When all “significance” melts away and
life suddenly comes down to just being somewhere (Gleiberman). Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, his fourth
commercially released feature that only took him about a week to write, links
five different cities around the world inside of five different taxicabs at the
same time in the middle of the night with five different mini-episodes. Jarmusch masters comedy of the oblique in this
film that leaves you with many unanswered questions,
at
the end, we have learned no great lessons and arrived at no thrilling
conclusions, but we have shared the community of the night, when people are
unbuttoned and vulnerable – more ready to speak about what’s really on their
minds (Ebert).
His films are not
intended to appeal to mainstream filmgoers, but they have become known for
trying to stay away from a traditional narrative structure, lacking clear plot
progression and they focus more on mood and character development. Night on
Earth explores disconnected characters and their relationships through a
series of off-the-wall duets giving the impression that they all may have more
in common than you may have originally thought.
The film begins in Los Angeles where an
elegant Hollywood casting agent, Victoria, takes a taxicab home from the
airport driven by a young, tough, chain-smoking tomboy, Corky; the complete
opposite of Victoria. “Victoria is so
high-powered that you might think her capable of raising Mars with the cordless
telephone she uses” (Canby) yet she is inspired by Corky’s no-nonsense outlook
on life that she offers her a job as an actress that she, to our surprise,
declined so she could pursue her dream of becoming a mechanic.
We, then, rewind a little in time as
we switch to a new location, New York. A rowdy, amusing man, YoYo, is
desperately trying to get a taxicab that will take him from Manhattan back home
to Brooklyn. He finally gets a cab with
a suspiciously smiling eager East German refugee, Helmet, who turns out has yet
to learn to properly drive. YoYo,
eventually, convinces Helmet to let him take the wheel. Helmet is a delighted, amusing passenger who,
we learned, was once a circus clown after YoYo called him “a clown.” “Absolutely nothing about these two characters
connect, yet in their very recognition of that fact they attain a fleeting
bond” (Gleiberman). Eventually they come
across and pick up YoYo’s highly opinionated sister-in-law, Angela which
resulted in a hilarious and liberating combination of YoYo, Helmet and Angela. However, after they reach their destination
Helmet is back behind the wheel no idea where he is.
In Paris a young, handsome cabbie’s
night is not going very well after fighting with and kicking out two arrogant
diplomats which was somewhat amusing. Jarmusch
said he “chose to use color and play off areas of the city that were colorful”
(LoBrutto) which seemed to be more prominent after picking up a blind
Frenchwoman.
The
truth is that the sight of her sightless eyes, freely rolling in their sockets,
is as unnerving to the audience as it is to him. His questions are direct, without guile, when
he brings up the subject of sex and what it must be like to make love with
someone one cannot see. Even here she somehow manages to squelch him. The night ends as badly as it began (Canby)
as the young, Ivory
Coast driver gets into an accident right after dropping off the Frenchwoman.
In
Rome, Jarmusch did the opposite with color then he did in Paris, he “kept it
all almost monotone and earth tone – yellows and browns. That was designed in, and that was [his] way
to follow through and make each scene distinctive” (LoBrutto). At any rate, the
sarcastic, talkative and goofy Roman cab driver picks up a tired, old Priest
who was not pleased when the driver decided to give his confession in the cab. The hilarious, sexual and somewhat
inappropriate confession, that you never find out if it is true or not, ends up
killing the Priest. Meanwhile, in Helsinki,
our last destination, four drunks whose “physical state has finally attained an
awfulness that matches your life choices” (Canby) decided to be responsible by getting
a cab ride home. However this may be
“the saddest, almost unbearably sad [episode], as the driver hears what a bad
day one of his passengers has had, and then tops him” (Ebert).
Jarmusch basically emptied the streets
making the all the cities look lonely and cold. He determined the cities in Night on Earth largely based on the
actors and actresses he wanted to work with. Now, when it comes to the taxicabs, one of the
reasons he chose cabs is because he figured there would be a great deal of
control.
The
cab itself is the world temporarily shared. It’s also a distinctive cocoon (each taxi in
the film has its own special purr or knock) from which one of the parties will
emerge if not changed, then at least shaken up, or, in one case, no more sure
where he is than when he got into the cab (Canby).
Jarmusch just loved the idea of the
forced situation of two people in a car who don’t know each other. With some help from Tom Waits’ music he
created a lonely, elegiac, romantic mood; “as much as jazz does, Night on Earth transforms the
commonplace into something haunting, mysterious and newly true” (Canby) where
he, basically, had the actor’s captive.
Though it may seem like insignificant randomness
it’s actually those throwaway observations that Jarmusch orchestrates with
microscopic detail making his films difficult to summarize as well as something
that you cannot watch just once. Night on Earth seems always to keep the
alien’s distance, as if part of its mind remained forever fixed in outer space
(Canby) not interested in making each segment in a short story with an obvious
conclusion. There are no zingers at the
end. [Jarmusch is] more concerned with
character [and] with the relationship that forms (Ebert).
His use of characters may seem stereotypical
and cliché at first but as you get to know each and every character their
behavior begins to grow increasingly more abstract as our understanding of their
existence and our relationship with them broadens. [The] cosmic title may lead you to expect a
spiritual overview of the state of the world, but the joke is that these
cabbies and their passengers all speak a universal language of disconnectedness
(Gleiberman). Yet Jarmusch creates the
feeling of being connected through being disconnected. [In his] worldwide feeling of kinship, we will
hear Spanish, German, French, Italian, Finnish and even a little Latin (Ebert).
[Jarmusch] seems to see his characters
through a telescope (Canby) as he transforms the ordinarily mundane
conversations into engaging episodes all having their own personality.
It’s
as if the minds of these night people are affected by all the dreams and
nightmares that surround them…his characters seem divorced from the ordinary
society of their cities; they’re loners and floaters. We sense they have more in common with one
another than with the daytime inhabitants of their cities. And their cabs, hurtling through the deserted
streets, are like couriers on a mission to nowhere (Ebert).
Yet maybe it just
comes down to just being somewhere, enjoying life. Jarmusch is an intriguing
contradiction: an avant-garde entertainer, a downtown aesthete with one foot
(well, okay, a few toes) in show biz…The fragmentary exchanges and subliminal missed
connections that most moviemakers leave out—for Jarmusch, are about the only
things worth putting in (Gleiberman).
Works Cited
Canby, Vincent. "Night on Earth (1991) Review/Film Festival;
Urban Life Seen from a Taxi Seat." New
York Times [New York] 4 Oct. 1991, Movies: n. pag. New York Times. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
Ebert, Roger. "Night on Earth." RogerEbert.com. N.p., 8 Mar. 1992. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
Gleiberman, Owen. "Night on Earth." Entertainment Weekly 17 Jan. 2015: n. pag. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
"Jim Jarmusch - Part Two." Guardian 20 Dec. 1999, Movies: n. pag. The Guardian. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
LoBrutto, Vincent. "Principal Photography: Interviews with
Feature Film Cinematographers." The
Jim Jarmusch Resource Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
"Night on Earth." Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Nov. 2014. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.
"Night on Earth (1991)." IMDB. Amazon.com, n.d. Web. 8 Apr. 2015.
O'Brien, Glenn. "Jim Jarmusch." Interview Magazine: n. pag. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.
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