I remember watching Jim Jarmusch’s film The Dead Don’t Die when it was first released, and being thoroughly unimpressed, even slightly insulted. I understood that Jarmusch was a “name” to cinephiles the world over (especially here in the States), and that he had a kind of maverick, too-cool-for-school appeal, so I was definitely intrigued by what seemed to be a deconstructed zombie flick. Turns out, the movie was rather dull, way too devil-may-care for my taste, and—perhaps the worst sin—dreadfully unfunny. A lot of off-kilter conversations going nowhere and oddball characters doing oddball things and Bill Murray deadpanning for nearly two hours.
It’s possible I’m remembering it uncharitably, since it came out in 2019 (which might as well be an eternity ago), but all the same, it has since been my only brush with Jarmusch. I know that Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is worth watching and perhaps a couple others—The Dead Don’t Die, however, was enough to put me off Jarmusch’s filmography for a good long while. He is certainly a name but there are other names, and other films, and life is much too short to survey every single one.
So with 2009’s The Limits of Control, written and directed by Jarmusch, I came in expecting a similar thematic vagueness; an aloof approach to such staid artistic concerns like clear character motivations and a more or less accessible narrative. These negations, of course, were all present, but I was surprised by how, indeed, controlled this project was, its vagueness stemming not from the sort of loosey-goosey drollness Jarmusch steeped The Dead Don’t Die in, but from, instead, a succinctly-phrased evasion one might normally encounter in a koan.
The Limits of Control follows an unnamed hitman character played by Isaach de Bankolé. He is given his assignment in a European airport by two mysterious hirers who relay their orders through even more mysterious messaging. The hitman (credited as the Lone Man) then travels to Madrid, where he meets several other mysterious figures who converse with him about art, science and philosophy whilst surreptitiously trading matchboxes with him. Inside are either cryptograms (which the Lone Man memorizes then consumes) or diamonds, presumably for payment for said cryptograms. Are they encoded instructions, or coordinates, or…? He then goes to Seville, where these odd encounters continue. Finally, he locates his target, a wealthy American businessman played by Bill Murray who hides himself away in an underground bunker, and kills him. He then returns to Madrid, changes, stashes his things, and departs the narrative.
I summarize the plot this way because it is very much in keeping with the blunt, barebones approach Jarmusch takes. Events simply happen, one after the other, and while one cannot quite describe The Limits of Control as a tight affair (clocking in at 116 minutes), and the going might be rough for most viewers, it’s a film that certainly feels shorter, in hindsight.
Jarmusch accomplishes this effect in two ways. The first is due to the aforementioned simplicity of the plot. The second comes from the care he takes to emphasize repetitions, which give the goings-on a strange, cyclical feeling, and thereby helping compress the film in the viewer’s mind through familiarized patterns of dialogue and imagery.
Here is the director himself on why The Limits of Control takes on such a stripped back approach to a premise which practically invites pyrotechnics and the more darkly dramatic conventions of noir/neo-noir:
[The Limits of Control] is a film where we deliberately tried to take away things that would be expected from the film. Which is the absolute opposite of the American way of approaching…”okay, what demographic, what do they want, what do they expect, give it to them.” It was like, let’s see, can we make an action film with no action in it? Can we make a narrative where the plot is just like a series of repeated variations on something? Can we have a film with characters that have no background, no past, no present, no name, we don’t know what they represent, they’re metaphorical?
Insofar as this intended experimentation goes, Jarmusch and co. succeed. But does it all amount to a satisfying viewing experience? For the most part, and for most moviegoers’ notions of what constitutes a “satisfying viewing experience”—no, not really. Too much is left open to interpretation, and the conversations too shallow (evocative of greater significance, but only that, evocative), and while the overall effect of the film is one of completeness, it is closer to the experience of watching someone efficiently complete a Rubik’s Cube rather than a full(er) work of art. “Ah, see how he aligns this pattern here, and that movement there, and so cleanly?”
Not that “puzzle” films can’t be artistically satisfying (Memento, for instance), and I don’t even mean to suggest that The Limits of Control is a cold, sterile film at all. It’s actually quite an aesthetically pleasing film, even warm at times; and the dialogue, however oblique, still retains the quaintly bantering quality Jarmusch’s scripts are known for.
In terms of its aesthetic appeal, Jarmusch will often focus on those visual repetons discussed previously, whether they be in the natural world…
…or with character idiosyncrasy, as in the Lone Man’s affinity (or is it mission protocol?) for ordering two espressos before every encounter with an agent.
Another striking instance of this is when the Lone Man, when seated by the window of a train compartment, holds up a crumpled cryptogram-paper up against a line of hills in the distance—the crumpled sheet perfectly mimicking the ruffled topography outside.
Now, what is the point of all this formal symmetry? Other than to please the eye?
Perhaps it has something to do with the cryptic dialogue bandied by the various messengers the Lone Man meets. There is a thematic throughline of resonance: of something like memory preserved, down to the molecular level, in objects like violins and human beings. Things simply persisting. Also spoken of is the concept of sameness, of death’s equalizing force. One of the sentences that gets repeated throughout The Limits of Control is “He who thinks he is bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is: a handful of dirt.”
And while the film never rises above its mere evocativeness, there is something to Jarmusch’s minimalistic take on a hitman film (he takes for inspiration the Parker character from Richard Stark’s novels and the Lee Marvin film adaptation, as well as Melville’s Le Samourai) which seeks to strip the story of any potential melodrama or sensationalisms and thereby reduce it to sheer form—just as the Lone Man’s target is a man who thinks very highly of himself, and lowly of others, and thus deserves the utmost lesson in humility. And in a more meta way, Jarmusch takes several high-profile actors (Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, and Murray among them) and reduces them to glorified bit parts—is it any wonder that, beyond the unconventional narrative, the film performed poorly in the box office?
But something tells me Jarmusch does not spend a lot of time worrying about such things. And even in a slightly-better-than-middling experiment like The Limits of Control, he has something serious to say, and says it more interestingly than many artists working today.
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