The Limits of Control

Although expertly executed, Jim Jarmusch’s latest release, The Limits of Control, tests the limits of its audience’s attention span. (BananaWho has an attention span much longer than the average viewer, but shorter than your average hardcore art film snob.) This film is even more plotless than the bulk of Jarmusch’s work, but unlike Down By Law or Broken Flowers, Limits is virtually free of characters and dialogue as well.

Riddled with absurd humor, dream logic, and elements of whimsy, even the playful use of ritual grows dull as we realize ideas have replaced the characters in this film. The Lone Man is the main “character” who serves as a blank slate upon whom Jarmusch thrusts his ideals of art and culture, a vacuous monolith who kills an American lexicon in the end. America, the destroyer of bohemian ideals? Oh, the insight!

The cinematography was one of the highlights of an otherwise sleepy ride. The camerawork is initially interested in geometry: the shapes, lines, and formal qualities of the metropolis. Christopher Doyle (famous for shooting Wong Kar Wai’s films and other beauties of Asian cinema) literally interprets one of the many cryptic lines repeated into oblivion, “The universe has no center and no edges.” The settings move from the geometric delineations of the city into the rural country side, and with it the distinct edges of the images literally break down into trees and nature, approaching chaos.

Jarmusch himself admits the film “was an exercise in celebrating a love of cinema and what it is capable of.” (Courtesy of the FilmLinc blog.) But an exercise is something one does to improve upon a craft, and not a finished product intended to be exhibited. There are certainly likeable things about this movie, and if you are a diehard Jarmusch fan then you might get exactly what you came for, but BananaWho has been far more engaged and entertained by other Jarmusch films in the past. JJ ultimately needed to give us more, and we know he is able to do so, but this time, he was unwilling. -CH