NIGHT ON EARTH
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Five cab rides in five major cities all
happening at the same time and none really go anywhere. This
film is mostly about personality and talk, but you won't
remember any of the cab rides any more than your last real
cab ride. This is Jim Jarmusch's most commercial film to
date, but it is still not greatly recommendable. Rating: 0
(-4 to +4).
Jim Jarmusch's films are an acquired taste. In some ways they are just too realistic to be really enthralling. Particularly in his first film, STRANGER THAN PARADISE, his characters always think for five or ten seconds before speaking a single sentence. This made listening to the conversations just a bit frustrating, which I suppose was the point. After his DOWN BY LAW, his most recent film was MYSTERY TRAIN, three interconnected stories taking place the same day and night in Memphis, Tennessee.
NIGHT ON EARTH is five stories involving taxi cab rides taking place at the same instant. The stories are less connected than those of MYSTERY TRAIN. Each takes place in a different city: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki.
In Los Angeles, a rather butch tomboy cab driver (played by Winona Ryder) drives a casting agent (played by Gena Rowlands). Each is discouraged by the way things are going on her job and the other may be able to help. In New York, a black man (played by Giancarlo Esposito) hails a cab and finds his driver (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl), a recent East German emigre', knows nothing about New York or driving a cab. Esposito's frustration gives way to friendship as the German is pulled into his life, but then the German ends up worse than when he started. In Paris, a black cab driver (played by Isaach De Bakole') first is the butt of racist remarks from two drunk black passengers. He throws them out of his cab and picks up instead a blind woman who is non-discriminatory--she has a nasty attitude toward everyone.
Rome is the site of the fourth story where a very funny and inventive cab driver (played by Roberto Begnini) confesses his sins hilariously to a priest in his cab. It may or may not be a joke, but it has serious consequences. The final sequence takes place in Helsinki. This time the driver is played by Matti Pellonpaa (who played the manager in the worth- looking-for LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA). He picks up three drunk passengers who tell him a sad story that he matches with one of his own.
Any of these segments might add needed texture to somebody's film about a cab driver but it overall is a film that had the viewer asking at the end of each segment, "Yeah? So?" Perhaps the idea, like in MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, is just to let you hear the conversation, but since the characters are so contrived there is little feel that these are real conversations. And lulls in the conversation tend only to stretch out a film already too long for many audiences.
NIGHT ON EARTH is a just-okay entry in Jarmusch's filmography. I give it a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale. It is intriguing to compare Jarmusch's films to LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA. Aki Kaurismaki recognizably borrows from Jarmusch's style, an observation I made before I had realized that Jarmusch also acts in THE LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA. So the two directors have some cross-fertilization. Yet of the two, Kaurismaki seems the better director. Kaurismaki totally avoids the "so what?" response that so often comes with Jarmusch's work.
Mark R. Leeper
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