'Coffee and Cigarettes' review

Jarmusch's latest is easy to like but a bit stale

By Ling Ma
Published: May 31st, 2004 | 1:43pm

Anyone who’s ever seen Two Or Three Things I Know About Her remembers that famous Godard shot when the camera slowly descends into a cup of swirling coffee, and its resemblance to the universe gradually becomes apparent, the melting cream constituting the stars and the caffeinated blackness a vast of empty space.

In the span of that shot, the understated transformation of something so accessibly ordinary into something much more grandiose and important is remarkable. That doesn’t quite happen here in Coffee and Cigarettes, the latest endeavor from acclaimed indie director Jim Jarmusch. The film is a series of vignettes featuring people conversing while enjoying the most insinuating and ordinary of vices.

Jarmusch has elicited a superstar indie cast that includes Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, the White Stripes, and Bill Murray, among others. If the premise of these figures being filmed in clichéd arty black-and-white while indulging in the nutritional staples of hipsterdom seems like a self-consciously affected choice, note that Jarmusch is far too intelligent not to be aware of this hint of parody. I hope.

In any case, it’s a choice that’s easy to like. Just watch Pop and Waits try to one-up each other about leading a healthy California lifestyle of smoke-abstention, each secretly coveting the pack of Marlboros on the table between them. Or Meg White egging Jack to show her his Tesla Coil before sweetly explaining its mechanical malfunction after its abrupt failure. Other notable segments include Jim Rigano’s big Italian outburst when his friend’s son introduces him to wasabi peas. Almost all the segments are accompanied with multiple tableau shots of white-rimmed coffee cups and a tabletop patterned in a dark-light checkerboard style that is touching in its arbitrary, common beauty.

Coffee and Cigarettes, however, neither boosts the idiosyncratically nuanced characters of Mystery Train nor the acute existential awareness of Stranger Than Paradise. A film about the ephemerality of moments as dictated by the time it takes to drink some coffee and smoke some cigarettes should know something about time, and perhaps it’s arrived a bit too late for us. The mannerisms, the conversations, and the character dynamics all seem vaguely familiar, as if we have seen this film before, sometime in the ’80s or ’90s, perhaps one of Jarmusch’s earlier works or the slew of works inspired by Jarmusch, at a time when talking while having some coffee and cigarettes was a bit less iconically stale.