Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law opens with rolling shots of New Orleans townhouses) tenements, the down and out on a crummy side-street. From there we enter into two variations on the theme of domestic disharmony, Jack’s and Zack’s, and on to a story set in a South that never was, by a film maker who, until the film was written and financed, had never been there. 

Jarmusch, a young man with silver hair from Cleveland, first made a name for himself with his remark ably successful, shoestring budgeted Stranger Than Paradise. A black-and white feature film about two small time emigre cardsharks and a newly arrived cousin, with whole scenes filmed from a single camera angle (mostly because Jarmusch couldn’t afford anything else), the movie was stranger than nearly anything. But it won Jarmusch kudos from the critics and even accolades from the great Japanese director Kurosawa. 

Like Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law is also done in black and white. One reason he decided to work in it again, says Jarmusch, is he thought it would leave the year the action takes place imprecise. In that he succeeds-this is a film without a year or even a season (for this is the South, 

remember); once upon a time, he could begin; long, or perhaps not so long, ago . . . In a modernized, odd way, the film is as perverse and peculiar as a Grimm fairy tale; it is equally dateless.

And, like the characters in Jarmusch’s first film, the leads in this one have no roots and precious little past. Jack and Zack, the two losers who end up getting thrown in the Orleans Parish Prison for crimes they didn’t even commit, could perhaps never have been children, never have lived else where, never been anything other than the fired disc jockey and small-time pimp they are when we first meet them.

What turns their lives around, fuels the movie, steals the show, and makes this film as wonderfully funny as Stranger Than Paradise was oppressively silent, is Roberto Benigni, the Italian comedian and director whom Jarmusch met while in Italy and for whom he wrote the part of Roberto.

Roberto first enters the movie the night Zack (played by Tom Waits) is sitting in the garbage, blind drunk on Wild Turkey and the misery of having lost another job and his girlfriend. “It’s a sad and beautiful world,” Roberto says; a bit of English he has clearly carefully prepared. “Buzz off,” says Zack. “Buzz off to you too,” Roberto responds happily, as though Zack had wished him a good evening.

Roberto next appears in prison, where he is assigned to the same cell that Jack and Zack, previously strangers, had been put into. Jack and Zack have tried ineptly to get to know each other, but it’s been the blind leading the blind, or, more accurately, as Jarmusch’s constant concern is with characters choking on their own inarticulateness, the dumb singing. Roberto changes all that. He provides a constant stream of broken English and energy that the two Americans desperately need, though they only gradually come to realize it. 

With some dinosaurs, it is said, it took seven minutes for a signal from the brain to be translated into movement. Jack and Zack can be very nearly as slow. But their slowness doesn’t come from brainlessness so much as from defeat; from being love less and utterly lost; from missing something they have, perhaps, never known. It’s as if as children they were never held, and now that they are grown, something has cut them off from the women who try to care for them, and from even the simply reasonable behavior that would allow them some small measure of success.

Even Roberto, who loves easily, can only heal them a little bit. After the three break out of jail (it is Roberto who discovers the way, of course) and make their way somehow through a Louisiana swamp, Roberto finds his true love in an Italian girl improbably stranded in Luigi’s Tin-Top, a restau rant she inherited that’s stuck on the edge of the swamp. He plans to settle there with Nicoletta and wants his friends to stay, but they can’t. Drifters to the end, they make their way to the fork in the road, one going East and one going West, though Nicoletta is unsure of her directions, and neither Jack nor Zack know which way goes which. It doesn’t really matter.

Ross McElwee, in his very funny, low-budget comedic documentary Sherman’s March, is similarly lost and floating in another South. I-laving se cured funds for a documentary on General Sherman, whose march to the sea is not forgotten south of Mary land, McElwee suddenly got dumped by his girlfriend and found himself without the heart or interest to tackle Sherman. Thus the movie became more about the devastation various Southern women wreak on McElwee, rather than about anything Sherman did to Atlanta or its environs. 

Sherman’s March is a form of cinema verité, where nothing is rehearsed or scripted—which just goes to show that real life is weirder and funnier than anything you or I could possibly make up. McElwee’s characters are all real—from his sister and her plastic surgery, to Claudia’s survivalist friends, to McElwee’s former girl friend, to Karen’s new boyfriend Cam and his incessant and incomprehensible trading of life-sized plastic animals.

This isn’t the imagined South Jarmusch created. But if McElwee’s isn’t a mythological South, it’s a South mythologized. Certainly Charleen, an old friend and former teacher of McElwee’s who is determined to get him fixed up and settled down, who is so imposing, bawdy and funny, is larger than life. This is despite the fuel that, seeing as McElwee’s camera is always perched on his shoulder, even during some pretty painful conversations, this film is intimate in a way no regular staged film can be. (I think ilia! this intimacy is just what cinema verité directors got into this kind of film making to achieve and is the reason they prefer the camera-slung-across the shoulder—technique to the more normal, silent, omnipresent third party technique all feature films and most documentaries assume.)

So McElwee has managed to stitch together (with even an occasional tie-in to the original subject of his film, William Tecumseh) a homey sort of tale. Sherman’s March has none of the occasional ominousness of Down By Law (an ominousness which is never overt but never goes away, either), and Ross McElwee as the central character of his own movie is reassuringly inarticulate even as Jack and Zack are slightly creepily so. But if only in bringing the camera lens in so close on a South that for both film makers may be more cliche than reality, they have transformed a little daily life into the rudderless, fumbling stuff of legend.

 

[Down By Law, written and directed by Jim Jarmusch; produced by Black Snake/Grokenberger Film; released by Island Pictures]

[Sherman’s March, written and directed by Ross McElwee]