Vampires can be classy, cultivated and artistic – nowhere more so than in Jim Jarmusch’s fey tribute Only Lovers Left Alive of 2013. Zombies, though, have rather less potential for refinement, tending to the rude and grasping. They’re deplorables, really.
Now, in the latest of his cool comedy genre-benders, Jarmusch gives us his version of zombie apocalypse, the end-of-the-world scenario invented by George A Romero in his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, much referenced in this film.
We’re in generic America, Centerville, population 738, “a real nice place”. Local police chief Cliff (Bill Murray, in his fourth film with Jarmusch) and his sidekick Ronnie (Adam Driver, star of Jarmusch’s last, Paterson — this is a repertory company piece) have noticed things are getting strange.
Thanks to “polar fracking”, the Earth has tilted on its axis. Night and day are confused and the dead are beginning to rise. A couple of “coffee zombies” (one of them being Iggy Pop in minimal make-up) lurch into the local diner and chomp on the nice ladies running it, before grabbing a caffeine hit.
Soon there are lots of these ghouls about, up for a bite as convention demands but also driven by reprehensible appetites for consumer goodies, gasping out demands. Candy! Chardonnay! Xanax! Snapple! Wi-fi! Bluetooth! Siri! Fashion! In Romero’s shopping-mall-set Dawn of the Dead (1978), the persistence of consumer instincts among the brain-dead is suggested quite balletically.
Here it’s only thus cursorily signalled, a lazy joke. But then Jarmusch disdains creating suspense, sustained interaction or trying to involve us with his characters. He hardly bothers to set up the horror story before spoofing it. He goes meta before there’s a fiction. What he loves are vignettes and curios, lollopingly assembled.
Here Centerville scores high. There’s the wild man of the woods, Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), who knows better than anyone what’s going down, having opted out of materialism years ago. Racist Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi) sports a cap with the slogan “Keep America White Again” and keeps a dog called Rumsfeld. Blasting away at the zombies, Farmer Miller denounces them mainly as “trespassers!”
The geeky owner of the town’s combined petrol station and horror memorabilia store, Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones) supplies lots of knowing allusions. When a party of stylish hipsters (led by Selena Gomez) rolls in to town in a 1968 Pontiac LeMans, he recognises straightaway that it’s classic, “very George Romero”.
The town’s new undertaker, Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton) has apparently been dropped from space. Swinton, in her fourth role for Jarmusch, is a sleek, pallid, Scottish Samurai sword-wielding oddity, walking robotically but beheading the deplorables gracefully, just too cool for them to touch. It never becomes really clear what part she plays here other than conferring her own stylishness once more — but then much the same could be said of many of the other roles.
Three kids in the town’s correctional facility manage to escape when their bullying guards fall victim — but then they’re just frankly forgotten from the story. It falls to Chloë Sevigny as Centerville’s third police officer, Mindy, actually to get upset about what’s going on, as it were to be the film’s token scream queen, but even she remains stilted.
All the actors here do that special Jarmusch acting, speaking slowly and pedantically, looking away, striking poses. Even the zombies are tiresomely affected in their deportment. When this film premiered at Cannes, almost every single reviewer managed some undead/deadpan pun — but that’s to flatter the similarity.
Jarmusch further demolishes basic plausibility by having Murray and Driver chat knowingly about having seen the script and recognising the film’s rollicking theme song. When the zombies are decapitated, they collapse in a puff of dust and ashes, for that’s all they’re worth (little as this squares with their bloody noshing). Surveying the closing mayhem, Hermit Bob explicitly tells us they’re “remnants of the materialist people — I guess they’ve been zombies all along … ashes to ashes, dust to dust”. It’s a shame that Tom Waits doesn’t get to sing this little editorial.
So here’s a sententious eco-take on zombiedom. It’s also a snooty reproof to the popularity of that super-soap, The Walking Dead. Comedy-horror can work — Shaun of the Dead made a much better job of it (if you can stomach Simon Pegg). But why subvert an inherently unreal genre anyway, unless it’s to feel superior to your own interest? If you want an exciting zombie movie as an antidote, I recommend Sang-ho Yeon’s terrific Train to Busan.
