Mystery Train

MYSTERY TRAIN   ****

Jim Jarmusch

1989

IDEA:  A flophouse in a dilapidated area of downtown Memphis becomes a way station for a pair of Japanese tourists, a recently widowed Italian woman, and a British transplant and his two acquaintances.

BLURB:  Jim Jarmusch is ineluctably drawn to coincidence and congruence, rhyme and repetition, similarity and resemblance; those phenomena that, if not exactly indicative of some grand cosmic design, provide fortifying patterns in the chaos of life. Such connections make up the drolly mesmeric form of Mystery Train, one of Jarmusch’s most explicitly and meticulously structuralist works. Everything in the film is somehow both idiosyncratic and commonplace, possessed of its own spirit yet ineffably bound to someone or something else. Memphis doesn’t look so different from a depopulated Yokohama; Will Robinson exists here just as he did on television’s Lost in Space; even Elvis Presley, that singular icon of 20th-century America, resembles the Buddha and the Statue of Liberty from certain angles! And just how many hundreds of impersonators does he have? For Jarmusch, the King is a synecdoche for the country, a mythic chimera of achievement and an ad-mass sign of grandeur concealing deep racial divisions and cultural contradictions. He is the elusive American wholeness the characters of Mystery Train are either chasing or being haunted by, the imago animating and rending the film’s woozy nocturnal Memphis, shot by Robby Müller like a living diorama of Edward Hopper paintings. What Jarmusch’s ingeniously adjacent narratives, transnational cast of outsiders, and myriad formal echoes reveal is a culture that, however distinctive it may seem, cannot be located in any unitary place or idea. As in so much of the writer-director’s work, Mystery Train hilariously and elegiacally embraces the cross-contamination, polyphony, and nomadic nebulousness of America both as it is and, unavoidably, as it’s imagined.