Down By Law (1986)

It’s a sad and beautiful world

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

Idiot DJ Zack (Tom Waits) is a fuck-up who is arrested when the car he is driving for someone else is discovered to have a dead body in the boot. Fuck-up pimp Jack (Jon Lurie) is an idiot who is set up to be caught in a room with an under-age girl. The two fuck-ups are slung in a New Orleans prison, where they bicker and fight until they are joined there by a sparky, competent Italian tourist Bob (Roberto Benigni). Bob proceeds to cheer everyone up, organise a prison break and guide them all through the bayou to safety.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve watched the beginning of Down By Law. Only slightly more than the number of times I’ve woken up to the sound of Tom Waits’ ‘Tango Till They’re Sore’ over the end credits, signalling that it’s time to go to bed.

This was, in my early ‘20s, one of the few films that I owned on VHS and consequently a regular choice for post-pub viewing. Skin up to the sound of ‘Jockey Full Of Bourbon’; recite dialogue along with Rockets Redglare and Vernel Bagneris (‘I’m serious as cancer, Jack’, ‘A few moments of your vewy vewy vawuable time’), and fall asleep to Waits and Lurie arguing in a jail cell. Which meant that I fell asleep about 45 minutes in, almost half way through: just as Roberto Benigni entered and the whole film changed.

The film pivots on this moment. Up until this point it has been at the most wryly humorous, but not really funny. It has been set in a seedy, sweaty New Orleans underworld, threatening danger and corruption. This is not a true underworld; like many contemporary indie film-makers, and like many that followed him, Jarmusch’s film happens in his own parallel universe. It’s not a hermetic diorama (like Wes Anderson’s world) or unpredictably violent (like the Coen Brothers’s world); but, like theirs, it is doggedly alternative and frequently marginal. It is artistic, it is beatnik. It is cool.

To a seventeen year old in 1986 Down By Law seemed almost impossibly cool. Tom Waits was obviously, canonically cool; John Lurie, with his great horse face and expressive be-ringed hands was like a big tiki mug full of cool. The crumbling back streets of New Orleans were exotic; the music was intoxicating (see Tom Waits, above); the dialogue was full of snappy slang; and all the clothes were amazing. Especially Tom’s shoes.

Seen now, though, this underworld is obviously parodic, often painfully so. The dialogue frequently verges on the awkward, and serious subjects – such as prostitution and paedophilia - are played for low comedy. The characters are frequently unpleasant, while remaining too stupid and pig-headed to recognise their own unpleasant pig-headedness.

But this, literally and metaphorically, is where Roberto Benigni comes in. For a start, he turns the film into an outright comedy. When we first meet his Italian tourist Bob, as he stumbles across a drunk Zack and regales him in broken English, he threatens to be a one-note (if delightful) comedy foreigner. However, once properly in the film, Benigni pantomimes Bob’s inarticulacy with extraordinary intelligence, heart and impeccable comic timing.

But Bob also changes what the film is about: or, rather, he reveals its true intent. Jack and Zack are not cool;, they just want to be. Bob, who does not care one whit about being cool or a criminal or antisocial, is the truly cool one. Not only is he the only one who has actually committed a crime (he accidentally killed a man in self defence), but he is the only one who is sorry for it. He is also the only one who can get them out of prison and then out of the swamp. He is the only one who can cook, have fun, and find love. He’s the adult. He’s the cool one.

Tom Waits’s shoes are indeed cool, Jarmusch is telling us; but there is more to life than a pair of chrome toe-tips.

Discomforts

The world of Down By Law is not overpopulated by women, and the few who exist there are not entire characters. Ellen Barkin is given some screaming to do; Nicoletta Braschi doesn’t even get that. Billie Neal has some lines, but has to deliver them with her top off.

And some of the unpleasant underworld is a little too real. Rockets Redglare, who plays a pimp, was a real life punk scenester and criminal who claimed to have killed Nancy Spungen, making his performance not so much creepy as skin-crawling.

Delights

We’ve done a whole piece on Tom Waits, so we don’t have to rehearse that here, but the rest of the soundtrack, by his co-star John Lurie, is also brilliant.

And so are the visuals. The cinematographer was Robby Müller, who was also cinematographer on Paris, Texas and Repo Man. His appearance in the credits of movies is usually a sign they’re going to be beautiful and also probably interesting.

In the case of Down By Law he enthusiastically embraced Jarmusch’s choice of black and white, not just for the inevitable film noir resonances, but also because, apparently, New Orleans and the bayou were simply too beautiful. He felt all the colour would distract from the characters and since the characters were the heart of the story, black and white it was.

Can We Show The Kids?

I can think of at least one kid who I strongly suspect, like twenty-something me, wouldn’t mind wearing some of ‘Uncle Luigi’s clothes’, the splendid thrift store outfits that Jack and Zack cobble together out of leftovers in Nicoletta’s cafe:

Is it still worth it?

Yet another film that has completely changed in the years between watching it in my twenties and watching it in my fifties. Weird how that keeps happening.

There are lots of different explanations for the title. Jarmusch said it meant to be good friends and to look out for each other. Obviously there is the connotation of being brought down by the law, and finding that camaraderie in prison. There is also a suggestion that it means to be held down by force of circumstance, or, indeed, the laws of physics, which, after all, are largely responsible for most of the down round here.

But there is also ‘down’ in the sense of ‘unhappy’. Both Zack and Jack are down at the start of the film. They have to be; it is the law. It is the law of cool, to be world weary and cynical and disappointed. This is perhaps what I responded to in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, that adolescent sarcasm meeting the cultural scepticism of Generation X and seeing reflected in these two losers who were so adamant on their own independence and never selling out.

And never quite noticing they were losers.

Bob, on the other hand, is happy. He is funny, both deliberately and inadvertently, because he is happy. And he is happy because he is fully engaged in the world.

One of Bob’s distinguishing features – indeed the first we see of him, even before his face – is an English phrasebook in which he writes down all the strange things these foreigners say to him. The first thing we hear him say is a sentence read out from his notebook: ‘It is a sad and beautiful world.’ This is Jarmusch telling us precisely who Bob is. He takes note of the world, recording its beautiful strangeness and its strange beauty. He sees it clearly, its disappointments and its glories. Bob, who is obsessed with poetry, has the poet’s habit of noticing. He has none of the cool distance of Jack or Zack; he is warm and he is in touch.

This is what’s truly cool, Jarmusch wants us to know. After all, Bob is the person who genuinely lives the life of a cool movie hero: he kills a man with his incredible skill in throwing pool balls (‘8 ball, very good ball’); he engineers a prison break; he catches, prepares and cooks a rabbit with his bare hands. He does these things not with studied detachment, but with enthusiastic engagement; and he is capable of these things because of his enthusiastic engagement, his interest in making friends in bars, watching foreign films about prison breaks, and learning to cook with his mother.

Both Jack and Zack are caught in pretences. Jack practises his self-consciously cool pimp lines; Zack puts on a DJ voice because it’s the only way he can express himself. Only Bob is genuinely himself, and can thus become the thing Zack and Jack are pretending to be: a whole, grown-up man.

He is still a very weird man; this is a Jim Jarmusch film, after all, and Jarmusch’s world is full of the alternative and the marginal because that is core to his world view. We should be taking note of what’s in the margins; we should be open to experiences beyond the usual. It is a sad world, but it is also a beautiful one, if we stop to notice; and beauty can arm us against sadness. That, and some ice cream.

Ice cream is definitely cool.

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One of the other films I owned on VHS, another monochrome visit to a parallel world, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire: