Movie Review: Mystery Train (1989)

Mystery Train (1989)

Directed By:
Jim Jarmusch

Starring:
Masatoshi Nagase: Jun
Youki Kudoh: Mitzuko
Screamin' Jay Hawkins: Night Clerk
Cinque Lee: Bellboy
Nicoletta Braschi: Luisa
Elizabeth Bracco: Deedee
Joe Strummer: Johnny
Rick Aviles: Will Robinson
Steve Buscemi: Charlie

Rating:

The Dude Abides

Mystery Train isn't really about trains, which is for the best. Trains started losing their romantic appeal around the time Henry Ford built a car that the everyday American could afford, and with every innovation in transportation, the noble locomotive steams further off into the horizon, suitable only for partisan debates and film plots where a person must escape a killer or stop the unstoppable anachronism from plowing headlong into an innocent town. Here the train is in the background, as it should be, its whistle a clarion call to the past, a unifying force that brings together nine people who don't realize that they're being brought together. It is still possible to romanticize trains, just as it's still possible to jump as they roar by, charging into nowhere.

Jim Jarmusch's 1989 film has more to do with people than trains; people and how they interact with music, with booze, and, mostly, with other people. Taking place in Memphis, the home of Sun Records and Elvis Presley, six of the nine principal characters are fish-out-of-water types, unaccustomed to the city and their place in it. Some, like the Japanese tourists and the Italian woman whose plane home is delayed, have practical barriers to work through, like language and the art of American panhandling. Others, like the bellhop at the transient hotel where most of the movie takes place, find themselves lost in time.

Mystery Train is an odd movie, an anthology of shorts joined together by place, time, a gunshot, and Elvis Presley. The three pieces that make up the film do more in their half hour chunks than most films accomplish across their 90-minute running times. The progression of the film is oddly logical, giving us the sense that what we're seeing is The Complete Memphis, even though we're restricted to the old flophouse the characters wind up in and the places they start out from. There's also progression in terms of language and theme. We begin with the tourists, who view gunshots as part of American culture, and end with a trio of drunken idiots who, in their way, represent what America is.

Each chapter has its standout moments. "A Long Way From Yokohama" features two innocents who are nonplussed by the shabbiness of their hotel, who make love on the dirty sheets, who tip the bellhop with a plum from Japan. One is obsessed with Elvis, the other with Carl Perkins. One is cheerful, the other wears his solemnity like a monk. Their earnestness in visiting the musical landmarks of America is fascinating. "Ghost" revolves around the old panhandling myth about the ghost of Elvis, a chance meeting between two women of very different circumstances, and an utterly brilliant scene where an Italian woman is pressured into buying a year's worth of magazines from a convenience store clerk. "Lost in Space" has Steve Buscemi as a kinda-sorta-maybe sleazy barber who seems uncomfortable regardless of his current situation, the oddest hold-up of a liquor store I've ever seen, and a conversation about Lost in Space that probably made Quentin Tarrantino drool.

There's never a dull moment here, never an instance where the film seems bogged down by the anthology format. Three events. One night. All flow seamlessly, lifted by some very odd turns in humor, like when the night clerk (Screamin' Jay Hawkins) tells the bellhop not to eat the plum before popping it in his mouth, and when Tom Waits advertises a fast food squid joint (Jiffy Squid) that, sadly, has not wound up with a t-shirt on the internet. Looking at this movie, it's a damn shame that Screamin' Jay and Joe Strummer didn't have bigger careers in film. Both are fantastic, relying not on their personas, but their skill. Maybe Jarmusch is just magic like that; drawing something great from the untested, showing the innocence in gruesome circumstance, finding romance on an AMTRAK train.

A line I heard at a poetry reading a few weeks ago went like this: "Sounds of fucking in room 305, and we're in room 304. So it's going to be that kind of century." That's what kind of film Mystery Train is, where sound passing through the walls is what ties our story loosely together. Hearing others fucking is a solemn reminder of sexlessness, the gunshot of the fickle nature of life. But say you're in the room making the sounds of fucking. It's not going to be such a bad century after all.