For a languid, unfeasibly hip kind of guy, Mr. Jarmusch can sure divide a room. The killjoys would have it that Jimmy’s metaphysical squiggles for m’eh-sayers go nowhere and go nowhere very slowly. His champions would broadly agree, but they’d smoke a Marlboro and take their sweet time about telling you as much. Truth is, like God or cinnamon chewing gum, you either get Jarmusch’s De Stijl whimsy or you don’t. Happily, intimidated by the depths of the director’s capacity for cool and possible reprisals from the Sons of Lee Marvin, even his more vicious detractors generally have the good grace to stay quiet. Deep down, they suspect that the Elect are in the Fun House, riding the Mystery Train, kicking back with coffee and reading copies of Rashomon.
All of Jarmusch’s films are essentially Dylanological doodles, and Coffee And Cigarettes represents 18 years worth of fleeting daydreaming froth. If you know the secret Jarmusch handshake, this insubstantiality won’t be a problem. Chances are, you love doodles. You know that doodles represent art at its most glorious stage -the potential is limitless, the idea is pure and the enterprise is unadulterated by labour (okay, now I’m just babbling - apologies). If, however, you’re not with the programme, er, well, didn’t I tell you to stop reading several sentences ago?
Beginning life as Strange To Meet You- a six-minute Saturday Night Live sketch in which the usually insufferable Roberto Benigni (Kill! Hurt! Destroy! Etc) hooks up with Steven Wright for, well, coffee and cigarettes - Jarmusch has gone on to build a collection of eleven similarly themed freely-associative out-take shorts. Conceptually speaking, it’s a no-brainer. People hook up for caffeine fixes and smoking. They babble meaninglessly and to little discernable communicative effect. They await Godot, or at least it seems that way. In between awkward silences, the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA persuades Bill Murray to gargle oven-cleaner, Tom Waits menacingly reduces the still boyish Iggy into a bundle of jittery nerve endings and Jack White shows Meg his malfunctioning Tesla coil. Predictably, Meg, while making eyes like Maria Falconetti, knows exactly how to fix it. Still waters and all.
Almost despite itself, Coffee nearly coalesces through recurrent themes of cousinship, ill communication and resonant transformers. For the most part though, the film is so joyfully self-indulgent and ADD-stricken, it makes a certain Austin dweller look positively high-concept. Oddly, despite these two gentlemen’s shared slacker voyeurism and indie-deity status, if anything, Coffee And Cigarettes reinforces the idea of Jarmusch as the anti-Linklater. Here, people aren’t sitting around, shooting the shit, trying to make sense of things by reaching out and tossing words into the void. Mostly, JJ’s ghosts can’t connect, they can’t wait to get away from each other and there’s a palpable competitive snarl beneath their minimalist exchanges. Check out Cate Blanchett playing herself and her resentful white-trash cousin for a case in point. Even better is the polite careering fiction between Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan over tea.