Jim Jarmusch makes his zombie movie

Every now and again, I come across a movie that I watch without being able to form much of a connection. That certainly was the case with The Dead Don't Die, director Jim Jarmusch's belated entry into the world of zombie movies. Employing a cast led by Bill Murray, Adam Driver, and Chloe Sevigny -- all of whom play small-town cops — Jarmusch deadpans his way through a dreary foray to a small town where the dead are popping up from their graves. There's little point making this kind of movie without taking aim at a decaying world. To that end, Steve Buscemi portrays a racist farmer who wears a "Keep America White Again" hat, a take on ... well ... you know. Strange things begin to happen in the tiny fictional town of Centerville and it doesn't take long for the dead to begin chewing on the living. Murray and Driver display little emotion as the movie progresses. Tilda Swinton adds to the weirdness quotient. She shows up as the town's mortician, a woman who also happens to wield a mean samurai sword. At one point, Jarmusch shatters convention. Driver's Ronnie justifies his gloomy outlook by telling Murray's character that he knows things will end badly because he’s read the script. Jim, he says, showed it to him. Oh, I forgot to mention that Tom Waits portrays a hermit who wanders through the woods outside of town and that Danny Glover appears as the owner of the town's hardware store. The idea of riffing on zombie movies, a deadened American culture, global warming, and small-town insularity isn't exactly new. Because The Dead Don't Die was selected as the opening offering of the Cannes Film Festival, I expected a more robust movie -- even if that movie kept faith with Jarmusch's low-key style. The Dead May Not Die, but this movie sometimes feels as if it's in need of life support. Oh well, maybe it’s me. I’ve admired some of Jarmusch’s movies and been unimpressed by others. For me, this one staggered its way onto the negative side of the ledger.

A bus driver who writes poetry

Jim Jarmusch's Paterson proves quietly affecting.

Jim Jarmusch's Paterson might be viewed as an attempt to connect with a frayed piece of a romanticized blue-collar past. Set in Paterson, N.J., and populated by a main character with the same name as the town, the movie walks in the shadow of some of the city's more renowned sons: Lou Costello, Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams to name three.

On it surface, Paterson brings us into the life of a bus driver (Adam Driver) who writes poetry and whose live-in lover (Golshifteh Farahani) makes cupcakes, designs draperies and dreams of being a country singer.

Jarmusch takes us through a week in Paterson's life; at first, it may seem as if Paterson's art is not to be taken seriously, but it grows as the movie progresses in typical Jarmusch deadpan fashion, part meditation, part reverie, part fantasy portrait of a lumpen world where art lives without any trace of pretension.

Paterson is the kind of quiet movie in which a meeting between Paterson and a young poet (Sterling Jerins), proves stirring, an impromptu connection between artists. We also see Paterson driving his bus, listening to the conversations of passengers, two working men exchanging boastful stories about women or two kids talking about Halloween costumes.

Every night, Paterson takes his bulldog Marvin for a walk; he stops at the local bar for a beer and listens to the various travails of the customers, the most pointed of which is a story of scorned love. William Jackson Harper plays a man who doesn't seem to know how to take "no" for an answer.

Of course, the bartender (Barry Shabaka Henley) keeps pictures of some of Paterson's more famous residents on the wall behind the bar, his own hall of fame.

The movie gives both Paterson and Laura artistic lives; she dreams of having a Tammy Wynette brand of success. Her ambitions are cockeyed and outward. Paterson doesn't really seem to have dreams. He just does his thing, yet it's Paterson's poems that really seem to matter in the flow of things.

There's a sweet softness to Paterson, which -- I suppose -- can be taken as a near ode to the grace in ordinary lives, a grace that's disrupted when Paterson and Laura attend a movie, and Marvin eats most of Paterson's poetry notebook.

Has the art battle finally been lost?

Paterson probably is inconceivable without Driver, who adapts to Jarmusch's style with spectacular ease -- and without totally suppressing his personality. There's sincerity, but also a bit of wry irony to Paterson -- and that's all thanks to Driver.

