Saturday, June 29, 2019

Review: The Dead Don't Die (2019)

The Dead Don't Die (2019)

Rated R for zombie violence/gore, and for language

Score: 3 out of 5

The Dead Don't Die is a zombie film with barely any plot that serves largely as a showcase to have a bunch of talented actors and friends of writer/director Jim Jarmusch fight zombies and shoot the shit in between. It takes the original Romero formula of using the zombie genre as a vehicle for social commentary, and spins that idea all the way into the realm of post-modernism with the characters seemingly aware that they're in a movie, complete with Bill Murray and Adam Driver breaking character and calling Jarmusch an asshole during the climax. All the while, Tom Waits' backwoods survivalist serves as a one-man Greek chorus commenting on the zombie apocalypse and the characters stuck within it. This was my introduction to Jarmusch's weird, minimalist, laid-back style of film, and while in this case it's definitely an acquired taste, once I put myself on its wavelength I immediately started grooving to it. Not a whole lot makes a lot of sense from a conventional perspective, yet it still somehow feels cohesive and entertaining in its sendup of all the characteristic tropes of the zombie genre.

Instead of a singular story, we get a bunch of loosely connected characters and vignettes all connected by a zombie outbreak in the small (as befitting a Romero homage) Pennsylvania town of Centerville. Bill Murray is the local police chief Cliff, and Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny are his deputies Ronnie and Mindy, investigating a brutal double homicide at the diner. Tilda Swinton plays Zelda Winston, the enigmatic new Scottish owner of the town's mortuary who also happens to be a master swordswoman with a katana and a dojo inside her home. Selena Gomez's Zoe leads a group of twentysomethings from Ohio who stop in Centerville on a road trip. Danny Glover's Hank owns a hardware store, Caleb Landry Jones' Bobby is the geeky clerk at a gas station, Steve Buscemi's Farmer Miller is a guy who is introduced wearing a red "Keep America White Again" ball cap, and Geronimo, Olivia, and Stella (played by a trio of unknowns) are teenage inmates at the local juvenile detention center. And of course, there's the aforementioned Tom Waits as the survivalist Hermit Bob, one of the few characters who gets a happy ending. Not that it's really much of a spoiler; Ronnie tells Cliff that he knows things are going to end badly, and towards the end it's revealed that he knows this because he read the script. This film is less interested in narrative then it is in sending up every type of zombie story it comes across, from George A. Romero's use of the genre for social commentary to The Walking Dead's blue-collar focus to the action of the Dawn of the Dead remake and numerous Japanese zombie flicks, and for the most part, it works. The film is at its best once you get used to its leisurely pace and are just hanging out with the main characters, the standouts being Bill Murray showing that he is still the master of deadpan humor and snark and Adam Driver as the guy who keeps right up with him with his knowledge that they're all in a movie. It does a great job capturing the lazy days of small-town life, with nothing to do except sit back, crack open a cold one, and just have some fun as all manner of weird shit unfolds around you, the zombies being just the start of it. There is gore here, but even that is mostly played for laughs; when it comes to zombie kills, the film goes out of its way to not get too graphic and ruin the lighthearted fun, showing that the zombies' blood has dried up and that dust comes out of the stumps where their heads and limbs used to be.

Unfortunately, this aimlessness becomes the film's Achilles' heel as it wears on. The biggest weakness in the film comes with the story revolving around the kids in juvie, which, to put it bluntly, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. While the other characters all interact with each other before and during the zombie outbreak before going about their business, the kids are literally and figuratively separated from the rest of the action, hiding and running from zombies within the confines of the juvenile detention center. Their subplot could've been cut from the movie entirely, and it would've changed precisely nothing about the film except to bring down the runtime by about ten minutes. Other problems will likely be very much a case of "your mileage may vary", most notably the attempts at social commentary. Touching on everything from climate change to consumerism to technology addiction, I get what Jarmusch was trying here, namely to create a satire of a satire: specifically, that of the use of zombie fiction as a vehicle to comment on the silliness and stupidity of modern life. The problem is that it's not always clear what, precisely, it's making fun of here, and so a lot of the film's jabs feel like they're played straight, be it a montage of zombies moaning things like "Wi-Fi" and "fashion" (taking Romero's idea in Dawn of the Dead of zombies gathering around things that were familiar to them in life to the next level) or talking heads on TV, in service to their corporate masters, sticking their heads in the sand over the real cause of the zombie apocalypse. The only sign that it's making fun of itself is that these ideas are blown up to the point where they're impossible to take seriously, without much of a wink or a nod suggesting that we're supposed to be laughing at the movie itself rather than with it.

The Bottom Line

This is probably gonna be the kind of cult classic that polarizes people. It takes an archetypal zombie movie plot and uses it as the basis for an offbeat comedy that won't appeal to everyone, but which will provide plenty of fun and good laughs if you are part of its target audience.

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