Writer/director Jim Jarmusch's "Down By Law" is a strange little beast. It's a 3-act story that shows disdain for any kind of narrative arc. It's a prison break movie that skips the prison break scene. It's an intimate actor's piece that casts two acclaimed musicians and an Italian clown who didn't speak a lick of English at the time of filming in its three lead roles. And it's a chase movie that moves slower than a hot Louisiana afternoon. Which might lead one to believe that it isn't actually any of those things, but a beast of another colour entirely. And one would be right.

The film opens with a long tracking shot that reads a New Orleans neighbourhood from right to left (like it were Japanese or Hebrew). This same shot, only in a different locale, will later introduce the settings for the second and third acts. Jarmusch quickly establishes a simple visual shorthand, off of which he can hang the poetry to come. Adding to the melancholy of the moment is a bouncy but remorseful Tom Waits song that floats through the background.

Waits himself quickly shows up on screen as Zack, a down-on-his-luck DJ being evicted from his apartment by a boisterous girlfriend (Ellen Barkin, who in one scene certainly leaves an indelible mark on the film). Zack sits quietly while Laurette screams and rambles, letting his only line ("We can't live in the present forever") say a lot about the film's overriding philosophy, and the character of this no-nonsense man. Waits is a little stilted in the role, oftentimes showing the amateurness of his acting. But he more than makes up for this with moments of pure insight, and tonnes of charisma.

John Lurie's introduction mirrors Waits' in a lot of ways. He plays Jack, a pimp with Big Dreams, who we see getting verbally dressed-down by a woman in his employ, played nakedly by Billie Neal. (Tangent: Lurie looks like a lot like Joaquin Phoenix, which is probably only of interest to members of the Phoenix clan or fans of our own Simply_Crispy). Lurie, like Waits, is not an actor by trade. And while he comes across as more authentic than Waits, he's usually far less interesting to watch. But he does play well the inherent tension in Jack and Zack's combative relationship.

Jack and Zack. Zack and Jack. Eventually the two pseudo-doppelgangers, in separate incidents, are set up for crimes they didn't commit, and sent to Orleans Parish Prison (yeah, you know me). It's not a difficult path to take for one to realize that Jack and Zack (Zack and Jack) are two sides of the same coin, outsiders just trying to scrounge up enough to get by in a world that really couldn't care less if they lived or if they died. It is quite telling when, later on, the third member of this most unlikely troika continually gets their names mixed up.

The prison scenes, ostensibly the film's 35-minute centrepiece, are prodigious and entrancing, while being simply staged in a single cell and nearly devoid of propulsive dialogue. Jarmusch appears to find every nook and cranny into which he can fit his camera, the better to make the scenes less claustrophobic and more visually interesting, while writing mini-speeches for his characters that speak more to a philosophy of life rather than an interest in drama. This tidbit, which comes from Jack's mouth, speaks a lot to that point:

You don't exist either. Walls don't exist. Floors don't exist. This prison's not here. The bar's are not here. None of this is really here at all.

This is a little insight into the Kafkaesque nightmare state that our boys find themselves in. If I were asked to pare "Down By Law" down to its basest elements, I'd have to describe it as an existential comic book.

Into this world floats Roberto (sometimes Bob), an Einstein-haired clown played by Roberto Benigni. Earlier, Roberto had a run-in with a post-break-up Zack, in which he cryptically exclaimed, "It's a sad and beautiful world" (could this be the film's thesis statement?). Which might leave you under the impression that Roberto is the same Benigni-clown prone to dancing on the seats at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, or the lingual-clown who offered to make love to the entire audience during his Oscar acceptance speeches, or the manic-clown riding multi-colour horses during the first half of "Life is Beautiful".

The Benigni of "Down By Law" is more like the sad-clown desperate to distract his young son during Holocaust scenes of "Life is Beautiful". He's whimsical and charming, without any of the manic energy, yet he still manages to inject a whole lot of life in what was threatening to become a rather dour film. Jarmusch gets a lot of mileage out of Benigni's broken English, even making it an important character point. In one moment Bob draws a window on the wall of their jail cell, and asks Jack if it is proper to say "I look at the window" or "I look out the window". Jack, with as much cynical apathy as he can muster, has some fun with Roberto: "In this case, you say 'I look at the window", deftly pointing to the hopelessness of their situation.

The film's finest moment also stems from Roberto's language barrier. He carries around a notebook, jotting down English phrases he comes across, in an effort to learn the language. Which leads, almost apropos of nothing, to the three men -- and the rest of the prison, eventually -- stomping around their cell, chanting, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!" It's a moment of pure catharsis, and the first time Bob is accepted by the ever-bickering Jack and Zack.

Jarmusch, whose work I've found "disjointed… [a] mix and match [of] tone and theme, creating strange and wondrous (and confusing) dichotomies… sad […] mixed with silly laughter" ("Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai") but in a good way, is in pretty much the same territory here. His visual style is minimalist at best, as he holds takes for longer than you'd expect (the opening scene of Barkin railing against Waits just goes on forever!). His shot compositions are skilled and artful, helped along by the crisp cinematography of Robby Müller ("Dancer in the Dark", "Breaking the Waves", fourteen films with Wim Wenders, and, besides "Down By Law", four others with Jarmusch; an impressive resume, no?). The score, composed by Lurie, is a startling mix of New Orleans rhythms and free jazz, which keeps you off-kilter while drawing you into the setting. The men behind the camera more than match up with the wonderful work being done in front of it.

The film's third section follows these three men through a Louisiana swamp, after their jailbreak. Once again, Jarmusch introduces the setting with a tracking shot. But he also spends a lot of time shooting the men walking behind the tall trees. It doesn't take a Master's in Semiotics to see how the trees mirror the bars of the jail cell, from whence they've just come. Is the outside world, to a bunch of outsiders, as much of a prison as the old concrete hotel? That's the message I'm taking away from "Down By Law". But I also take a lot of joy from the film. Its final image, in almost direct contrast to Frost's "Road Less Traveled" (which is referenced at least once before in the film), allows its characters to take both roads that diverge in a wood. And, in a way, it makes all the difference.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD