Coffee and Cigarettes:
take 1 by Elbert Ventura
take 2 by Tom Carlisle

Smoke and Mirrors
Elbert Ventura on Coffee and Cigarettes

In his extravagant assessment of Dead Man for the BFI Modern Classics series, Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that his enthusiasm for director Jim Jarmusch in the years preceding that movie had become “somewhat qualified by an overall sense that he was coasting, adopting the role of a sophisticated urban entertainer without significantly expanding his talents or in some cases adequately exploring his territory.” Consider that the epitaph for Coffee and Cigarettes. Made by a director preoccupied with life’s empty minutes, the movie is itself dead time, the nothingness that merely holds achievements past and future in useful context.

Not really terrible as much as inconsequential, Coffee and Cigarettes is so wispy it practically slides off the screen. Only audience good will and Jarmusch’s hipster rep seem to be pinning it up there. Comprised of 11 vignettes connected by the titular motifs, this anthology of bullshit marches out a reliably cool, multi-culti cast, split into discreet duos and trios and shot in lustrous black-and-white. Seemingly improvised banter is shared across a table as Jarmusch urges us to sit back and watch the magic unfold. The alchemical fireworks never do go off, however, a failing confirmed by the smattering of forced titters from isolated pockets in the audience.

The first vignette, starring Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright, each in his respective wired and tired persona, gets things off to a wobbly start. The promise of a combustible mix fizzles early, as the bit strains for eccentricity, in lieu of something to say. Filmed in 1986 for SNL, the opening sketch was in fact the genesis for the entire project. In the following years, Jarmusch filmed a short starring Joie and Cinque Lee, Spike’s siblings, and Steve Buscemi, set in a Memphis diner, and another starring Iggy Pop and Tom Waits holding an ugly summit at a California joint. With an eye toward releasing a compendium of the tête-a- têtes, he completed the rest recently, making tenuous thematic connections across the shorts.

The scorecard at the end is unimpressive: six outright duds, three passable bits, and only two successes. The irony is that the best sketches also happen to be the most conventional. In “Cousins,” Cate Blanchett plays herself and her resentful cousin, Shelly, meeting for coffee in a posh hotel lobby. Blanchett’s Cate is regal, classy and generous—the way we imagine Blanchett herself to be. The punky Shelly, meanwhile, exudes passive-aggressive envy, her self-deprecation doubling as a sly prick on the self-conscious Cate’s conscience.

Equally preoccupied with the power disparities immanent in celebrity, “Cousins?” builds on the themes of the Blanchett short. Brit actor Alfred Molina excitedly meets compatriot and rising star Steve Coogan for tea at an L.A. cafe. Molina has big news: an amateur genealogist, he has discovered that he and Steve may in fact be distant relatives. Feigning interest (badly) in Molina and his discovery, Coogan is the quintessential careerist, unable to muster any regard for the eager—and conspicuously less famous—Molina. The longest of the sketches, it also provides the neatest resolution, with a comeuppance that puts the brash up-and-comer in his place.

Featuring celebrities playing “themselves”—one of the movie’s motifs—the two shorts also possess unfashionable virtues: dramatic tension, discernible arcs. Next to the limp doodles surrounding it, they seem like paragons of narrative economy and good acting. Jarmusch tries to spin coherent themes out of his collection, but what we get are half-baked “meditations” on fame, persona, and power. The penultimate entry, “Delirium,” finds Bill Murray playing waiter to RZA and GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, and begging them, “Don’t tell anyone I’m Bill Murray!” Played strictly for laughs, the sketch underscores the irony of being an actor—of slipping on a mask for a living, and being stuck with your own famous face the rest of the time. Much like the rest of the film, however, “Delirium” dissolves into an indulgent lark, with Jarmusch clearly more interested in letting his stars do their shtick than tackling the stray ideas that arise.

That nonchalance, a defining trait of Jarmusch’s movies, here becomes something more—or, rather, something less. Mistaking lazy for loose-limbed, he displays a strikingly high opinion of the empty minutes that his friends fill. A filmmaker like Abbas Kiarostami shows the passage of time out of respect for human routine and mortality. With its panoply of famous faces, Coffee and Cigarettes nullifies this promise. The kind of movie that gets played at boho parties in Williamsburg lofts, the movie verges on disrespect for the audience, who is expected to happily pay $10 to spend some downtime with these icons of cool.

In its obsession with formal variation, Coffee and Cigarettes is reminiscent of Hal Hartley’s Flirt. Hartley’s experiment used recurring elements to tell the same doomed love story across different contexts. Flawed as it was—and even Hartley knew it, inserting a preemptive critique in the movie itself—Flirt at least used its conceit to express a specific idea: a determinist worldview of modern romance. In Coffee and Cigarettes, the repetition of certain ideas, both visual and thematic, never really coheres into anything novel or interesting. Less virtuoso jazz than indulgent jam, the movie offers a pale imitation of intellectual engagement.

At its best, Coffee and Cigarettes can be a diverting trifle. That’s not so bad if we didn’t expect more, for this is, after all, the work of a filmmaker who made two of the greatest American movies of the last 25 years, Down by Law and Dead Man. (Stranger than Paradise I prefer to think of as merely seminal.) What separates those two from the rest of his oeuvre is the way form and content converge to produce breathtaking and incisive art. His sights set nowhere near that high here, Jarmusch settles for the low-hanging fruit of indie eclecticism. This cliquish throwaway is genial and harmless enough, but you can bet you won’t have as much fun as the people up on the screen.

