I remember seeing the original Coffee and Cigarettes short film during a rerun of Saturday Night Live quite a few years ago, back when the only thing Roberto Benigni was in that might have made a blip on mainstream America's radar was the ill-conceived Son of the Pink Panther. At this point, I hadn’t even seen Benigni's two brilliant turns in Jim Jarmusch's excellent films Down by Law and Night on Earth. The original short film, directed by Jarmusch and featuring Benigni and Steven Wright, had a funky, pointless vibe that I immediately hooked into. It was funny because of its absurdist, random nature, and the magnetic pairing of two polar-opposite personalities in a situation where their only goal seems to be sitting at a table, taking in the title consumables, and talking.

When I learned that Jarmusch had made follow-up shorts, and in fact, planned to make an anthology film that would bring those older films together with new material, I was extremely excited. While many other critics seem to consider Coffee and Cigarettes a kind of 11-track film-album novelty, Jarmusch has already displayed his adept ability to work up full-length films from short-film components, in the excellent and underseen works Mystery Train and Night on Earth.

Admittedly, Coffee and Cigarettes is an entirely different animal than either of those two films.
Mystery Train is a trilogy of stories set during the same day and night in Memphis. It explores American culture from the outside (through the eyes of two '50s-rock-loving Japanese teens, and later through the experience of a stranded Italian widow) and from within (as a bunch of drunken average joes take out their aggression by holding up a liquor store and bungling it, naturally). Radio broadcasts and other offscreen sounds allow the viewer to locate each story in the overall chronology of the night, and the device of a mysterious gunshot at the end of the first two sections lets the viewer know that something important is coming in story no. 3. (This device was later used by Rebecca Miller in her 3-part film Personal Velocity.) These recurring threads give the sense of a greater single story, despite the film's serial nature.

Night on Earth is a much more episodic and less interconnected work, which makes it closer in concept to Coffee and Cigarettes. As the title reveals, the setting of this film is one night, as experienced in taxis in five cities around the world. What distinguishes these vignettes is that Jarmusch seems to adopt the sensibility of each new setting, so that the Helsinki segment has a Scandanavian ambience of deadpan tragicomedy, while the Rome segment (featuring Benigni) is exuberant and almost ludicrous, while the New York segment reflects the funkiness of downtown Manhattan, and so on. At a hair over two hours in length, the film is not just an exercise in style and form, but a revealing and entertaining collection of character studies.

The feature-length Coffee and Cigarettes, because of the compressed time of its vignettes, is never really able to achieve the depth of Night on Earth, but that does not make it any less revealing or entertaining. The segment that has gotten the most notice from critics -- the meeting between Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan in what appears to be a warehouse café -- probably is the best component of the film, because in addition to being the most dramatic and perfectly acted of the segments, it also achieves the fullness of the Night on Earth segments in a compacted timeframe.

As for the other segments, it will be a matter of each viewer's taste -- as it was with Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, remember? -- which ones seem worthwhile and which ones should have been left to short-film obscurity.

For instance, while many have raved about the sequence in which Cate Blachett plays a dual role as herself and her less manicured cousin, I personally found the vignette had nothing to say about the perils of fame that has not already been covered in thousands of showbiz stories already, and it just sort of meandered without ever provoking an epiphany or a chuckle.
Some of the episodes, such as the engaging exchange between Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, struggle toward some sort of satisfying closing moment, while others just end as soon as one of the participants leaves. In many cases, the latter is preferable because, as in the Pop-Waits segment, the protracted wait for the cut rarely creates resonance through reflection or provides the solid sting of a punchline.

Other personal highlights include the closing segment featuring Bill Rice and Taylor Mead as two old-timers on a coffee break, for its quiet elegance and economical eloquence, and the episode featuring The White Stripes pondering a Tesla coil, which is the new scene that most closely captured that original random absurdity of the first short (even though the scene with the RZA, GZA, and Bill Murray has the best new odd-couple… er, odd-trio casting).
And what about that first short? How does it hold up after all this time?

Not as well as it could. By itself, it was an interesting diversion, of a much more quirky comic sensibility than one normally finds on SNL. As an opener to a feature film, the acting seems too unfocused and the directing too formally restricted (…cut to 2-shot, cut to overhead shot of coffee cups, cut to 2-shot…) to make viewers feel like they are watching something more substantial than an exercise. Gradually, as more sequences unspool, this feeling fades, and the film overall can be considered a success.

After all, a Jim Jarmusch film is like a John Cassavetes film -- it is a known quantity. These directors have made films again and again in the manner that they prefer, and audiences are always split between the fervent followers and the repulsed disbelievers. If you like Jarmusch, you'll like Coffee and Cigarettes, and if you don't, I doubt the film's smattering of famous faces will get you to change your mind.

                                                                © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004