Really Independent
Comedy

by Mark Netter

Two notable new releases by filmmakers known primarily as independent auteurs take on reality in highly comic ways. Mario Van Peebles' ode to the ignition of modern African-American cinema, Baadasssss, tells the too-funny-to-be-fiction making of his father Melvin's seminal 1971 feature, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a movie that marked his own onscreen acting debut as a 13-year old boy losing his virginity to a moaning prostitute. It is by turns outrageous, moving, nostalgic and inspiring. The other film, Jim Jarmusch's collection of eleven black & white shorts, Coffee and Cigarettes, plays like a beatnik celluloid "Goldberg Variations," with several bravura sequences starring well-known celebrities that make us feel we're getting closer to them than we ever have before. Even when it's all an act.

What the two films have in common is a resolutely iconoclastic point of view in service of what might be considered, within each filmmaker's body of work, a light entertainment. In each case, your state of mind when you go in will likely determine how entertained you actually feel coming out. If you're expecting a whole story, or a narrative line that somehow cleverly connects back on itself even across eleven separate short films, you will likely be disappointed by Jarmusch's chamber pieces. If you think the black man really never needed a movie to pull the white man's foot out of his ass, or that an arguably cardboard depiction of racist police corruption can only make things worse, you may not be persuaded by son Mario's paean to his father's blood, sweat and eyestrain. But if you're ready for some truly off-Hollywood fun, you'll want to catch both.

Van Peebles successfully captures the look and feel of Los Angeles circa 1970, in large part by emulating and referencing the cinematic techniques of the original movie, including colorful solarizations and "trippy" multiple exposures. It may be hard to imagine so racially polarized a world as existed back then, when the white middle class feared the radically empowered Black Panther Party, and African Americans were rarely seen on movie screens in anything but embarrassingly servile roles, but Van Peebles does an admirable job of laying it out. He borrows from the work of Spike Lee (a director admittedly inspired by Van Peebles Sr.) in films like Bamboozled, by lacing Baadasssss with both horrifying newsreel shots of anti-black repression and humiliating Hollywood movie clips, the worst of which may be child-actor Shirley Temple scolding her Negro servant, Bill Robinson, fifty years her senior.

What really gives the movie its visual hook is that Mario plays father Melvin, and the resemblance is astonishing. Clips from Sweet Sweetback blend with new shots as Van Peebles the younger fully inhabits the elder with what can only be described as a lovingly jaundiced eye.

Melvin and Mario Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles told his son not to make him any nicer than he was, and we watch the 1970 actor-writer-director-producer-editor put everything he has, everything he has saved for his family, and everything everyone around him can give him, into his low-budget opus. Absolute ruin looms closer and closer, and unbridled egoism plays no small part in how Melvin gets to the finish line.

While surely the events leading up to and including the climax are heightened for comic and dramatic effect, it appears that the movie sticks pretty close to the truth, certainly in spirit and much in fact. Band of Brothers-style interviews with actors playing the original crew members and others in Melvin's circle are replaced at the end by the actual persons themselves, verifying much of what we've seen in a buoyant flourish. The large and frequently hilarious cast, including Joy Bryant, Rainn Wilson, David Alan Grier, Nia Long, Len Lesser, Terry Crews, Paul Rodriguez, Saul Rubinek, Adam West, Sally Struthers and Ossie Davis (mentioned in the film as one of the only other two black Hollywood directors at the time), all add their talents to the festivities, but this is Mario's triumph, a unique movie valentine to his father, given legitimate heft due to the true-life impact of the original film.

Coffee and Cigarettes cannot boast of an equivalent legendary pedigree, but it does have a history of its own. In 1986 Jarmusch made the first short in the series as a commission for Saturday Night Live, and it opens the movie, featuring stand-up comedian Steven Wright and Italian comic actor Roberto Benigni meeting in some wayward café. While a rather unexpected role reversal does take place, the short establishes a theme of shaggy dog-like missed connections, mainly through near-total ignorance of each other's language. From there the filmmaker sporadically shot other disconnected episodes in lulls during or between his feature productions, and about a year ago completed the collection with the final five shorts.

Jarmusch says he treated it as a challenge, always having the characters meeting over the titular stimulants, always using similar camera angles, always with the checkered tablecloth. Aside from those cosmetic motifs, the main theme seems to be disconnection, a comic frustration of what we normally expect when we watch players meet and communicate in a movie. Cigarettes go unlit, coffee cups go unfilled, Tesla coils sputter to a halt. Two characters may or may not be siblings or twins, a friend cannot be convinced that his compadre has no problems, cousins are unable to connect.

What grace that comes is largely fleeting or individual, as with the final short. Aged actors Taylor Mead and Bill Rice both hear Mahler very faintly, but Rice is unwilling to enter the imaginative world where Mead fantasizes that the rather bad coffee is actually champagne. But the major rewards come from Jarmusch's formidable talent for slowed-down, classically counterculture, pinpoint timing. Shots always seem to last just long enough for us to see what we're looking at, and feast upon something unusually human in the actors themselves.

The most memorable sequences feature Interview magazine-quality celebrities. The Iggy Pop/Tom Waits summit (the third short filmed, and a Cannes Festival winner) sets the tone: the meeting goes awry, as both parties fall victim to their worst habits and passive-aggression. Cate Blanchett, in a bravura turn, plays both herself and her bitterly failed musician cousin as they meet in a hotel lobby during one of the actress' press junkets. The cousin, Shelly, is painfully resentful, searching for chinks in Cate's success and finally finding something she can use. As Cate, Blanchett skewers her own discomfort and compensational behavior, gamely (or lamely) attempting a family performance against her worst possible critic.

It's up for grabs whether that's the triumphant centerpiece of the movie, or if the big prize goes to the increasingly hilarious meeting of British actors Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan. Molina may be best known for a movie that's not even out yet, as Doc Octopus in Spiderman 2. Coogan emerged from British sketch comedy as the lead in 24 Hour Party People, and is soon to be seen as Phineas Fogg in the remake of Around the World in Eighty Days. In the short, Molina plays himself as a very eager and earnest innocent, who's asked to meet Coogan, the hot Hollywood import being pursued by every major studio with no bones about lording his newfound stature over Molina. What should be poignant moments come out slanderously funny, and the capper twist makes this the most satisfying of the bunch.

Auguring well for the future is the match-up of Wu Tang Clanites RZA and GZA with Bill Murray. In a fairly nonsensical scenario, the two band members recognize that their waiter is actually Bill "Who You Gonna Call, Ghostbusters" Murray, or as they repeatedly run his name together to comic effect, "Billmurray." Murray has just signed on as the lead in Jarmusch's next feature, cementing his newfound status as indie superstar. It's a testament to Murray's intelligence that he's choosing to go with the maverick Jarmusch, and a testament to Jarmusch's talent that he can attract an actor of Murray's box office stature. The proof is in the brew -- here Murray is funny in a refreshing way, and his combination with the two coolly chatty musicians is inspired.

It's interesting to note that Jarmusch is friends with Spike Lee, casting his brother and sister Joie and Cinque Lee in the second segment. Somehow it all circles back to Melvin Van Peebles, whose independent moviemaking dream has flowered into so many others. This time around, both Mario Van Peebles and Jim Jarmusch, each capable of heavy political or spiritual themes, emphasize the breezier side in their free-spirited entertainments; but each movie works only because it is grounded in something very real, very true, and ultimately quite engaging.

©2004 Mark Netter
CineScene