“It’s not a very healthy lunch, just the coffee and cigarettes.”—one of the several lines repeated throughout the 11 short films that make up Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, and it stuck out in my mind when I thought back to my first experience with the movie. It was opening weekend, and the crew I was with was eager for their first taste of Jarmusch in quite a long while. Going in, expectations were unrealistically high, but nevertheless, after the end credits rolled, I knowingly and foolishly made the mistake of asking my companions what they thought of the film. The response was oddly hostile at first, as if some stark act of betrayal had just occurred. But after talking about how much they disliked the movie, and after enumerating the ways in which many of the shorts disappointed them, they finally got around to enthusiastically praising two or three episodes. This would occur again, over the weeks and months since that initial viewing, when Coffee and Cigarettes came up in conversation. It seems that most people were compelled to simply write the movie off, even if again and again they found the same two or three shorts to be particularly enchanting. And therein lies the problem: Just like the often delightful substances they use as connective tissue, the shorts that stand out in Coffee and Cigarettes are beneficial only in small doses. Too many small, seemingly inconsequential moments can lead to a sense of overwhelming malaise; an hour and a half of concentrated caffeine and nicotine use leaves one feeling slightly dizzy and perhaps a bit bored.

Ultimately, Jarmusch is working with such a thin premise—two to three people having a conversation over, well, cigarettes and coffee—that it seems perverse to have any expectations at all beyond what is promised out of an encounter at a café: some pleasant conversation, an interesting anecdote, a quiet moment away from the hustle and bustle of daily responsibilities. But Coffee and Cigarettes courts higher expectations than it can meet not only because of its status as a feature film but because of the high profile stunt casting Jarmusch engages in—Tom Waits meets Iggy Pop in the “Somewhere in California” episode, Bill Murray meets Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA and RZA in “Delirium,” rock stars du jour Meg and Jack White show up in “Jack Shows Meg his Tesla Coil.” It’s no wonder that these shorts are some of the least enjoyable, especially considering that even when they do show sparks of potential they are overwhelmed by a quirkiness that keeps genuine engagement firmly at bay.

The shorts that stand out from the lackluster pack in Coffee and Cigarettes have a natural flow and sublimely unspool at a lackadaisical pace. In “No Problem” old friends Isaach De Bankolé and Alex Descas skirt around some unnamed, and possibly nonexistent, issue that De Bankolé is convinced is troubling Descas while the ambient sounds of the Skatalites play quietly in the background; in “Cousins” Cate Blanchett does double duty as herself and her cousin, Shelly, the latter full of resentment over the former’s celebrity status which is met with the frustrating false humility that celebrities use to counter that inevitable reaction; and in “Cousins?” Steve Coogan, over the course of a cup of tea and a cigarette, makes a masterful journey from egotism to bald opportunism to embarrassment in the face of Alfred Molina’s giddy excitement over the shared bloodline he’s discovered between Coogan and himself. Each one of these shorts is remarkable in its own right, and each, individually, successfully explores the overarching themes that Coffee and Cigarettes as a whole tries (and often fails) to expound upon—paradoxically made all that much more powerful when taken alone, standing outside of the repetitiveness that hampers the feature. Each one, when considered by itself, tells us something about the way in which human relationships and their dependence upon ritual works; the uncomfortable, forced qualities of first time meetings or reunions; the rampant egos we often try to mask with politesse; and the desire, and seeming impossibility, of communicating your position to others. “No Problem,” “Cousins,” and “Cousins?” are memorable because they avoid the more forced qualities of the shorts that surround them, favoring instead a strong sense of reality. In fact, the one concession to unreality they do make is in the service of the other major theme of Coffee and Cigarettes: nostalgia for a time when you could conceivably have a cigarette with your coffee in New York or Los Angeles.

The juxtaposition of great filmmaking with substandard fare is a common problem in the omnibus films of Jarmusch. The first short film in the triptych Mystery Train, “Far From Yokohama,” in which a young Japanese couple explores Memphis in search of the roots of either Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins, depending who you ask, is by far my favorite Jarmusch film. The wistful romanticism of being in a foreign land, the poses of cool that dominate the youthful demeanor, the beautiful shots of the couple trudging around Memphis hit me every time. But the second two episodes fall completely flat. (And considering that Joe Strummer appears in the final part, that’s saying a lot.) In fact, the arc from great promise to sullied disappointment is so pronounced that I’m reluctant to even pony up the $3 to rent Mystery Train again, even if this means denying myself the pleasure of “Far From Yokohama.” This pattern repeats itself in Night on Earth, where each film follows a cabbie and a passenger in a different city. There seems to be less consensus as far as which of these shorts are the stand-outs (the episodes with Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands in L.A. and Isaach De Bankolé and Béatrice Dalle in Paris come to mind), but very few people are inclined to praise the film as a single piece. A cynic couldn’t be faulted for suspecting that Jarmusch has cobbled together more than one of these themed shorts in order to package some of his better shorter work for distribution as a full length feature film.

In many ways Coffee and Cigarettes and Jarmusch’s other short film collections remind me of much of the work of songwriters like Ryan Adams or Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard, who are by any definition masters of their craft yet almost completely without the ability to tell their masterpieces from their toss offs, and as a result put out one disappointing album after another, where the good to bad ratio leans inevitably towards the bad, and whose great songs are destined for mixes where the fans separate the wheat from the chaff for them. Perhaps the best way to take this strain of Jarmusch’s filmmaking, then, is as inadvertently ahead of its time, best suited for the age of bit torrent file sharing and DVD burning. One could make a pretty great DVD mix of the best of Jarmusch’s shorts, separating them from the clumsy features they once were part of, freeing them from the unwieldy sandbags of needlessly repetitive overarching themes. That way you wouldn’t just have the coffee and the cigarettes but a complete and balanced meal.