For almost three decades now, Jim Jarmusch has been one of the heroes of American independent cinema. The deadpan humor and multicultural vibe of his best works have influenced directors worldwide, and his maverick sensibility has practically defined the term “independent filmmaker.” While this sensibility hasn’t endeared him to the Hollywood bigwigs (his insistence that he retain the rights to the negatives of all his films would be a dealbreaker for most studios) it’s made him something of a hero to followers of indie-film, because he’s a director who gets away with making whatever he damn pleases.
Jarmusch’s 1995 masterpiece
Dead Man marked his first collaboration with legendary rocker Neil Young, of whom Jarmusch was a longtime fan. Young’s mindbending score was divisive- Roger Ebert famously likened the sound to Young dropping his guitar over and over- but the film cemented a friendship between the two artists. So for his next film Jarmusch decided to go on the road with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with the goal of making the concert film
Year of the Horse. It was Jarmusch’s first documentary.
A few weeks ago I spotlighted in this column
The Dark Wind, the sole fiction feature from master documentarian Errol Morris. For Jarmusch,
Year of the Horse is no less misbegotten. Now, I don’t begrudge filmmakers- least of all gifted, independent-minded ones like Jarmusch- their attempts to break out of their filmmaking comfort zones. However, with
Year of the Horse, Jarmusch shows almost no affinity for the documentary form.
In its opening credits,
Year of the Horse proclaims that it was “proudly made in Super-8,” and the film is suffused with a lo-fi aesthetic that’s similar to most of Young’s best work. However, in such films as
Stranger Than Paradise,
Down by Law, and
Dead Man, Jarmusch’s style is tight and deliberate, with little room for the kinds of accidents that one normally finds in a documentary of this sort. As a result, the film feels less like a charmingly hardscrabble Young work than a sloppy, amateurish mess.
Part of the problem is the music in the film. While I prefer Young’s rootsy albums like
Harvest to his Crazy Horse work, the
songs in the film are pretty solid. However, their concert performances have a tendency to drag on (and on and on), with lots of onstage improvisation between Young and his bandmates. While jamming can make for a great concert experience, it’s tough to make it interesting to those who aren’t actually in attendance, and Jarmusch never figures out how to make it work. Rather than focusing on the audience’s reaction to the music or really zeroing in on the musical chemistry between the band, Jarmusch too often cuts away from the concert to often random and usually uncompelling images.
Some of these images are merely distracting, as when Jarmusch intercuts footage of clouds or a passing train into the songs. But others are downright puzzling, as when the film cuts away from an onstage performance of “Fuckin’ Up” to show some decades-old footage of Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot shoplifting and getting arrested, a hamfisted attempt on Jarmusch’s part to turn the song into a music video, another form he isn’t particularly good at. Either way, the cutaways don’t help. Whereas Jarmusch seems to intend them to add interest to the stage performance, they merely serve to remind us of how the song is dragging on well past its logical end (one number finishes with the band playing the same chord nearly two dozen times). The only time the cutaways actually serve their intended purpose is when Jarmusch juxtaposes the 1996 concert performance of “Like a Hurricane” with footage of the same song taken from their 1986 tour. In this footage, in which Young already looks haggard, Jarmusch comes closest to illustrating the idea of how long Neil Young and Crazy Horse have been in the game.
At several times during the (mostly superfluous) band interviews in
Year of the Horse, Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro remarks that Jarmusch will never be able to compress three decades of Crazy Horse history into a documentary. However, based on the evidence on display in the film, two hours seems far too long. I’m sure there were plenty of vivid experiences in the history of the band, but few of them appear to have been “proudly filmed on Super-8.” Seeing as how the most memorable thing that happens offstage in
Year of the Horse is a floral centerpiece catching on fire, perhaps Jarmusch would have been better off sticking to the music itself.
But as I said, he’s always marched to his own drummer, and fortunately for his fans his next film was 1999’s fascinating
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, that wonderful one-of-a-kind combination of aging wiseguys and Hagakure-reading lone gunmen. In other words, definitely a step in the right direction. Jarmusch’s next film,
The Limits of Control, is currently on track for a 2009 premiere.