The Dead Don't Die

 Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die (2019) is a completely unnecessary film,  It's amiable and pleasant to see well-known performers put through their paces, but the movie is a low-energy affair (this is part of its shambolic charm) and it's hard to figure out why the film was made.  Presumably, the cast enjoyed making the movie, but this seems an insufficient reason to invest in a production of this sort.  The Dead Don't Die is a zombie horror film, although not really frightening and it simply recycles things done much more ferociously in other pictures that take the genre seriously.  Jarmusch doesn't take this seriously and there are ironic "air quotes" around most of the film's standard zombie scenes.  But the film isn't a full-blown comedy by any means and it's imagery, although not too scary, is pretty horrific.  The kinds of people who will pay money to see a movie by Jim Jarmusch aren't likely to be fans of the horror genre and so the movie plays like a zombie picture for people who would never watch a movie of that sort.  As a consequence, lots of scenes from other movies are just reprised in this film -- Jarmusch seems confident that his target audience of aging hipsters won't have seen other zombie films and, therefore, won't recognize the stuff that he steals from those pictures.  The film is very slip-shod -- it doesn't have much of an ending or climax and some characters seem to be simply forgotten.  Jarmusch seems to have worked hard to get all of his buddies in the film and so it has a large cast -- but, as a result, almost all the parts are underwritten to the point of being mere sketches for characters, the sort of thing you might see on Saturday Night Live.  Jarmusch has been in horror-territory before -- his film Only Lovers Left Alive was about vampires living in ruined mansions in Detroit:  the vampire mythos involving love and death is far more profound in its implications than the rather vulgar and dull conceit that motivates zombie pictures and, I thought, Jarmusch's deadpan but intrinsically passionate approach to his lonely lovelorn vampires was moving and, even, profound.  The Dead Don't Die plays as a shaggy dog story, a tossed-off joke that isn't really funny and that seems wholly superfluous.

Bill Murray plays Cliff, a small-town cop, sort of like Sheriff Andy of upstate New York.  Cliff's deputy is Ronnie (Adam Driver).  The two cops patrol a tiny town in a wooded area.  The town seems to consist of one long avenue that runs between various businesses where the film's action takes place --  there's a gas station that also implausibly sells movie memorabilia and comic books, a diner,, a hardware store, a motel, the police station, and a correctional facility for teenagers. On a side street, we see a funeral parlor run by an unearthly seeming Tilda Swinton -- she claims to be from Scotland and speaks with a rich brogue but prays to the Buddha and has a rack full of samurai swords in her backroom.  A hermit lives in the woods -- he's played by Tom Waits in a beard with shaggy hair that makes him look like Bert Lahr's cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz.  Waits' character watches the action with binoculars and mutters under his breath various comments on the zombie apocalypse -- none of them are original or interesting:  it's all a critique of consumerism as far as the hermit is concerned, a point made with far more style in George Romero's pictures.  Polar fracking, whatever that means, has knocked the earth off its axis and the days seem to last forever.  For some reason, this phenomenon causes the dead to claw their way out of their graves and, of course, they are hungry, hankering to eat the living.  The film observes all of this mayhem with scarcely amused deadpan equanimity.  Friends of the director appear briefly in the film, but are wasted -- I mean this literally:  they appear only to be killed.  For instance, Rosie Perez has a brief part, but zombies eat her.  Carol Kane plays the corpse of an old drunk -- she is resurrected muttering "Chardonnay" only to be beheaded.  Iggy Pop plays a zombie obsessed with coffee -- he repeats the word ten times or so before he has his head blown off.  Steve Buscemi plays a farmer who wears a hat styled on Trump's MAGA caps -- the  zombies eat him about midway through the movie and he really doesn't play much of a part in the film; he's the local curmudgeon and White supremacist and he gets, more or less, what he deserves.  Adam Driver and Bill Murray seem to be phoning their parts in -- they don't care much about the proceedings and the humor in the situation is that neither of them seems much perturbed about the dire situation.  The only actor in the proceedings who takes the film seriously is Chloe Sevigny as a female cop -- she's suitably terrified by the ghastly proceedings and weeps and cowers in an effective display of real terror. (At one point, she even vomits.)  But her naturalistic acting seems out of place in a film that otherwise doesn't take itself seriously.  Adam Driver's Ronnie keeps saying that things "won't turn out well" -- when the Sheriff asks him how he knows this, Ronnie says that he's read the script:  "Jim had me read the whole thing," Ronnie says.  This makes Bill Murray mad and he says that Jarmusch only had him read the scenes in which he was involved -- a snarky comment that doesn't make sense in the context of the film because, if Bill Murray would have read all his scenes, he would know that Ronnie is right:  it doesn't turn out well.  Some "hipsters from Cleveland" show up -- it's a couple of boys and Selena Gomez.  They check into the motel.  Ronnie notes that Selena Gomez'  character "is from Mexico" -- he knows this because he likes Mexican people and has been to Mexico twice.  These "hipsters from Cleveland" don't play much of a part in the film -- they get eaten before we even find out what they doing crossing the country in a vintage car that is said to be "very Romero" (referring to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.)  Everyone gets eaten and Tilda Swinton, who turns out to be a space alien, beheads thirty or forty zombies before being transported into a UFO and, thereby, departing from the movie.  Everyone talks about a country-western musician named Sturgill Simpson -- he's heard on the radio crooning a song called, as you might expect, "The Dead Don't Die" with the refrain:  "The afterlife is over/ But the afterlife goes on."  When Ronnie hears this on the radio of the squad car, he cheerfully says:  "That's the theme song."  In the end, Ronnie and Cliff emerge from their besieged cop car to battle the army of zombies.  They go down fighting.  Sturgill Simpson's song  is played agailn and the movie is over.  The only survivors seem to be three disaffected kids from the correctional facility -- their guards have been eaten by the monsters and the last thing we hear them say is "Let's go hide somewhere."  The film is modestly enjoyable but it feels like an "in joke", that is, a "hipster joke" -- one of the graves in the cemetery bears the name Samuel Fuller, of course, the well-known American director who transfigured schlock into art and a mentor to Jim Jarmusch.