Jim Jarmusch
Down By Law

When I read that a digitally remastered edition of Jim Jarmusch's "Down by Law" was going to be made, I was pleasantly surprised, given that in the VHS edition, purchased a few years ago, the film's soundtrack revealed many limitations. I was therefore hoping for a considerable improvement in the audio track in the DVD edition. Although an undeniable improvement in the audio was achieved, frankly, the remastering slightly disappointed my expectations. Probably, the conditions of the original audio track did not allow for substantial improvements, and therefore even the subsequent digital remastering could not perform miracles. After all, I imagine that a director like Jarmusch, although already known at the time of making "Down by Law" (1986), did not have substantial financial resources available to take care of every aspect of production, or it might even have been a stylistic choice of his, as one might be led to think in light of some considerations I will make later.

I want to clarify immediately that, in my humble opinion, this might represent the only and ultimately negligible flaw of a film (Jarmusch's eighth in chronological order) which I consider on the whole sublime, as well as one of my absolute favorite films. The Italian title was horribly butchered into "dounbailò", but such a debatable choice is ultimately forgivable by the fact that our producers fortunately decided to keep the film in its original language, subtitling it, thus allowing us to appreciate and savor the original performances of the three protagonists. A film that, if I had to classify by genre, I would define as "borderline", or frontier. Situated as it is, on the boundary between drama, comedy, and road movie, "Down by law" represents a fragment of life that three characters (with personalities that are in turn "borderline") find themselves fortuitously sharing while being in the confined space of the same cell: a failed disc jockey (Zack - Tom Waits), a small-time pimp (Jack - John Lurie), and a quirky Italian tourist (Roberto - Roberto Benigni).

I believe that Jarmusch's first great stroke of genius lies in the choice of protagonists: three thespians around whom the script's roles are perfectly tailored. Zack seems a cinematic representation of the real Tom Waits: how can one not trace in Zack the characteristics of the sharp and biting entertainer-provocateur, author of marvelous gifts to contemporary discography like “Swordfishtrombone,” “Nighthawks at the Diner,” or “Rain Dogs” (from which tracks have been drawn to enhance the film's soundtrack). Waits appears to us as he truly is, with his hat, his “alligator's shoes,” captured in his typical swaying movements (what he himself describes as the funny pastime of the “rockin’ chair”). How can one not recognize in Jack's gruff and surly character the poorly concealed shyness of the real John Lurie, or not see in Roberto the early genius Benigni, the quirky young man from the outskirts of Florence, with his abstract yet concrete humor at the same time, always on the border between the serious and the clownish. What Jarmusch narrates in "Down by Law," with burning realism, is nothing but the failure of the "American dream". The director makes explicit reference to the theme favored by many authors, including, predictably, Tom Waits, or other directors like Robert Altman who, in 1991 with the film Short Cuts (in Italian "America oggi"), revisits the theme, relying on Tom Waits’s face to represent a certain typology of characters belonging to the "wrong side." Other "important" directors have portrayed the failure of the "American way"; I refer to directors of the caliber of Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino, or Oliver Stone, who have extensively (in my view, even too much) drawn from the well-known genre of war-action movies, which aimed to represent American failure as a paraphrase of the failure in the Vietnam War.

But Jarmusch's cinema is much closer to Altman's, to draw a parallel, being all built on a minimalist poetry, far from the bursts and special effects extravaganzas to which we have become so accustomed, and around which a certain genre of film has been constructed. Certainly, those films, like "Down by Law," were courageously anything but "politically correct", but Jarmusch does not aim to construct a film by speculating on the spectacle, at times, in my opinion, even Grand-Guignolesque, of war, of the battlefield, of killings: quite the opposite. In "Down by Law" we are directly catapulted in an original way, because so direct and minimalist, from the Vietnamese jungle to the asphalt jungle of the metropolis. Here, there are no heroes armed with rifles and bombs, facing terrible "Vietcong" (read "bad guys of the moment"): there are only some poor devils (anti-heroes), grappling with the problems of everyday drabness in which destiny has condemned them to live, or rather to survive. Instead of filling us with frames with an unstoppable flow of combat scenes, the filmic poetry of "Down by Law" is all played on widely stretched times that create spaces, necessary to fully savor those sparse, indeed minimalist scenes, those dialogues apparently meaningless yet so real, so concrete, precisely in their often being ends in themselves.

The technical choice of black and white returns to us all of Jarmusch's desire not to get lost in frills, to make the representation even rawer, more stripped down and as close as possible to the bone, that is to the representation of the "other face" of America: the one so dear (not by chance) to Tom Waits, namely the America of misfits, hobos, prostitutes, and the marginalized in general. As important is the minimalism of the dialogues as is the minimalism of Waits and Lourie's music, on whose mastery I don't want to linger here because it would require too much space. After all, if "Down by Law" was to have music, it could only be those written by Tom Waits and John Lurie. Yet these three characters, who appear to us as figures so singular and far from the concept of "hero," typical of late romantic or neo-romantic cinema, have such emblematic strength that they instead become so close to the idea of a hero, and to an image of a hero even more powerful, precisely in being so explicitly true, not only as a paradigm of the "other face" of America, but also of certain typicalities that Jarmusch sculpts sublimely, representing the different "approach to life" shown by Jack and Zack's characters, on one hand, and Roberto, on the other (note the choice of the assonance/interchangeability of the names Jack/Zack).

Throughout the film, one distinctly appreciates this difference in "approach to life": Roberto represents the eternal naïf, the pure-hearted, who carries with him a great positive force, giving himself unconditionally, without reserves, always ready to fully accept the decisions of his fellow sufferers, companions whom he truly believes to be his "friends" (how could one not stop to savor Benigni's splendid macaronic performance, such as when he shouts: "Jack, Zack, my friends").
In contrast to Roberto's intense positivity, there is the profound disillusionment and cynical disenchantment of Jack and Zack, so eager, at the end of that strange and chaotic adventure, to return to their lives, though conscious of having to pay the high price of reintegrating into the perverse mechanisms of the metropolis. Three anti-hero characters, yet heroes, each in their own way, who are gradually sculpted throughout the film, and who then take on a complete and defined form in the sublime and well-balanced final part, between the lyricism of Roberto's figure, which rises amidst all that squalor, finding the strength to restart, falling hopelessly in love with one of his emigrated compatriots, encountered by chance in a hut between the swamps of New Orleans (pure poetry), and the cynicism of Jack and Zack.

An open and meaningful ending, in which Zack and Jack probably appear as defeated, but only apparently, because they too, like Roberto, although in another way, have chosen their own path: and it is precisely this that is the essence of freedom. The film ends precisely with the image of the fork that separates the two paths of Jack and Zack, as if to give what seems to me the ultimate message of the film, namely: nothing is lost as long as there will be the possibility of choosing which side of the fork to take, we all, like Zack and Jack, can still call ourselves free. And even today, the message is very current, continuing to retain all its value. In a historical moment in which the prevailing morality and politics seem to be essentially summarized in a slogan like "there is no third way: only the American way exists", I would like us all to be able to reflect carefully on the concluding frames of "Down by Law," that is, the shots of that fork.

In conclusion: some films are important for their message, others have value as a cinematic work in itself, yet others because they provide us with a view of the director or a particular representation/interpretation that enriches us, showing us aspects sometimes forgotten, sometimes entirely hidden from our view, as in the case of "Down by Law": Jarmusch, by drawing his three characters, gifted us a film from which, in my view, nothing can be taken nor added: simply perfect.