A review requested by Mandy, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.

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1991's Night on Earth is a crucial pivot point in the offbeat and peculiar career of the offbeat and peculiar American indie director Jim Jarmusch. It is something of the finale to the first stage of his career, as an extremely indie director, who did not merely eschew the trappings of Hollywood-style narrative filmmaking, but seemed openly distrustful and hostile about such things. And so his early career is dominated by movies very much like this one, where there is not a "story" as much as a grouping of people that we swing by to watch for a little while - not really "hanging out", since they're not always friendly to outsiders. More like the goal is clearly to slow life down to the point that we can spend an entire feature in-between the "plot beats", watching to see what goes on for these folks as we do so. Other than his third feature, 1986's Down by Law (Night on Earth was his fifth), his films were all vaguely or explicitly constructed more as short story collections than the novellas of most movies, taking those slow and relaxed slices of life and further subdividing them into tiny fragments of time. I cannot think of a similarly significant American filmmaker to start their career since Jarmusch whose work is so completely outside of the commercial mainstream, especially not ones who seemed so laid back about being outside of the mainstream, and everything up to and including this movie is Jarmusch at his most comfortably, happily removed from that kind of filmmaking.

Beginning with his next feature, 1995's Dead Man, Jarmusch would start to get much more conventional, in specific registers: he'd get higher budgets, he'd work with bigger actors, he's start telling stories that at least belong to recognisable genres, even if they never typified those genres. And we see a little bit of that in Night on Earth, which had enough resources, thanks to a weirdly generous influx of Japanese money (the director's second consecutive relatively "higher" budget film mostly financed out of Japan: his 1989 Mystery Train was even more expensive than this $2 million production, in fact, with a whopping $2.8 million to go around), to shoot in five different cities in four countries. It also has, in the form of Winona Ryder, far and away the biggest actor Jarmusch had worked with up to that point, as well as Gena Rowlands, Giancarolo Esposito, and Rosie Perez, all of whom certainly counted as "names" by the director's standards. So whether this is one of Jarmusch's biggest small films, or one of his smallest little films, it's definitely at a point where something changes.

But none of this necessarily matters to the film itself, which the director treats very much as an expansion on the same kind of probing, experimental work with actors and character creation that had become a standard part of his filmmaking toolkit by 1991. The conceit is gimmicky and simple at the same time: in five cities, in four timezones where it is dark in all of them simultaneously, we watch a 20-30 minute short film about a taxi driver and one of their fares, all of which start at the exact same instant: 7:07 PM in Los Angeles, 10:07 PM in New York, 4:07 AM in Paris and Rome, 5:07 AM in Helsinki. I think you would not be able to guess that it is the small hours of the morning in the Paris and Rome segments, but that's not the point: the point is to tell five standalone stories unified by the kind of human relationship being showcased, the weird anonymous intimacy of a driver and a passenger.

The twin tails that wagged the dog of the concept were that Jarmusch had certain actors he wanted to work with, and certain cities he wanted to do that in, and in this second respect, Night on Earth is actually something of a failure. None of the five cities really makes much of an impact on the story being told there, as all five end up being set largely in the confines of a car interior, as the city whisks by at speed. The closest there is to an exception is the sequence set in New York, which is also the best of them, and I'm not altogether sure if I think that's a coincidence. But there is, in all cases, a definite sense that the story matters less the process of fleshing out the story, giving interesting performers a chance to play with a scene partner in a close, intimate, low-stakes setting. It really is just about watching human interactions, the great subject of all Jarmusch films, and sometimes it works out very well.

Unfortunately, being that this is ultimately an anthology, this also means that sometimes it doesn't work out very well, it being the nature of anthology films to have dead spots. More unfortunately yet, Night on Earth opens on its weakest link, in which Gena Rowlands's harried casting agent, Victoria Snelling, lands in Los Angeles shortly before dusk, and rides into the early nighttime hours with Winona Ryder's Corky, a tough little cookie from the working class who wants to be a mechanic. For a glamorous professional like Victoria, this is just weird, and their conversation is largely built around the light tension of two people with incompatible worldviews learning a bit more about each other.

All nice enough, and suitable for the small amount of space that the film has for it, but there's a crucial problem: Ryder is fucking horrible: it's the worst performance I've ever seen her give in a movie, and not be a remotely small margin. Supposedly, Jarmusch wrote the role of Corky specifically for her to play, and I cannot fathom what that's about, unless he was trying to humiliate her for some inexplicable reason. But there is simply no level at all on which the actor, born to a well-off family and already a well-established leading lady by her twentieth birthday (she was, indeed, not yet twenty when shooting Night on Earth, suggests that she understands the mind of a blue-collar worker. Corky is a squawking, tacky caricature, devoid of anything resembling naturalism, and while I don't think Rowlands is ever consciously trying to send up her co-star, she literally can't help but but completely dominate the film with her own well-honed skill for arch heightened realism. Coupled with this being the least intrinsically interesting conversation - the film industry stuff is pretty inside baseball in a way that sadly suggests a writer who genuinely thought he wasn't doing that - and it's a pretty miserable opening, the worst thing an anthology film can have. It casts a pall over all the rest of the stories, no matter how good they are on their own merits.

