Jarmusch Watch: Night on Earth (1991)

Watched:  05/09/2024

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jim Jarmusch

This is one I remember seeing advertised via trailers on VHS tapes of indie movies you'd rent in the early 90's.  But somehow I never got to it back then, and I think, having had now seen the movie, that's okay.  I think I would have gotten the vibe back then, but as a suburban kid from Texas, I would have missed the experience of riding in cabs, which I had not really done back then, and wouldn't do until the end of college.  

Generally, I'm not sure how much I support "auteur" as a concept.  Film is a collaborative medium, full stop.  But I do get it a bit more when you look at a writer/ director like Jim Jarmusch.  Small, talky indie movies that rely almost entirely on actors handling the scripts Jarmusch puts in their hands.  And the rest is the vibe he creates around those actors.  

Night on Earth (1991) is an interesting but of what became the explosion of indie film that carried the decade (not that we didn't have huge blockbusters, too).  Essentially five, unrelated stories, but all with the similar points of taking place in a cab, between sunset and sunrise, somewhere on the planet (LA, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki).  It's short vignettes, in rough real-time as cabs pick up a client and the interaction that ensues.  

And I get it.  I have absolutely written in my fair share of cabs and ride shares and a car service or three.  Ships in the night.  You'll never see your cab driver again, and yet you'll find yourself talking to the cab driver and having some buckwild conversations with this stranger, telling them all sorts of things - maybe because of the certainty you'll never see that person again.  But, yeah, I'm a Chatty Cathy sometimes in the back of a cab.  (I'll save my own anecdotes, and I'm sure you have your own.)

The LA section features Winona Ryder as a small, spunky cab driver with dreams of becoming a mechanic.  Gena Rowlands is the power film-exec.  It's a brilliant sequence about dreams and where you can wind up chasing the things we're told we're supposed to want.  Also, Rowlands looks amazing.

New York features a pre-fame Giancarlo Esposito in the mode I knew him first from Blue in the Face, of the consummate Brooklynite from a Brooklyn that seems to have disappeared in the ensuing years.  Esposito is picked up by a guy who has just left East Germany (we're like a year out from the Wall coming down) who has secured a job as a cab driver, but can't really drive and doesn't know New York.  The two couldn't be more different, but find themselves liking each other and finding their similarities (a dynamite Rosie Perez also appears).

In France an immigrant from The Ivory Coast drives a cab and taken it both seriously and as a burden when he picks up a blind passenger who pushes back.

In Rome, Roberto Benigni is a maniac who picks up a priest and goes into a series of hilarious but upsetting confessions against the priest's request he not. 

In Helsinki, a driver picks up a trio, one of whom is drunk and passed out, having had the worst day of his life.  He shares his own story.

I'm sure someone out there is still making movies like this - slice of life vignettes that lean into the idea that you just never know what people have going on - and instead of "showing the darker side", just says "we're all going through something, or have experienced something."*  But all of the scenery is far from idealized, the only comments on the beauty of a place are from people to whom the location is novel or to a weirdo driving with sunglasses at night.

It's a movie book-ended by Tom Waits songs, so you won't be surprised that it's a movie that isn't exactly hung up on glamour or highlighting the majesty of its locations, but it does understand the passing lights and rhythm of night traffic have their own appeal.

Like a collection of short stories, there's a theme - that odd human connection we all can have in the right circumstances.  And sometimes those connections happen in places and ways we think of as being pedestrian, but they can be lovely.  

*Indie film makers: exposing darker sides gets super boring after a while.  We all have access to the news.  We know.  Try figuring out what you want to say about the fact that everything isn't copacetic, and then we'll talk