while recalling the morning's baby delivery. "You don't have your tools." Iggy looks properly astonished, as Waits explains, "Music and medicine, I'm living in a place where they overlap."

A skewed-parallel scene is called "Delirium," Wu-Tang Clan's RZA (who scored Jarmusch's Ghost Dog) and GZA. Explaining his own combinations of alternative medicine and music ("two planets circling around the same sun"), RZA provides a clever gloss on his famous numerologies and Eastern philosophizing, by way of his acute sense of irony and humor at his own expense. Both the ZAs are duly entertained by the arrival at their table of their waiter, Bill Murray (whom they call by his full name, as a kind of punctuation to every address, as in, "Are you a bug, Bill Murray?").

Similarly eccentric in its interest in celebrity is "Cousins," where Cate Blanchett plays herself as a junketeering movie star, who takes a few minutes out of her interview schedule to meet with her dark-haired cousin Shelly. Unimpressed with the bag of hotel swag Cate offers her, Shelly is increasingly agitated at her famous cousin's lack of attention or empathy: Movie stars live on their own planet, each alone.

Another set of cousins (far removed, apparently) is devised in a scene featuring Alfred Molina, who has charted his family tree only to find that Steve Coogan is a distant relative. Unmoved by the discovery, Coogan rudely insinuates he has no time for Molina, now residing in L.A. with a just-canceled sitcom. Only when he overhears Molina's phone call with an apparent good buddy who is a bona fide celeb does Coogan suggest that they ought to stay in touch, a last-minute effort that Molina agrees is "shabby," before he dismisses it.

Other siblings (or are they?) Meg and Jack White sit in a dark cafe discussing the tesla coil, whereupon Jack demonstrates his own tinkered-together version of the invention, which he's hauled down to the cafe on a red wagon. And still another familial continuum emerges in a section titled "Twins." Here Cinqué and Joie Lee (Spike's siblings, who've both worked with Jarmusch in the past) endure the attention of their waiter (Steve Buscemi), who says they remind him of "Heckyl and Jeckyl, you know, those cackling magpies," even as the twins roll their eyes in disbelief at his blundering offensiveness.

All these and other connections in Coffee and Cigarettes, oblique as well as unavoidable, outline the provocative method to Jarmusch's seeming disorder. Patterns of rhythm, desire and self-invention, strategies of survival and addiction: The film is all about finding the sameness in difference.

Coffee and Cigarettes

Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch An MGM release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

recommended