THE DEAD DON’T DIE REVIEW: Deadpan performances capturing the plight of our doomed social exis

There are dozens of filmmakers who get giddy-eyed at the thought of orchestrating an army of extras, all made up to look as if the flesh is rotting on their bones, all shuffling forward as if battling rigor mortis, all moaning and grasping and jaws chomping in anticipation.

Yes, Culturedemandsgeeks are talking about zombies, the undead, walkers, etc…

You get our drift…

Jim Jarmusch is not one of those filmmakers. “I’m more of a vampire guy,” the 66-year-old director admitted, and even if you haven’t seen his stellar addition to that horror subgenre — 2014’s Only Lovers Left Alive — you could have guessed that immortal bloodsuckers are more his monster-panache.

“They’ve seen it all. They’re nocturnal. They never age. They’re fucking cool, man,” he added in the interview with Rolling Stones Magazine last year

It’s cool, Jim, we hear you, man.

Sooooo…

Intriguingly, there’s a throwaway line in Only Lovers Left Alive, where the couple talks about humans being zombies — because they’re not conscious of what’s around them.

“And look how unconscious so much of the world is right now, for the most part, of its impending end. It’s sad and it’s maddening,” he said from that same interview.

And it’s the “maddening” part that really propels The Dead Don’t Die, Jarmusch’s singular take on the shambling-corpses-crave-flesh story that has been a popular mainstay on our screens, culture, and psyche.

PLOT:

Guiding us through Centerville are two police officers, played by Bill Murray and Adam Driver, who take a relaxed approach to law enforcement and a serious approach to coffee and doughnuts. Murray and Driver are two of Jarmusch’s favorite muses.

The police are so used to the routine that in the opening scene when a local hermit named Bob (Tom Waits) responds to their queries about a farmer’s stolen chicken by shooting at them, they get back in their car and drive away.

What will they do when things fall apart and News reports say the world has spun off its axis. A process called “polar fracking”, wreaking havoc on the planet’s diurnal rhythms — sometimes the sun shines in the middle of the night; sometimes darkness falls at noon — and disturbing the slumber of the dead.

The dead start climbing out of their graves and eating people in the usual sloppy, bloody way. The three cops have to deal with the situation, aided for a while by the town’s new coroner (Tilda Swinton). “This will end badly,” says Officer Ronnie Peterson (Driver), and we won’t spoil anything by saying how he knows.

With wry jokes, an impressive cast of Jim’s chums and (uh-hu) Tilda Swinton wreaking zombie havoc with a samurai sword will probably be enough for diehard fans of arthouse oddball flicks.

But this is a testing experience even for people who loved the deadly emotionally-laden script of Only Lovers Left Alive, Jarmusch’s take on the vampire movie and in some ways a sister picture to this one.

The performances are so deadpan (and sometimes, undeadpan perhaps) that most of the cast seem to be shuffling around like the gruesome extras even before the zombies start chewing chunks out of their faces.

Each role has been cast with precisely the actor you expect to see in that sort of part: Driver is a soft-spoken, bespectacled nerd-hulk who gets a little too enthusiastic over the prospect of beheading former neighbors (the chief asks him if he’s ever played minor-league baseball); Swinton is a long-haired, steely-eyed, samurai-slash-elfin badass who seems to exist beyond the concepts of nationality or gender. While Buscemi plays a blandly racist in a red hat whose impending death no one mourns.

Also, we have pop-ups from Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, and endless others.

FUN IDEA:

The screenplay leans heavily on the idea that enough repetition will eventually make a banal line – Adam Driver’s glum assertion that “this is going to end badly”, for example – funny.

SOUR POINTS:

But there’s sloppiness to the storytelling – one subplot, about a group of teenage escapees from a detention center, simply fizzles out. And Jarmusch is not above grave-robbing previous zombie movies for ideas. Like George Romero, he links the relentless, lumbering hunger of the undead to consumption – in this case, however, the monsters are craving wifi coverage rather than the contents of a mall.

We are all zombies now, is the suggestion, whether or not we have a pulse.

But maybe that was the intention of the film in the first place?

The idea of consumption…

The need for more, even after death…

Maybe that’s not a typical slice of Americana, but Jarmusch has never been much for realism.

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Watch the trailer for The Dead Don’t Die.

“I just wanted to do something silly.” Director Jim Jarmusch on the set of ‘The Dead Don’t Die.’

Like much of his filmography, Jarmusch is content to spend some quality time with his characters, and the film’s early scenes show a subtlety of observation that perhaps doesn’t remain as the running time rolls on.

STEVE:

The one politically-minded guy in Centerville seems to be Farmer Miller played by the great (Steve Buscemi), who wears a red baseball cap that reads “Keep America White Again.”

As you can guess, nobody likes him very much, not because of how he might have voted (does anyone vote here?) but because he’s a jerk, excessively attached to his own property rights. Oh, and he does get along with Hank, though, who runs the hardware store and is played by the awesome, Danny Glover to full-effect and comedy parody.

FINAL VERDICT:

The film does have problems and if you are not a fan of the great director, then I’m afraid you may struggle to even love this film for what it is.

I’m not sure I entirely understand the layers of irony and pop-cultural meta-textualism at work here, either, but for Culturedemandsgeeks, Bill Murray, Adam, and Tilda are spot on with their portrayals of the characters they depict in the film.

3.5/5 STARS