The poems Paterson writes are the work of Ron Padgett, including an ode to Ohio Blue Tip matches. Early on, Paterson stops by the Great Falls, a Paterson landmark, to finish writing a poem. Jarmsuch superimposes images of the falls on Paterson as he sits and writes. Words of his poem appear on the screen. Perhaps the inexorable flow of water and the writing of a poem are really the same thing. Or maybe we're just watching a guy who's stopping for a quiet lunch.

After Paterson's notebook is lost, a Japanese visitor (Masatoshi Nagase) tries to bring a dejected Paterson back to his art. It may sound a bit trite, but every loss also opens a new blank page. Do we, the movie may be asking, have the courage to face the opportunity it presents?

Jarmusch joins the vampire jamboree

Jim Jarmusch -- a director who has marched to his own tune since his 1984 breakthrough with Stranger Than Paradise -- is a late attendee at the vampire party that's been sinking its teeth into popular culture for the past several years.

Perhaps that's why Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive feels burdened by fatigue, as well as by a pervasive sense of futility. Make that futility with a capital "F."

That may be part of the point. Jarmusch seems to be commenting on the generally woeful state of human affairs.

Within the movie's confined and airless world, only vampires truly appreciate the best of human achievement in the arts and sciences. Vampires dismiss the rest of humanity, which they seem to regard as a biological lost cause.

It's a risky approach because Jarmusch's movie sometimes becomes an example of the statement it's making, an entertainment that can feel more like it has been embalmed than edited.

And yet ....

There's something to be discovered amid the resignation and ruin, a feeling that the movie's vampires -- played by Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston -- are remnants of a dying breed, symbolic holdovers from the last days of a reeling counterculture.

Hiddleston's Adam lives in a deserted part of Detroit in a house full of electronic equipment that supports his musical habits. Adam spends most of his time recording all the parts of various tunes in his junk yard of a home.

Adam also nourishes himself with blood he buys from Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright), a doctor who runs a blood bank in a nearby hospital. Adam always arrives unannounced, sporting a flimsy doctor's disguise.

When he drinks blood out of a wine glass, Adam -- like movie's other vampires -- swoons like a heroin addict experiencing the relief of a first rush.

Swinton's Eve lives in Tangier: She reads compulsively, and obtains her blood supply from Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), a vampire who's clearly devoted to Eve.

Adam. Eve. Marlowe.

Restrained as the tone can be, Jarmusch's movie virtually screams out for metaphoric or ironic interpretation: Adam and Eve, for example, seem more like the last couple than the first.

And immortality -- or as close as former humans can get to it -- has its burdens. Suffering from spiritual exhaustion, Adam contemplates suicide, a wooden bullet to the heart.

Concerned about him, Eve -- his long-time lover -- decides it's time for a visit. She flies to Detroit to elevate Adam's spirits. When Eve travels, she carries a couple of suitcases containing nothing but books.

Adam's also concerned about what humans -- he regards most of humanity as the walking dead and calls them "zombies'' -- have done to the planet, contaminating the blood supply and despoiling the very Earth upon which they walk.

That's the rub, though. No matter how contemptuous vampires are of humans, they can't live without them. The lumpen masses feed the vampiric elite.

Not a lot happens. An eager-to-please human named Ian (Adam Yelchin) drops in on Adam from time to time, bringing a sampling of guitars and other paraphernalia to satisfy Adam's musical cravings.

Late in the movie, Eve's sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) arrives for a visit: Ava's boisterous, undisciplined and liable to sink her fangs into a human, an activity that Adam and Eve disdain as barbaric.

Is it disparaging to say that Swinton was born to play a vampire? Could there be an actress more suited to pallor?

Hiddleston -- known for his work in The Avengers and Thor movies -- shows a different side of himself, and it's always a pleasure to see Hurt, who seems to be decaying before our eyes.

Jarmusch is now 61, and it's tempting to view Only Lovers Left Alive as a kind of dirge for a lost cultural moment that he cherished. Is Jarmusch wondering whether even vampires have the energy for one more bite?

I don't know, but Only Lovers Left Alive feels less like an artistic summation than a last gasp.