GHOST DOG
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Artisan Entertainment Director: Jim Jarmusch Writer: Jim Jarmusch Cast: Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Cliff Gorman, Henry Silva, Isaach De Bankole, Tricia Vessey, Victor Argo, Gene Ruffini, Richard Portnow, Camille Winbush
When the new millennium began last month, the world did not end nor did terrorists succeed in striking a single blow against the West. The day came and went with no changes. But if you look from a slightly longer perspective of the past decade, the biggest change appears to be the loosening of a sense of loyalty that companies have toward their workers not only here but even in Japan--where large companies had heretofore guaranteed their employees lifetime jobs. The nineties was the decade of downsizing, of shifting alliances, and large segments of the working population who were formerly dedicated to unionism found that there was simply no organization around any more to defend their interests.
Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai," dramatizes this dereliction of allegiance in his own quirky way. The Czech-German-French-Irish filmmaker known to all movie buffs mostly for his eccentric comedy "Stranger Than Paradise" (about a bland young man, his dimwitted friend, and his 16-year-old cousin who come to America from Hungary), and "Mystery Train" (about a trio of foreigners who stay in a sleazy hotel), retains his style of slow pacing and idiosyncratic characters this time around as well. "Ghost Dog" intersperses the rules and regulations of two disparate groups, the Japanese samurai and the American Mafia, to dramatize the decline of the old loyalties and the inability of anyone, however disciplined, to restore the codes of respect and honor of previous generations.
While the movie is punctuated by intermittent and abundant shoot-outs, Jarmusch casts a meditative demeanor around his latest project, highlighting close-ups of the brooding, isolated and generally friendless Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a professional hit man for the Mafia. Attacked in a racial incident by a band of thugs, Ghost Dog's life had been apparently saved by a mid-level mobster named Louie (John Tormey), who guns down the man's assailant. The expression "I owe you one" takes on a profound meaning, as Ghost Dog, a student of the culture of the Japanese samurai whose bible is the 18th century warrior text "Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai," pledges himself as a retainer to his unlikely new master. But when Ghost Dog hits the lover of mob boss Ray Vargo (Henry Silva) while the boss's daughter is still in the room, Vargo cannot forgive Louie for failing to put the emotionally distant young woman on the bus before the assassination. He orders Louie to hit Ghost Dog or forfeit his own life.
What could have been just another B movie about gangsters takes on a special resonance as Jarmusch introduces some of the oddest characters, such as the obligatory old mob "uncle" who wears glasses, leans on a cane, and occasionally spurts out the most unusual racist epithets. An African immigrant who sells ice cream from a truck and speaks a French that no one else can understand is yet another curious individual--given to announcing over his loudspeaker each day that "ice cream is healthy...I heard this from a nutritionist on the radio today...lots of calcium." The vendor (Isaach de Bankole) and Ghost Dog do not understand a word of each other's conversation but are best friends and chess partners, and they look out for each other.
While "Ghost Dog" is too sluggish to be compelling and is dependent on a taciturn title character, the movie has an exciting hip-hop soundtrack by a group known as The RZA ("Rizzah"), and a few compelling scenes such as one in which Whitaker practices some swordplay on the roof he shares with his carrier pigeons in a scene reminiscent of a key vista in Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's Danish feature "Mifune." Whitaker is thoroughly believable as a kind of Don Quixote (or, in a sense, Sancho Panza) who rebels against the passing of the old order of chivalry and continues to fight windmills in an age becoming bereft of loyalty codes. We root for the guy--who kills only criminals--and wonder what advantage still lies in being a wiseguy in the 21st Century. The goodfellas in this movie can't even pay the rent in the clubhouse, which is situated in a Chinese restaurant, and for diversion idle away their days watching TV cartoons featuring Felix the Cat and Woody Woodpecker. As proof of the mobsters' dysfunction, look closely at the boss' daughter, Louise Vargo (Tricia Vessey), a basket case of emotional deadness and intellectual vapidity. Jarmusch displays a neat, occasionally comic, but ultimately flat blend of disparate people who--as the tagline says--live by the code and die by the code.
Rated R. Running Time: 116 minutes. (C) 2000 Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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