![]() ![]() “The Dead Don’t Die” is also akin to the other great recent American political horror comedy, Jordan Peele’s “ Us.” Jarmusch’s film is similarly crammed with deftly intertwined details that lend daily life in exceptional times in Centerville a vital and invigorating texture and, at the same time, provide a deep array of visionary connections beneath the surface of the brisk and flamboyant comedic invention. Then there’s the dead-foremost, Mallory (Carol Kane), Cliff’s ex, whose body is being held in a jail cell because the funeral parlor’s two slabs are both occupied. (She also speaks with arch diction and a florid accent, and walks with a stiffly martial bearing.) Three teens (Maya Delmont, Taliyah Whitaker, and Jahi Di’Allo Winston) who are being held in the town’s juvenile detention center have a clear view of the marauding zombies three so-called hipsters (foremost, Selena Gomez) stop over in town and stay at the local motel that’s run by the crusty Danny (Larry Fessenden), and the zombies go there, too. ![]() Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton), the new undertaker, is also an expert with a samurai sword. Bobby (Caleb Landry Jones) runs the gas station and has also turned it into a grungy boutique of horror-movie memorabilia Dean (RZA) is an oracular deliveryman for the drolly titled WuPS. Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny), the town’s only other police officer, is both capable and frozen in grief Hank (Danny Glover), who owns a hardware store, endures the cantankerous presence of Frank (Steve Buscemi), a crabby and racist farmer who wears a baseball cap with the slogan “Make America White Again” and who called the cops on Hermit Bob. Jarmusch fills his film with a giddy array of idiosyncratic characters and a cast of actors who wink at the cinematic worlds of David Lynch and the Coen brothers. Animals go mad the dead soon rise up from their graves and-moving, as zombies do, at the languid pace of people to whom time means nothing-eat the living. Day and night hours are instantly unpredictable. They sense that something big is up, and they’re right: the Earth has been thrown off its axis by “polar fracking,” throwing life at large out of whack. but the sun is still high in the sky then their police radio goes out, then, their cell-phone service. Then, driving away from his hideout, the officers realize that the time of day is 8:20 P.M. The premise is stark and simple: a pair of Centerville police officers-Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray), who’s the chief, and Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver)-confront the local hermit, Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), over a trivial charge, the theft of a chicken. With uproarious derisiveness yet also empathetic warmth, Jarmusch borrows a small but solid batch of horror-movie tropes to evoke an existential tabula rasa with (almost) no way out. Though Jim Jarmusch is only sixty-six, he is nearly forty years deep into his career-and “The Dead Don’t Die” can be considered his first “late” film, reflecting the kind of radical repudiation of conventions, of familiar practices, of settled ways, of ordinary life and ordinariness as such, that directors make with a sense of end times. “The Dead Don’t Die” is also a film of extremes. Jarmusch’s film is an exuberantly imaginative comedy that’s also as fervently, vehemently, bitterly political as Wiseman’s documentary. “The Dead Don’t Die” is an actual zombie film about the American center-or, rather, dead center-set in the fictitious Pennsylvania town of Centerville, where the population is seven hundred and thirty-eight but soon turns out to fluctuate rapidly. In its mournful and death-steeped view of Monrovia’s somnolent and baffled residents, Wiseman’s film struck me as a documentary version of a zombie film. The film that Jim Jarmusch’s new horror comedy, “ The Dead Don’t Die,” most reminds me of is Frederick Wiseman’s “ Monrovia, Indiana,” a 2018 documentary about social life and civic routines in a small Midwestern town. ![]()
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