The Dead Don’t Die
Jim Jarmusch (2019)
The poster announces ‘the greatest zombie cast ever disassembled’. According to Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, that’s one of the problems. In a zombie movie, writes Lane, ‘You want to see unfamiliar heads, not necessarily with bodies attached; it may be because we don’t recognize the victims, indeed, that all the chopping and chewing can be borne’. It’s not quite the same problem if, like this viewer, you’re not sure you’ve ever seen a zombie movie, let alone a zombie comedy, before. Lane’s point is well taken, even so: the dissonance between the presence of the likes of Bill Murray and the apocalyptic goings-on in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die put the latter in inverted commas from the word go.
For a short while, though, the film is agreeable. The title song, composed and performed by the country singer Sturgill Simpson, accompanies the opening credits (and is heard several times more – on car radios, etc). Its pleasing blend of relaxed and wistful complements opening shots of the story’s locale, the small American town of Centerville – ‘A Real Nice Place’. As the camera picks up a petrol station (‘Bob’s Gas and Other Stuff’) and the ‘Ever After’ funeral home, there’s a whiff of David Lynch’s soothing yet disarming introductions to Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Bill Murray is Cliff Robertson, the local police chief. His sidekicks Ronnie Peterson and Mindy Morrison are played by Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny respectively. Murray and Driver are both experts in comic deadpan. As a double act, they threaten to be too samey; in the event, they raise smiles, if not laughs, for half an hour or so. The prospect of a quiet build-up to the horror – even comedy horror – in store offers a refreshing change from the tactics of an Ari Aster (Hereditary and Midsommar).
The film’s premise is that ‘polar fracking’ has interfered with the tilt of Earth’s axis, which is playing havoc with the natural order. Animals are behaving strangely, day and night are confused, and graves are opening. According to Sight & Sound (July 2019), The Dead Don’t Die is a comedy that never ‘[loses] sight of its deadly serious theme of environmental destruction’. This is true to the extent that the script keeps mentioning the effects of fracking; Ronnie repeatedly warns that ‘this is going to end badly’; and Tom Waits, as a hermit who lives out of Centerville in the woods, is exempted from the carnage. But there’s no traction, comic or otherwise, between the ecological breakdown and the zombie invasion nor any dynamic contrast between the easygoing scene-setting and the guts, or blood and guts, of the story. Once the zombies are out in force, they’re as tediously relentless as, for example, the scarlet doppelgängers in Jordan Peele’s Us. But they’re much less resourceful too.
In an interview with Geoff Andrew for this month’s Sight & Sound, Jarmusch says that he used to ask himself, ‘“What are the greatest things humans can offer?” I’d say, art, including music; science; and things which combine art and science, like architecture and engineering. Now I’ve added jokes to that list’. That’s a fundamental weakness of The Dead Don’t Die: it’s less a substantial comedy than a series of jokes, some of them self-contradictory. Take farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi), whose baseball cap bears the slogan ‘Keep America White Again’ (sic). In the local diner, we find him sitting next to African-American hardware store owner Hank Thompson (Danny Glover) – a surprise in itself. Miller deprecates the coffee he’s drinking as ‘too black’, before hurriedly making clear to Hank that he only means by that ‘too strong’ – this shows remarkable sensitivity for a white supremacist who wears his heart on his cap. Later, as zombies swarm towards his farm, Miller exclaims, ‘Where they all coming from?’ That faint echo of his anti-immigrant views is literally the last we hear of Miller – or see of him, until he turns up as one of the undead.
A better (in the sense of immediately amusing) joke is that Jarmusch’s zombies, when they descend on Centerville (and, according to a TV news report, everywhere else in America), croak out demands for whatever it was they were addicted to in life – coffee, Chardonnay, Bluetooth, Xanax. This is a running gag that doesn’t develop, though – or articulate interestingly with the idea that insatiable consumer appetite has hastened the end of life on Earth. Jarmusch undermines his apocalypse now theme conclusively when Cliff, fed up of Ronnie’s warnings of eventual disaster, asks his colleague how he knows ‘this is going to end badly’. Ronnie – or, rather, Adam Driver – replies that he’s read the script. ‘The whole script?’, asks Cliff – or, rather, Bill Murray – ‘he only sent me the scenes I’m in’.
The cast also includes, among others, Iggy Pop as ‘Coffee Zombie’; Caleb Landry Jones, entertaining as Bob, the petrol station proprietor whose ‘other stuff’ includes an encyclopedic knowledge of supernatural and horror movies; and Tilda Swinton, as a mortician whose name is, near as damn it, an anagram of her own. A combination of Scottish common sense and Zen calm, Zelda Winston is nifty enough with a Samurai sword to declare herself ‘quite confident of my ability to defend myself against the undead’. As good as her word, she neatly decapitates all-comers but eventually departs Centerville, and planet Earth, on a spaceship. With her unearthly appearance, this seems right enough; in any case, Jarmusch has to arrange her exit somehow. Swinton gives proceedings a bit of badly needed theatrical verve although you can see all her best bits in the film’s trailer.
In the S&S interview, Jim Jarmusch also says that, initially, ‘I wanted to make a ridiculous, stupid film with actors I love, and some others I’d not yet worked with’. The film he’s delivered very much reflects this original intention: it was probably a lot more fun making The Dead Don’t Die than it is watching it. I’ve not seen Jarmusch’s vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) but, on the evidence of this listless new one, he isn’t cut out for either horror parody or doomsday jeremiad. That meta moment between Adam Driver and Bill Murray, which concludes with the latter cursing ‘Jim’, exposes the self-indulgence of The Dead Don’t Die and Jarmusch as wholly incapable of being ‘deadly serious’ about the end of days.
16 July 2019