Dead Man

with Johnny Depp, Crispin Glover, John Hurt
Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch
(Miramax)
by Mark Phinney

If you are familiar with the works of Jim Jarmusch, then you are quick to recognize the master’s brush strokes: the dry humor, dead landscapes and twisted storylines that call for deadpan sentiments and stark realizations. These elements are all in evidence in his latest offering, Dead Man, with the almost too out-there Johnny Depp. I overheard someone uttering that this is another Depp film with him making eyes at the camera; well, let me tell you that it’s not, and even if it was that’d be okay, too. Depp, if nobody knows it yet, is one of the finest actors of our day, and the Jarmusch format fits him like a grey suit.

Dead Man is a Jarmusch Western (!), and a fine one at that. Depp plays Bill Blake, a button-down accountant who, en route to a new job, gets abandoned in a run-down town called Machine. (You get a clue that the journey’s going to be strange when your guide is Crispin Glover). In a case of mistaken attitude, Blake finds himself on the run from trackers, lawmen, and outlaws through the backroads and bleak woods of Machine. Depp, by way of Jarmusch’s trademark scenarios, transforms himself into a true western everyman, a real loner where, in Jarmusch’s previous works, the protagonists at least had the choice of either the road to Lonerville or the path to herodom. A Western does not necessarily mean shootouts and saloons – they are the stories of lone men in worlds that were not made for them. Hunter, writer, poet, cowboy – they all mean the same thing.