Film Review

Also submitted in IMDb:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0112817/usercomments-246

Dead Man (1995): Nightmare Vision of the Old West

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Writer: Jim Jarmusch
Genre: Drama/ Western
Music: Neil Young
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Running Time: 121 minutes
Starring: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Mili Avital, Crispin Glover, Gabriel Byrne, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris, John Hurt, Alfred Molina, Robert Mitchum

This story of a young man's passage through a frontier crawling with violence, death and decay begins on a train whose soot-faced fireman (Crispin Glover) delivers an ominous prediction. Appearing in the car where William Blake (Johnny Depp), the film's protagonist, is playing solitaire, he warns Blake that when he reaches his destination, the town of Machine, he will find his own grave.
As the train hurtles westward, Blake, dressed in a bow tie and checkered suit, finds himself surrounded by silent faces. Peering out the window, he sees remains of abandoned covered wagons and other signs of decay. When the train passes a buffalo herd, his fellow passengers go to the windows with rifles and blindly open fire.
He arrives in Dickinson where he is going to be employed as an accountant but showing up at the place, he is informed that the post has been filled. When he confronts the owner, John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), he is ordered at gunpoint to leave at once.
Blake visits a bar where he meets Thell Russell (Mili Avital), an attractive woman who takes him back to her shabby rented room filled with paper flowers she has made. While they're in bed together, Thell's former boyfriend, Charlie Dickinson (the company owner's son, played by Gabriel Byrne), appears and shoots at Blake but kills Thell instead. Blake shoots Charlie with Thell's gun, and jumps out a window, but not before he himself is critically wounded. Blake suddenly finds himself a fugitive with a bullet in his chest.
From here, the movie changes from a horrifying frontier into something more problematic and self-conscious. Pursued by bounty hunters and law officers, Blake makes his way westward until he reaches the Pacific. For much of the way he is accompanied by an Indian guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who has dressed his wounds and believes his companion to be the reincarnation of the English poet William Blake.
When Nobody tells his story, it turns out that he, too, is a sort of fugitive. Captured as a boy by white men, he was taken East and exploited as a sideshow attraction and from there to England, where he was educated and discovered Blake's poetry. The Indian appoints himself the poet's guide back into the spirit world.

So what is depicted in the movie is the idea that Blake encounters a world of danger and decay rather than promise and freedom. Dead Man suggests that the West was indeed vital, but was a place of death rather than growth. Instead of an optimistic assessment of virgin land and opportunity, the film presents the spread of what one might call "white blight," the viral meanness and ignorance spread by European industrialism onto the lands of the lands of the indigenous tribes. That Jarmusch respects but thankfully falls short of romanticizing his Native American characters is one of Dead Man's more singular points of interest.

Like most great Westerns, Dead Man holds the American West and its (white) inhabitants up to close scrutiny, and in this sense its radicalism surpasses virtually every earlier example. The film's power is impossible to extrapolate from its commentary on history and society. One cannot overlook its acknowledgment of environmental degradation associated with progress, its depiction of an indigenous people's ambivalence to whites and their encroachment, and its nuanced grasp of violence, particularly gun violence (not a simple "anti-gun" op-ed, but a beautifully literal rendition of firearms' deployment by people in moments of passion, stupidity, and cold anger).
It is scored by Neil Young, who lets loud, amplified electric guitar strains settle in among the pictures. The music is limited, but effective. It very well punctuates this imaginative Western which includes interesting meditations upon the myth of the frontier, violence, artistic outlaws, and the serious situation of mistreated Native Americans. Blake's arduous journey toward death is a wonder to behold
The movie takes place in a dream state. To drive this home, we see several shots of Blake falling asleep or passing out from pain, hunger or exhaustion. By the end of the film, the images we see are dazed and dreamy.
It is not like any other western. It's not an easy film to watch, and I predict that a lot of people will call it "joyless". But, I also predict that with the passing of time, this movie will settle in and find a place as a cinema classic.

Slow, dark and very cool, Jim Jarmusch's anti-Western movie can attract and at the same time confuse you.