Review of Mystery Train (1989) by Paul Z — 22 Sep 2009

The opening shots of Jim Jarmusch's new film show two young Japanese tourists in a faded Amtrak coach, listening to their Walkmans as the train pulls through the edge of Memphis. The girl is an Elvis fan. Her boyfriend believes Carl Perkins was the real founder of rock 'n' roll. They have come to see the shrines of Memphis such as Sun Records. In other hands, this pattern would head straight into cultural satire, into a comic knock on rock tourism, with a sardonic destination at Graceland as the punchline. But, though he is a natural at dry goofiness, Jarmusch is not quite as much a comedian as an idealist, who sees America as an immigrant might, as a bizarre, nostalgic country where the urban landscapes are painted by Robert Henri and the all-night blues stations supply a soundtrack for life.

The tourists arrive in Memphis and haul their luggage through the yawning train station, and walk to the Sun studios, where a guide babbles on with her pitch about Presley and Perkins faster than an auctioneer could. Then they check into one of those flop joints that has grown tired waiting for the traveling salesmen who no longer come. This is a hotel out of a 1940s noir, with neon signs and a linoleum lobby, and a night clerk who is surprised by nothing and a bellboy whose eyes are so broad, he might be seeing everything for the first time. Other people will check into this hotel during the movie's lasting night of intricacy.

The soundtrack is from a local radio station, and Elvis' version of Blue Moon is heard at some point during all three segments of the narrative, supplying a collective bond, as does an offscreen gunshot. And so does the ghost of Elvis, who appears to habituate the movie with his sound and his mythology, and who materializes to an Italian widow played by Nicoletta Braschi. Jarmusch believes in an American landscape that took place before city spread, before the reliable fruitlessness of the fast-food strips on the highways leading into town, saloons where everybody knows each other, diners where the short-order cook is in charge, and landscapes across railroad tracks to a hotel where vagabonds are not only greeted, they are known.

This indie tapestry is Jarmusch's third major film, after Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law, and definitely a precursor to his next film, Night On Earth, which is more solidly an anthology and explores the entire world at random. In all three there is the conviction that America cannot be nimbly encased into conservative and reassuring shopping assemblies, that there must be a life of the night for the drifters and the dropouts, the heroes of no permanent address and no evident vocational position. However indeed their lives may be horizontal and bare, in Jarmusch's conception they are the true residents of the city, mainly after midnight.

Speaking of the film as if separate from the universe of the Jarmusch filmography, this uncommon genre-less universalistic film, an anthology film that upon reflection does not seem like three stories but one, is not a traditional plot, and it is not how the story ends that is essential, but how it endures. It is inhabited by dozens of minute, oddly contemplated bits of behavior, such as the rapport between Screamin' Jay Hawkins' hilarious night clerk and Cinque Lee's bellboy, or between the two teenage Japanese tourists, whose whole idea of what America is like is fashioned out of the sum of ideas, perspectives, attitudes and images of the mainstream. The greatest element about this almost antiquated album is that it takes you to an America you sense that you ought to be able to find for yourself, if you just knew where to look. A place of people who are permitted to be personas, to be themselves. The train is the foolproof synecdoche in this movie. It's not where it's been that's of value, or even where it's going.