Tough Blake

Who knew Jim Jarmusch had a Western in him? In Dead Man, the downtown hipster who made ennui funny in Stranger Than Paradise and taxi-riding an adventure in Night on Earth -- a creator of minimalist narratives with no use for genre conventions -- looks with great somberness upon the rural past and takes on the most convention-bound genre of them all. And he manages to do to our treasured images of the Old West what he did to such familiar settings as New York, Memphis, and Rome: make it look like some place on the dark side of the moon.

The sense of dislocation is profound for Bill Blake (Johnny Depp), an accountant from Cleveland (like the characters in Stranger) riding the locomotive to a promised job at the Dickinson Metalworks in Machine, the town at the end of the line. A buttoned-down fellow in a bad suit, he should have known something was wrong when the train's fireman turned out to be a doomsaying Crispin Glover, or when riflemen suddenly start taking pot shots at bison through the windows.

When he arrives in Machine, a filthy hellhole presided over by robber baron Dickinson himself (Robert Mitchum, one of an embarrassment of cameo riches), Blake is told by the foreman (John Hurt) that the job has already been taken. With no prospects, he heads for the saloon and takes comfort in the arms of a similarly jobless ex-prostitute (Mili Avital). But when her estranged fiancé (Gabriel Byrne), who happens to be Dickinson's son, appears, there is gunfire, and soon the wounded Blake is on the run. Dickinson sends out three bounty hunters (Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, and Eugene Byrd), mostly because he wants his pinto horse back.

Blake is rescued by a grumpy Indian called Nobody (Gary Farmer), who feels equally alienated. As a boy, he was kidnapped by whites and sent east as a sideshow attraction, eventually to England, where he learned to read and write. He returned only to find himself a pariah among his own people as well as the whites. The well-read Nobody believes William Blake to be the visionary English poet who died in 1827, and he pledges to return him to the land of the spirits from which he has apparently strayed. As they travel toward the Pacific Northwest, the slowly dying Blake must defend himself against a near-constant stream of trackers and other enemies, gradually becoming the desperado everyone thinks he is -- writing his poetry in blood, as Nobody puts it.

Like Blake, we ultimately have to go with the flow and accept the story's air of evocative mystery and spiritual portent. For the first time, Jarmusch does not affect an air of detached irony. Not that the film is entirely solemn; there is much humor, and it comes in broad strokes, like the mad family of skinners: pa Billy Bob Thornton, "ma" Iggy Pop (in a dress, for some reason), and idiot son Jared Harris (unrecognizable from his current film turn as Andy Warhol). Among the hired guns, much is made of the contrast between Wincott's chatterbox and the laconic Henriksen, but the humor turns grisly as the full extent of Henriksen's brutality is revealed with much startlingly cartoonish gore. (In-joke alert: Jarmusch names one character Sal Jenko, after a musician in P, Depp's band, and another after Tom Petty's keyboardist, Benmont Tench.)

Depp adds another to his pantheon of sensitive outcasts (call him Edward Triggerfingers), though he grows into Blake's surprisingly hard shell. Farmer works very hard at keeping Nobody from being a noble-savage cliché, regarding his efforts on Blake's behalf as his grudging duty to a powerful spirit that happens to be trapped in a mundane shell.

Reuniting with Jarmusch is cinematographer Robby Muller, who shoots in a wonderfully grainy black-and-white that takes the movie from the soot of Machine to the dust of the trail to the mist of the oceanside Makah village where Blake fulfills his destiny. This is not the clear, dry, sunny, expansive West we know from John Ford and Sergio Leone. Also appropriately impressionistic is Neil Young's reverberating, guitar-riffing score.

By the end of his journey, Blake seems no less hapless and unenlightened. Still, there is something satisfying about his dreamlike passage to what the poet Blake (and Jim Morrison after him) called "the end of the night." Moviegoers may not understand where they've been either, but they won't want to miss the trip.