Samurai 101

Jim Jarmusch and Ghost Dog

The polar ends of East Coast independent cinema: Kevin (Clerks, Dogma) Smith, suburban Jersey child of Sundance, sit-coms, and blockbuster Hollywood; and Jim (Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man) Jarmusch, serious-minded downtown New Yorker with an allegiance to high modernist European and Asian cinema. In America, college kids relate to Smith. He's their hairy, T-shirt-hanging-out main man: the former video-store guy as auteur. In Europe, it's Jarmusch, the sleek and prematurely white-haired hipster, who's the director-as-superstar. At Cannes last year, I was shut out of three sold-out screenings of Jarmusch's new feature, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (it opens this Friday at the Harvard Square); I finally caught it back in North America at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It was worth the wait: Ghost Dog is prime Jarmusch, a moody and minimalist and formally elegant slice of estrangement and alienation, a gangster genre piece filtered through self-conscious French and Japanese reworkings of the American gangster movie and then brought back to America, still resonant with the foreign trappings.

Jarmusch's protagonist, Ghost Dog (a stirring Forest Whitaker), is the embodiment of the mythic lone hero, a melancholic, monosyllabic African-American hitman who resides on a rooftop among carrier pigeons and steps through his solemnly violent life by adhering to, and constantly quoting, the rules of an early 18th-century Japanese warrior text, The Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai. The Samurai 101 path is to find a master and then devote your very being to obeying and defending that master. Ghost Dog grabs onto Louie (John Tormey), a below-the-line Mafia capo who once saved his life. Now it's Ghost Dog's turn, and he spends much of the movie standing up for Louie, killing for Louie, whether Louie wants him to or not.

There's obvious black humor in the obsessive, destructive way this black Don Quixote follows a seemingly outmoded chivalric code. Is Ghost Dog a hero or a total fool? Jarmusch allows you to decide whether Ghost Dog's trip toward his own annihilation is pure nobility or sheer stupidity. Robby Muller's cinematography makes it all cool and alive, as does the sublime RZA musical soundtrack.

"I started with the actor," Jarmusch said when we talked at Toronto. "I wanted to write something about Forest. He has this big physical presence that could be intimidating, and also his soft side. I like watching him. I like that poignancy. I collected a lot of fragments and details and observances. Eventually I connected the dots, and a story came from that."

Jarmusch was inspired by a remark from his late friend, Rebel Without a Cause filmmaker Nicholas Ray. "I remember Nick saying that dialogue is in the left hand, melody is in the eyes. I wanted to make Ghost Dog a character who doesn't speak much and yet is very expressive.

"The lonely hitman? I've been a fan of crime fiction: Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett. I also like gangster films: White Heat, Public Enemy. There are a lot of inspirations and references, from the book Frankenstein to John Boorman's Point Blank to the Japanese films of Siejun Suzuki such as Branded To Kill. Suzuki's films about a lone hitman, black-and-white and widescreen, were so strange that Toho cancelled his contract."

I mention another clear influence: the great French gangster works, Le doulos and Le samurai, of Jean-Pierre Melville. Jarmusch agrees. "There was an inside joke in Melville's films: the killers wore white film editor's gloves. Ghost Dog also wears these gloves, and like Ghost Dog, Melville also refers to Eastern philosophies." Jarmusch offers a term he has coined for Melville that, by extension, I might apply to his own cinema: "melange films." He explains: "How do you classify Melville's works? They are so French, and yet he want them to be so American. Is his vision American? Western? Eastern? Hip-hop? What is it?"

For that matter, is Ghost Dog a ridiculously deluded Don Quixote? "He is Don Quixote as a fool in a way, but there's something beautiful, too. By choosing a code from another century and another place, he keeps it intact and in focus. It comes from a spiritual place, where the gun is an extension of his body and being."

And the man behind the soundtrack, Wu-Tang Clan founder and producer the RZA? "He's 29, and a brilliant businessman, marketing genius, and I've been a fan of their music since the first Wu-Tang CD. His music is very cinematic and always refers to martial-arts films, quoting their music tracks or their dialogue. He's an incredible aficionado of martial-arts projects. He said to me, `You make films like music. I make music like films. We're both stupid.' He's a very busy man. He'd look at a rough cut of the film, then he'd make music, give me a tape and say, `Check this out.' He'd say, `Meet me at a van at 53rd and First.' He'd have a tape for me. By our third meeting, he gave me so much beautiful stuff I couldn't use all of it. I would have drenched the film."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com