4/3/2005: Views: Dead Man
Dead Man 1995, dir. Jim Jarmusch
"Do you have any tobacco?"
For a movie I'd never heard of, this one sure has a lot of big names in it: Johnny Depp, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne, Alfred Molina, Billy Bob Thornton, and even Iggy Pop, as a shabby frontier transvestite. But Dead Man is really Depp's and Gary Farmer's movie.
Depp plays William Blake, a young accountant traveling west to a new job in Machine - a gritty, hard-life town in the old west. He gets into trouble soon as he arrives and quickly has a bounty on his head, placed there by Mitchum in one of his last roles.
An injured Blake meets up with Nobody (Gary Farmer), an Indian who'd been exhibited throughout the eastern USA & Europe as a youth as the "wild savage", and educated along the way. He believes Depp is the William Blake, the poet and painter. Nobody tends to Blake's wounds and sets off into the wilderness with him, quoting cryptic Indian spiritualism and lines from Blake's poetry while a bizarre team of bounty hunters follow their path.
On one hand this is a straight-ahead Western about an innocent turning into a killer to survive, and it's also about the turbulent clash of cultures in early American history. But beyond that, it's a surreal mindscape of striking photography and brilliant, if subtle, comic dialogue from writer/director Jarmusch, who also weaves a labyrinth of layered symbolism that will have you wondering "what did that mean?" throughout.
Dead Man is stunningly shot in black & white, with a minimal but pervasive guitar soundtrack from Neil Young (who I think also appears in the film, in a pan-by cameo early on.)
I can't remember why I had this one in my Netflix queue - possibly for Gary Farmer who was so good in Powwow Highway and Smoke Signals. He is superb in Dead Man, which also gets added to the list of well-played and surprising Johnny Depp roles in "little" films.
DVD extras include deleted scenes, Neil Young "Dead Man Theme" music video, and trailer.
