Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch’s
beguiling 1999 mash-up of genres and styles might just be the best movie in an
exceptionally eclectic and historically relevant career. Jarmusch has made many
films that walk the line between filmic tribute and cutting-edge cultural
critique, and Ghost Dog does so with
style and energy. In one of his greatest roles, Forest Whitaker is Ghost Dog,
an urban assassin, who, in a lifelong debt to an old-school Mafioso, carries out
gangland hits using the philosophy and techniques of the Japanese samurai as
portrayed in the classic Japanese text Hagakure.
By night he murders gangsters, but by day he is an eccentric, yet integral
part of his community. It is
precisely this humanizing conflict that makes this film rise high above its
inherent stylistic limitations and enter the class of groundbreaking modern
film.
Ghost Dog succeeds on many levels,
but they are all thanks to Jim Jarmusch and Forest Whitaker. Whitaker’s Ghost
Dog is a complex mountain of a character, whose lethal understanding of murder is
matched by his authentically tender relationships with others in his
neighborhood (in an unnamed, gritty, East-Coast city). He carries on a
telepathically satisfying friendship with the local ice cream salesman in spite
of the fact that they don’t speak the same language, bonds with a young girl
through books, earns the respect of the local gang-bangers and, most
interestingly, he cares for a flock of pigeons, using them for communication
while showing them a humanity he denies his victims. In a performance of very
few words Whitaker conveys a colorful palette of emotions through his
expressive eyes, world-weary bearing and delicately menacing physical enormity.
The true samurai, he glides through the city invisible to his enemies, but
surprisingly approachable to the folks in the ‘hood.
For his part writer/director Jim Jarmusch has
created a modern classic. While occasionally veering into the Tarantino school
of style-over-substance-hyper-violence, he keeps an eye to the moral center and
fills the motivations of the central character with such convincing ambiguity that
the reprehensible moral choices he makes seem somehow understandable. Through
his terse dialogue and the creation of an atmospheric world for Ghost Dog to
inhabit, the characters and events feel like real life (or maybe dream life).
That world is the other uncredited star of this film. Ghost Dog pulses with the sights and sounds of the city. There are
dark urban realities juxtaposed with beautiful, ponderous shots of the moon or
birds in flight. And then there is the music. Jarmusch masterfully weaves
together deep soul and reggae cuts with the brilliant beats and insistent
rhymes of the original music created by The RZA (who makes an effective cameo
himself toward the end of the movie). Like many of Jarmusch’s best movies, the
soundtrack almost becomes a character in itself.
The central conflict of the film comes from the
fact that in the execution of one of Whitaker’s scheduled hits something goes
wrong, and suddenly the hunter becomes the hunted. The mob now has a hit out on
Ghost Dog and thus, as they say on the street, “it’s on!” Lots of blood gets
spilled in a very short period of time in the last quarter of this movie, and
yet an equal or even greater care is given over to showing Ghost Dog as a man
of honor and thought. He lays the seeds in his neighborhood for those he cares
about to sprout new growth.
Like all movies which busy themselves with the
feelings of the killers, rather than those of the victims (which is virtually ALL modern movies), I question the
believability of some of the characters, or why I should give a rat’s ass about
them, but the overall effect of Ghost
Dog: The Way Of The Samurai is like that of an epic poem. Forest Whitaker
is a modern Odysseus trying to make it home through a world filled with evil to
a place of moral serenity. He gets there, but if he’s better off for it is for
you to decide.
-
Paul
Epstein
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