And they all have at least something good, though the New York sequence is the only one that I think makes it up to top-tier Jarmusch. Esposito, after being passed by several cabs, gets into a car driven by a cheerful man with a thick German accent, played by Armin-Mueller Stahl, who turns out to be literally incapable of driving a car, so Esposito's YoYo takes over, and the two men have a nice, looping conversation about identity, being an outsider in American culture in different ways, and the maddening beauty of New York. Along the way, they pick up YoYo's girlfriend Angela (Perez), at which point the whole thing just clicks beautifully, and the inside of the cab becomes a sparkling little three-way debate between actors who feel deeply comfortable just riffing and having fun; it's the lightest segment of the film but also the one that most captures the vibe that all of the others keep seeming to strive for.

Over in Europe, we get three various flavors of "almost, but not quite". The Paris segment is the best for the longest: Isaach De Bankolé plays a Ivory Coast immigrant who starts off with a pair of drunk asshole diplomats from Cameroon, who proceed to mock him ceaselessly. Later, he picks up a blind Frenchwoman (Béatrice Dalle), with whom he has a much more productive conversation about (once again) being on the outside of the dominant culture, though this less friendly than the New Yorkers bullshitting, and more of a tense stand-off between two people who would probably be friendlier if they weren't tired and already primed to feel prickly. It's pretty lovely, and the two actors are fantastic, but it ends on a moment of terribly inorganic irony that makes the whole thing kind of cheap. Then we head over to Rome, where Roberto Benigni does a long comic routine after picking up a priest (Paolo Bonicelli). Benigni  and Jarmusch had already worked together twice: on Down by Law, and on the first of the Coffee and Cigarettes shorts, and the first of those, in particular, is the best I've ever seen Benigni in anything. But his segment here requires a much higher tolerance for his motormouthed shtick than I come close to having. The last segment moves to predawn, snow-covered Helsinki, where Matti Pellonpää (a regular collaborator of director Aki Kaurismäki) plays a driver telling the saddest story he knows to passengers played Sakari Kuosmanen (a regular collaborator of director Aki Kaurismäki) and Kari Väänänen (who appeared in multiple Aki Kaurismäki films, but I don't think counts as a "regular"). It's quite a nice piece, the segment where the reliance purely on what the actors can bring to flesh out their non-characters pays off the hardest but, in an absolutely unforseeable turn of events, it basically feels like Jarmusch is doing an Aki Kaurismäki impression, and it's... okay.

So that's one excellent segment, two okay segments, one mildly irritating segment, and one dreadful segment. Not, I am sorry to say, a terribly impressive hit rate; it's Jarmusch at his most curious about humans but also his most sedate as a filmmaker, and on top of its purposefully limited dramatic situations, it's almost completely bereft of formal interest. The director would eventually find interesting things to do with color, but I don't think it's ever what he's best at, and in 1991, it still felt more like a choice being forced on him from outside than a conscious aesthetic strategy. That, plus the inherent limitations of a film where the camera is only ever pointing at the actors through the windshield, leaves us with a movie that just isn't interesting to look at.

But, in the interest of ending on a high note: it is very wonderfully interesting to listen to. After the infamous Francis Ford Coppola bomb One from the Heart, Night on Earth is the second and (to date) final feature film in all of movie history with an original score composed by Tom Waits, who had also played one of the leads in Down by Law, and just in general seems to be somebody who would have been part of the same circles as Jarmusch (tellingly, they were two of the five guest stars featured on the marvelous 1991 cult TV series Fishing with John, starring their mutual acquaintance John Lurie - the third lead in Down by Law). Waits contributed the film's the song, and a very different cover of the same song for the end credits, but mostly he's on-hand to provide instrumentals, and they're incredible - the best thing about Night on Earth, I'd even say. This was near the start of Waits's dive into his "carnival barker from Hell" mode, or whatever we want to call it, the era where he was producing music with a demented jolliness, morbidly lilting and Weill-esque, like some rattletrap post-apocalyptic cabaret at 4:00 AM when only the most dangerous, anger-prone drunks are still skulking around. It's a fucking bizarre fit for the soft-touch human stories Jarmusch and his actors are telling, and yet it works so well: the slight madness of cities at night is given epic grandeur by Waits's music, feeling both livelier but also more broken and slightly deranged than the images themselves. It's a great sonic background that does more to shape the experience of the film than any other individual element, and gives what might otherwise feel a bit too much like a structural experiment that certain jolt of artsy dreaminess of its director's best work.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.