| Island Pictures | Release Date: September 20, 1986 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
15
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
|
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Critic Reviews
Director-writer Jarmusch's characters are insignificant antiheroes adrift in an America that is both sad and beautiful. Jarmusch has a powerful visual sense, but he is weaker in the realm of content. The jazzy relationship between Lurie and Waits never quite clicks. As a result Down By Law merely reiterates the ideas about people and American life that Jarmusch had already stated more richly in Stranger Than Paradise.
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Jarmusch likes to make movies that are slow and desultory and unresolved, and to beat him over the head with his vision would be unfair. In Down by Law, he's made that kind of movie, but he's worked from the outside in. He's made a Jim Jarmusch film instead of just making a film; his self-consciousness leaves you at arm's length.
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Some scuzzily noirish moments, thanks to Robby Müller's slick black-and-white cinematography, but once the deadbeat trio get thrown into their cell, the film comes to a virtual halt: it's minimalism reinforcing minimalism, with none of the subtle counterpoint between movement and stasis, environmental opening out and psychological shrinking in, that gave Stranger its small energetic charge.
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Jarmusch's whole method consists of reversing expectations. The problem with that method is that you quickly begin to expect the reversals; the unpredictability becomes predictable. Jarmusch is a talented filmmaker, with an original sense of humor and a sharp and distinctive visual style, but he won't be a great filmmaker until he stops approaching his material from the outside.
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Jarmusch's passive style has its wit, but the style is deadening here until he brings in Roberto--a character out of folk humor. And without the boredom of the first three-quarters of an hour Roberto wouldn't be so funny.
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