Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Released cinematically last March, this is another one of those movies I'd hoped would show up somewhere in theaters around here but never even came close. A couple years ago Coffee Underground ran Jim Jarmusch's earlier film Dead Man, a trippy, wonderfully cast b&w Western starring Johnny Depp and featuring Robert Mitchum, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Crispin Glover, Gabriel Byrne, John Hurt, Alfred Molina, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, and a guitar-only score by Neil Young. The resulting impression was that Jarmusch is not only a talented, iconoclastic guy but the sort artists relish working with (he returned favors by doing a cameo in Sling Blade as the burger monkey who sells Carl his first serving of french-fried taters, and shooting a Neil Young & Crazy Horse documentary), so I was really anticipating his next project.

Well, better to catch it on video than during a Sunday afternoon vinyl-siding sellathon, right? In Ghost Dog, the writer/director once again mixes cultures and centuries, calling on Forest Whitaker to portray a gentle urban keeper of carrier pigeons, given to reading Hagakure in his rooftop shack and playing chess with a Haitian ice cream vendor. He also has a secret life as a ruthlessly efficient assassin for a local Mafioso to whom he's indebted for saving his life years ago. Now, through no fault of his own, one of his contracts has gone sour, and every local wiseguy other than his benefactor is after his blood.

This homeboy vs. The Mob plot may sound rather Shaft-inspired, but Jarmusch injects it with much odd textual and visual humor, as well as some haunting exerpts from the book invoked for the movie's subtitle. As in Dead Man the casting is itself a major player, only this time an assemblage of character actors and little-knowns contribute to the absurdity. Particularly entertaining is career villain Henry Silva as a made guy addicted to vintage cartoons such as Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, and Felix the Cat, which show up at critical times on TV doing things curiously similar to what's happening with the plot. A trip-hop soundtrack from RZA lends to the surreal pacing of a story so unusually constructed that it could easily have ended in several different places without seeming to interfere with the denouement, until you get to the end and realize there is a geometric solution to it all. B

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