"DOWN BY LAW" AND HOW TO GET BACK UP AGAIN...

Now, having met Allie and got to know his philosophy slightly better, we jump forward a few years and see what he may become when he grows up. And as if to break the mood of deep philosophy of the previous film, we see quite clearly that the result needn’t be tragic or very thought provoking… Down by law is qualified as one of the “coolest comedies” ever, with an even cooler cast – and if you ever thought that there could be no such thing as a truly funny minimalist comedy, well, prepared to be proved wrong.
Zack (played by legendary musician Tom Waits) is a DJ. He is basically very much like Allie Parker from Permanent Vacation all grown up. The only trouble is that he is lacking slightly in Allie’s maturity and his girlfriend has had enough of his attitude and kicked him out of their flat. Jack (John Lurie) is a pimp. But again, he has no great ambition and drifts through life, things seem to be going well, he’s cool, he’s hip… Various hitches and “setbacks” later, these two misfits will end up as cellmates in jail. At first, their great similarity means that they rub each other the wrong way, but this soon transforms into something akin to “brotherhood”; while goading each other and bickering nearly constantly, they are deep down good friends. Things change dramatically when they are joined by a third cellmate: Roberto (Roberto Begnini). Roberto can only speak very broken English, phrases of which he religiously writes down in his “phrasebook”. Unlike his cellmates, he is anything but “cool”, he talks constantly and can be best likened to a well-meaning Labrador. But just as his cellmates are trying to decide whether to like him or loathe him, something unexpected happens: a chance for escape presents itself and our three cellmates grab at it… The question is, will they be able to put their various differences to one side and escape in one piece?
It’s part of Jarmusch’s originality that after setting out a certain thing, a certain outlook on life in a quite sober way in one film, he can turn around and use it as a mainstay of comedy in another film… Although I must admit I somehow suspect that later on in life Jarmusch decided that the comedy side of the “cool” attitude to life was more important than its philosophy because in quite a few films I have seen he puts a “cool” character and a “totally uncool” one side by side – or portray a character trying to be cool but actually not really managing… As you can imagine, this a typical “clash of characters” film, with Roberto Begnini providing the comic contretemps to the ultra-cool Zack and Jack. It is rather telling that, ok warning, a small spoiler, that at the end of the film Roberto is the one who is “successful” as in he is the one who actually manages something concrete, Jack and Zack however will, shall we say, continue to drift to unsure futures in pretty much the same way they were at the beginning of the film…
In all the Jarmusch films I have watched, one thing that always strikes me greatly is the attention to detail. Since this is a minimalist film with minimum points distracting from the main story, the small details naturally gain great importance and one can sit back and savor a cleverly planted gesture or expression from one of the actors or a prop of some description, cleverly inserted into the foray… And again – I cannot say this often enough – something should be said about Jarmusch’s cinematography, this time even more striking in black and white…