Coffee and Cigarettes
review by Jeffrey Overstreet | posted 5/14/2004
 1 of 4
If you could sit down and have a cup of coffee with anybody in the world alive today, who would you choose?
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has done even better than that. He's brought together many of his favorite pop culture figures and filmed them while they talk to each other over cups of coffee. He's been doing this for twenty years, and now moviegoers get to enjoy the results. Coffee and Cigarettes is a film for people who want something more than predictable entertainment. It's for people who love to watch people.
GZA, The RZA, and Bill Murray
Coffee and Cigarettes is the latest experimental entry in a fascinating career. Jarmusch's consistently challenging and innovative work has earned him cult status in independent filmmaking circles. For this film, he abandoned plot entirely and instead focused on documenting a variety of amusing, thoughtful, sometimes surreal interactions between his former cast members and various other musicians, actors, and familiar pop culture figures. This isn't a documentary—the performers are working from sketchy scripts that lead to understated punchlines. But the pleasure of watching this collection of brief meetings is in the contrasting personalities, expressions, and improvisations that fill up the minimalist material.
Some of the meetings are more rewarding experiments than others.
The film opens with a meeting of spectacularly different personalities. The flamboyant and erratic Roberto Benigni—who starred in my favorite Jarmusch comedy Down by Law, as well as the Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful—joins comedian Steven Wright, whose photograph belongs next to the word "deadpan" in the dictionary. Benigni's faltering English and Wright's worried mumbling lead to a feeble-at-best conversation that culminates in a moment of unlikely decision. This meeting was filmed all the way back in 1986.
The meeting between British comedian Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People) and actor Alfred Molina is a hilarious play on Molina's continuing lack of fame despite the incredible run of great films in which he has performed (Frida, Magnolia, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the upcoming Spider-Man 2). Coogan treats Molina like an annoying fan instead of as the great actor of stage and screen that he is. The plot thickens when Molina presents a startling discovery he's made, and Coogan's disregard for his colleague backfires.
Fans of actress Cate Blanchett (The Lord of the Rings, Veronica Guerin, Elizabeth) will be delighted to see her deliver the film's finest performance. Blanchett plays herself in a meeting with her cousin, who shows up at a ritzy hotel during a film junket to make sour remarks about the attitudes of the rich and famous. Blanchett plays both sides of the conversation so convincingly, some viewers may never figure out the joke.
My favorite meeting takes place between French-Canadian actors Alex Descas and Isaach de Bankole, who say very little out loud, but their interplay of critical and bewildered glances becomes a comedy in itself.
There's a casual verbal sparring match between a couple of opinionated Italians (Joe Rigano and Vinny Vella), laced with excessive use of a certain expletive (you can guess which one) that might be offensive if it was used in a meaningful fashion. But only those who cannot tolerate encounters with profanity will come away without some affection for these cussing old coots. Sure, swearing, like smoking, is a bad habit. It just pollutes conversation and communication. And it usually betrays a certain sense of insecurity and weakness in those who do it. But sometimes characters who do swear can be endearing if only for how oblivious they are to their own foolish speech. As it is, the two fill the stereotypes formed from a thousand gangster flicks, reacting as if the entire world appalls them.
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