DOWN BY LAW – jim jarmusch – 5.6 / 10

Thank god for the 1.5x fast forward on my DVD player. Without it I would’ve certainly fallen asleep less than ten minutes into this film and either never would’ve bothered to finish it or, if I had, it would’ve taken another three days of watching it in short twenty minute bursts with all the lights on and the computer on my lap to keep me from dozing off when the film became too boring.

Even watched at 1.5x speed (so that it took a little over an hour instead of the full 110 minute running time), the film is still only decent, not exactly the classic its inclusion in the Criterion Collection might lead you to believe it is. And, somehow, incredibly, it’s still slow moving. I just can’t understand why people make films like this. Just what is it that the audience is learning by watching Zack (Tom Waits) slowly put on his boots and then, again slowly, polish them in one long static shot that it couldn’t just as easily have learned in a couple of quick cuts that took a third of the time?

The only thing that happens when you watch a long take like that one is that your mind starts to wander. Your eyes start searching other parts of the frame for something interesting. Sometimes, if you’re really into the film, this might get you thinking more deeply about the characters or the setting or whatever. Other times, and this is what’s more likely to happen with me, it takes you completely out of the film. In moments like that, I find myself thinking about the set decorator and why she chose that specific photo to include on the nightstand or the costumer and why he chose to put the character in those boots. And then, if the shot goes on long enough, my thoughts stray completely away from the film and before I know it I’ve distracted myself to the point of not even noticing what’s happening on the screen anymore.

I guess that doesn’t speak all that well of me as a viewer. Basically I’m saying that I need to be constantly stimulated or else I’m not going to be able to pay attention to your movie. (And there is some truth in that. One of the key benefits of watching a film at 1.5x speed is that you really have be on your toes to hear everything that’s said, which serves to keep you more engaged in the film than you might be otherwise.) But that’s not the whole story. The best I can figure it is that Jarmusch and his ilk (pretty much every European and independent American filmmaker) make movies like this because they like a slow, deliberate, almost elegiac pace. It lends, I guess, a sense of realism and thoughtfulness to both the characters and the films themselves.

But there are plenty of films I love that are very slowly paced (Eyes Wide Shut, The Road to Perdition and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to name three) and during which, at no point, was I ever thinking about what I was going to have for dinner or whether or not I left the bedroom lights on. So it’s not the pace by itself that turns me off to films like this. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s not the pace alone. It’s the slow pace coupled with the ramshackle production values and the loosely scripted dialogue that dooms these sorts of films to mediocrity in my eyes. If I become bored at any point during a film like The Road to Perdition and find my eyes wandering the frame looking at something other than the actors, there are plenty of things still within the world the filmmaker has created to draw my attention. I can examine the spectacular cinematography or the impeccable set design or I can try to puzzle out why exactly this particular shot was chosen and what it’s supposed to symbolize in the context of the larger film. But with something like Down By Law, given that same opportunity, there isn’t much to be gleaned from any of those things. The cinematography is fine but mostly just gets out of the way of the story and all too often succumbs to that handheld faux-documentary crap that typifies so many Indie (TM) films. And the dialogue seems like it might well have been made up on the set the day of the shoot. A closer examination of either of these things (or any other of the many constituent parts that make up any single shot or scene) doesn’t seem like it would be particularly rewarding or illuminating. I don’t think there’s much to be gained by thinking about them overmuch. And so I don’t; and my mind wanders; and then either I’ve missed something that will turn out to be important later on or I’ve fallen asleep.

So, yeah, thank god my DVD player lets me watch movies at 1.5x speed. That way I can get through films like this in one sitting, quickly write up something about it, file it in the ‘seen it’ column and move on to something that I’d rather be watching. That’s pretty silly, I guess, and probably begs the question of why I’m even bothering to watch a film that I’m really not getting anything out of. The answer is that you never know. You never know where the seed for an idea that will grow to become something interesting will come from. You never know if, buried within all this standard Indie (TM) film stuff, there just might be something transcendent. So I watch and hope. And mostly I’m disappointed. But that’s okay. My Netflix queue is long and I’m still (relatively) young.