The Dead Don’t Die

Jim Jar­musch has a bone to pick with Amer­i­ca. By his own admis­sion, his oeu­vre has always viewed the so-called Land of Oppor­tu­ni­ty through a for­eign­ers’ eyes, explor­ing immi­grant sto­ries and ele­ments of Euro­pean and Japan­ese film­mak­ing to cre­ate some­thing that is dis­tinc­tive­ly, unmis­tak­ably Jarmuschian.

After the soul­ful blue col­lar poet­ry of Pater­son, he returns to the famil­iar­i­ty of an unre­mark­able Amer­i­can town for his unique take on the zom­bie com­e­dy. But in true Jar­musch fash­ion, it’s not real­ly about zom­bies, no more than Only Lovers Left Alive was about vam­pires. Rather, this is Jar­musch rag­ing against the cap­i­tal­ist machine, and reck­on­ing with the USA’s present state of decay.

In non­de­script Cen­ter­ville a charm­ing­ly eccen­tric cast of char­ac­ters go about their rel­a­tive­ly mun­dane busi­ness. Police chief Cliff Robert­son (a world-weary Bil­ly Mur­ray) and his assis­tants Offi­cer Ron­nie Peter­son (Adam Dri­ver, flex­ing his con­sid­er­able comedic mus­cles) and Offi­cer Mindy Mor­ri­son (Chloë Sevi­gny in a pret­ty thank­less role) make their dai­ly patrols, while a car­ful of teens pass­ing through stop off at a motel. Oth­er Jar­musch reg­u­lars trick­le in: Til­da Swin­ton as eccen­tric Scot­tish mor­ti­cian Zel­da Win­ston, Tom Waits as can­tan­ker­ous Her­mit Bob, RZA as Dean, the Wu-PS deliv­ery driver.

A smat­ter­ing of strange phe­nom­e­na cul­mi­nates with the rean­i­ma­tion of the dead, who lurch and strut their way through the streets, wail­ing odd phras­es: ​“Cof­feeeeee” groans one; ​“Gui­taaaaaar” moans anoth­er. The cause of the zom­bie plague is man-made cli­mate change, but in the B‑movie world of The Dead Don’t Die, it isn’t so much the zom­bies that mat­ter but how our cast of char­ac­ters react to them, rang­ing from gen­er­al pan­ic to cool-head­ed com­pe­tence and final­ly ener­vat­ed acceptance.

Sevi­gny is giv­en the least to do, her sim­per­ing, squeal­ing damsel a stereo­type plucked from some Romero-adja­cent prop­er­ty. By con­trast, Swin­ton, on a spe­cial sort of form she seems to reserve exclu­sive­ly for Jar­musch films, wields a katana sword with the pre­cise amount of grace and pow­er you would expect her to. Dri­ver, bespec­ta­cled and entire­ly straight- faced through­out, goes about decap­i­tat­ing zom­bies with Paul New­man lev­els of calm while con­stant­ly mut­ter­ing, ​“This won’t end well”.

The theme is that cap­i­tal­ism makes zom­bies of us all – but it’s also a stum­bling block. Not con­tent to allow us to bask in the small-town weird­ness of it all, the direc­tor throws in a ref­er­ence to Trump and some fin­ger-wag­ging about how the things we own even­tu­al­ly own us. We come to Jar­musch for his unmis­tak­able dry wit and rejec­tion of con­ven­tion, yet The Dead Don’t Die feels odd­ly con­ser­v­a­tive in places. The small moments become the film’s best: Dri­ver fold­ed into a tiny red con­vert­ible Smart car; an unex­pect­ed fourth wall break; SQÜRL’s deli­cious­ly atmos­pher­ic score.

This wry, mean­der­ing approach to the end of the world – which Jar­musch sug­gests will come not with a bang, but a whim­per – is a lacon­ic con­dem­na­tion of every­thing that is our present soci­ety, from ​“hip­sters from Cleve­land” to chardon­nay-swill­ing old timers. But per­haps there’s a sim­ple point at the heart of it: every­one dies in the end, zom­bies or not. Bet­ter make your peace with that.