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The Criterion Channel Presents: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)


Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is the most normal movie I’ve yet seen by Jim Jarmusch. By which I don’t mean to suggest it’s conventional or lacking in significant artistry (for the time it came out in such things weren’t actually staples of “normal” movies). But it’s very accessible, very mainstream-friendly in its plot, structure, and storytelling in a way something like Strangers in Paradise or Dead Man are not. It’s a mafia action movie with a thrillingly capable protagonist and a score by RZA. A series of moody night sequences and periodic quotations from the Hagakure appearing on screen doesn’t change that.
Of course the movie’s loftier aims can be found in its influences. Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï is a rather obvious touchstone for a movie about a hitman who operates under a very strict moral code, but Ghost Dog is also fairly obviously indebted to the samurai film genre itself and the work of Akira Kurosawa more specifically. The book Rashomon is referenced directly throughout the film, exchanging hands and acting as a curious symbol of enlightenment, while it’s iconic movie adaptation is paid homage in recurring motifs of the tin sound that showed up in that film as bookends to various levels of interpretation. The film also feels very Kurosawa in some of its plotting, specifically in how the lone hero taking on the crime syndicate had shades of Yojimbo and Sanjuro to it.
But it owes a lot to American gangster movies too -in fact Ghost Dog with its general depiction of the Italian mafia can be seen as Jarmusch’s version of The Godfather or Goodfellas (it probably resembles most The Sopranos, which first aired the year this movie came out). Jarmusch isn’t very interested in gangsters though the way Coppola or Scorsese are -actually, here they seem to be largely parodies in the same vein as his cowboys in Dead Man. But they do give the movie both an entertaining character and purpose for the titular Ghost Dog to have a world in which his philosophy can exist. One that though centuries removed is inherently defined by ancient techniques of mindfulness. We don’t actually see Ghost Dog engage in conventional samurai fighting techniques -beyond one scene of him practising with a katana on his rooftop hideaway. It’s the samurai state of mind, explained by the movie in those snippets, that drives his methods.
It’s one of Forest Whitaker’s best performances -probably THE best that I’ve seen (I haven’t yet watched Bird or The Last King of Scotland). His sense of focus as an action character could rival John Wick, his almost spiritual adherence to his samurai code is entrancing -taken seriously where it could come off hokey; and yet he also is grounded and sincere. For as much as Ghost Dog commits to an ancient warrior sense of self, he lives in and acknowledges his urban black culture -which he fashions around his interpretation of the way of the samurai. Whitaker isn’t stoic here, and the scenes between him and the little girl Pearline (Camille Winbush) and his French ice cream vendor friend Raymond (Isaach de Bankolé) speak to the comfortable, approachable side of his personality -one that simply wants to share his wisdom… and books of Japanese literature. It makes for a more fleshed out character, for what little we actually know of him, to see this in contrast to his violence.
The film is very graceful in this respect though, featuring few elaborate action set-pieces, over-dramatic shoot-outs, or tangents of gore. One guy Ghost Dog holds at gunpoint seems confident and poised enough to launch into a monologue, but gets shot in the head before it can start -a contrast between Ghost Dog’s Japanese way and western tropes. When he invades the mob bosses mansion, wiping out his retinue, but for the one guy Louie (John Tormey) who saved his life years ago, the camera follows it all as a kind of ballet -even using tools like guns, there’s a sophistication to Ghost Dog’s style. And the movie reflects this through its recurring sojourns of mood -particularly the night drives Ghost Dog makes to an arrangement. The radiating city ambience, the occasionally stylized deep blue colour schemes -it’s some of Jarmusch’s most evocative work.
I have to note that the movie is funny too. The homing pigeons that Ghost Dog communicates exclusively with are hard to take seriously -even while their nesting grounds on his barren rooftop seems to point to this movie as obvious influence on John Wick’s Bowery King. One scene, where the gangsters attempt to pin him down and execute him where he lives, they only find Gary Farmer’s Nobody from Dead Man, a charming Jarmusch-ian meta reference that had me delighted -especially in the reprisal of his famous catch-phrase. And the gangsters themselves are all pretty much cartoons, who spend their free time watching literal cartoons, including Felix the Cat and Itchy and Scratchy bits off of The Simpsons.
Ghost Dog ends rather aptly, in translating a samurai aesthetic to the western, much as Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars. But poetically, the way of the samurai is not lost -keenly a message the film wishes to impart.

Criterion Recommendation: All Night Long (1962)
I didn’t ultimately talk about this one in my Best Shakespeare Adaptations list, but I feel it deserves greater recognition. It’s playing on the Criterion Channel but is not actually in the Criterion Collection, yet it’s so interesting a movie it ought to be. Directed by Basil Dearden, All Night Long is a movie that transposes the plot of Othello to a swinging sixties London jazz club. Patrick McGoohan plays the scheming drummer intending to start his own band with the singer played by Marti Stevens, recently married to the black American jazz cat played by Paul Harris -notably one of the first black actors to play Othello on film. It sticks to the plot very closely yet manages to make it work well within this new context and framework -just about the whole movie takes place in the same club. It does notably alter the ending, but that doesn’t take away from the adaptation’s sharpness. And obviously it’s coloured by some really great music. Probably one of the better, more creative Shakespeare movies -certainly for the 1960s, and one that deserves more eyes on it and more appreciation.

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