(Bill
Murray & Adam Driver)
The
Dead don’t Die, written and directed by Jim
Jarmusch will be showing again on Sunday, July 27 at 19h45 at Gateway 13.
(Review by Patrick Compton)
Jim Jarmusch’s play on the zombie genre has
plenty of his laconic, deadpan humour, but also a surprisingly fair helping of
seriousness about the grim state of the world.
Fans of his hipster movies will probably
regard this film as a lesser work, something of a throwaway. Nevertheless, any
film with his old comrades in it – including Bill Murray, an outstanding Tilda
Swinton, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny and Steve Buscemi – is worth a watch, and
they certainly have a good time meeting up again with their boss.
The film is set in the placid small town of
Centerville and Jarmusch is quick to make us aware that polar fracking is the
ultimate bad guy here. As a result, the earth has been tilted off its proper
axis resulting in unusually long days, bizarre animal behaviour and, most
disturbingly, the reanimation of the dead into savage ghouls who feast on human
flesh as well as long for their old favourite tastes such as coffee, Chardonnay
and wi-fi.
Murray, Sevigny and Driver are the cops
trying to police the zombies, Swinton is a Scottish mortician expertly wielding
her sword to “kill the head” of the ghouls, which includes a bloody turn from
rocker Iggy Pop.
The characters not only play their part in
this make-believe world, they are also very aware of their fictional characters
in a zombie movie. On one occasion, Murray asks why a country song seems so
familiar and Driver replies: “It’s the theme tune.”
Whether any of this hits home with
audiences will be partly down to whether you’re a Jarmusch fan who enjoys
meta-movies and partly whether you warm to his low-key, occasionally weird
sense of humour.
The movie is not simply a goofy take on the
zombie genre, more a somewhat despairing vision of the human condition. As the
theme tune says: “If you’re gonna die, die with your boots on.” – Patrick Compton
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