At first Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, made over a span of 17 years, looks like a departure for him. It consists of 11 entertaining, mainly comic short films in black and white that show people mainly sitting around in coffeehouses mainly drinking coffee, mainly smoking cigarettes, and mainly talking. But four of Jarmusch’s seven previous fiction features were built out of similarly isolated episodes, and the remaining three—Permanent Vacation (1980), Dead Man (1995), and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)—are all episodic. Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Down by Law (1986)—also in black and white—each concentrated on three characters seen in three separate settings. Mystery Train (1989) had three separate sets of characters and three episodes set during the same day in Memphis. Night on Earth (1991)—focusing, like Coffee and Cigarettes, on what might be called downtime—had five separate episodes featuring cabdrivers and their passengers, occurring simultaneously across the globe.
A few critics have shrugged off Coffee and Cigarettes as slight and inconsequential, calling it an exercise in style, done in Jarmusch’s usual “hip” idiom. But I think its form and content are much more notable and consequential than its style.
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The film is certainly less ambitious than Dead Man or Ghost Dog, though it’s by no means less personal. The main themes are the ethics of celebrity, the tensions and irritations that can arise between close friends and family members, and two Jarmusch standbys, shyness and loneliness. These themes and the recurring formal elements—ranging from inserted overhead shots of coffee cups and checkerboard tablecloths or tabletops to abstract patterns in the dramaturgy—give Coffee and Cigarettes an overall artistic coherence that’s far from common in current movies.
People who object to the in-jokes should consider that they might be just part of a dialectic with what could be termed the out-jokes—the more populist and obvious bits of humor. There’s a close parallel in the dialectic between celebrities and nobodies that runs throughout the film, and there’s the suggestion that inside every apparent improvisation is an element of determination, that juxtaposed with every conspiracy theory is an abyss of meaningless absurdity and chaos, and that next to the political incorrectness of the addictive coffee and cigarettes are politically correct demonstrations of social etiquette. Paradoxically, a certain kind of social chaos becomes most apparent whenever the characters are being most polite: when Isaach (Isaach de Bankole) meets Alex for coffee at Alex’s request, he can’t believe he’s been summoned just for the pleasure of his company, even though they’re supposed to be best friends. This paranoid misunderstanding is played for comedy, but the fear of a gaping void remains.
Directed and written by Jim Jarmusch
With Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Joie Lee, Cinque Lee, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Joe Rigano, Vinny Vella, Vinny Vella Jr., Renee French, E.J. Rodriguez, Alex Descas, Isaach de Bankole, Cate Blanchett, Jack White, Meg White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, GZA, RZA, Bill Murray, Bill Rice, and Taylor Mead.
