Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Written by Jim Jarmusch
Starring Forrest Whitaker, John Tormey, Camille Winbush
USA, 2000
Rated R (violence, language)

B+

THE POETRY OF WAR
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is certainly a violent film, but it's probably the most serene movie I've seen in a very long time, being free of regular shoot-'em-up action and substantial suspense. I am new to the work of American independent film master Jim Jarmsuch, so I am ready to be chastised for not having seen his supposedly similar “masterpiece” Dead Man, or his classic Stranger than Paradise. His new film is invigorating without ever being too slick or even feeling like a completely satisfying experience, and it all rests, mostly, on his shoulders. Its plot, which focuses on the title character, a hit man (played by Forest Whitaker, who is appropriately reserved but not really impressive) who has adopted the samurai's way of life, is more like a premise. It seems barely enough to hold together a two-hour film, but it is actually Jarmusch’s delicate direction that creates the beautiful, quiet mood that feels liable to crumble at any minute. Here, style is synonymous to substance, and execution is king.

Ghost Dog is an eccentric hit man; he communicates with his master (who saved his life years ago) by pigeon, and is incredibly peaceful and standoffishly friendly. He has a great deal of respect for his master, who works for an Italian mob, and follows the strict code of the samurai. When he makes the mistake of murdering a man in the presence of one of the mob bosses’ daughters, the mob orders that he be killed. The movie feels very simple and stripped-down, but it's packed with humorous witticisms that stem from Jarmusch bringing together all these ironies, outright contradictions, and opposite elements of nature into his tangy, pungent culture soup.

In the film, we have the hip-hop, Japanese, Italian-mobster, American cartoons, and Haitian cultures represented, with an insignificant reference to the Chinese on the side, but Ghost Dog is, first and foremost, about the hip-hop culture. As Jonathan Rosenbaum astutely pointed out in his review of the film, Jarmsuch mixes these different flavors together like a DJ samples. Hip-hop is often about putting old music into a fresh context and piecing different sounds and textures together, and rap is usually a spontaneous flood of words and rhetoric, just like jazz is an improvisational flood of music (we get some jazz on the soundtrack when Ghost Dog is found cruising in his stolen car to what sounds like a whining sax; the perfectly intoxicating score is by one of today’s great rappers, Wu Tang's RZA, who Jarmusch has hailed as the "Thelonious Monk of hip-hop.")

Ghost Dog's bible is an old Japanese warrior text called Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, and we are frequently read passages of this book in voice-over as the words are shown on title cards; this collection of esoteric samurai doctrine sounds to me like something out of the Tao Te Ching (the only Asian literature I've read.) It is this oriental connection to the spirit and to nature and this state of tranquility that the film uses as its style. There's the overwhelming desire for peace, but the reality of suffering. All the violence in the film is gracefully choreographed and when someone is shot in the film, they do not scream in agony, but first sit down in their chair, and then slump over to die in dignity. Each event in the film is related to karma, and the plot, just like the equally spiritual Unbreakable, makes some sort of ineffable sense. What goes around comes around; a collection of Japanese short stories makes its way from the hands of the mob boss's daughter to Ghost Dog to a little girl Ghost Dog meets in the park named Pearline (the excellent Camille Winbush), then back to Ghost Dog and back again to the mob boss's daughter. And everything occurs according to Ghost Dog's plan; once he has completed all he needs to complete on Earth, he allows himself to be killed by his master.

Ghost Dog is certainly about eccentricity and, in these modern times, the longing to revert back to something ancient, something basic and spiritually pure. But when Pearline, who loves to read, shares with Ghost Dog the books that are in the lunch box that she totes, and we find a trashy book called Night Nurse amongst classics like Frankenstein (whose monster is surely a symbol of man’s search for understanding), the message seems to be that our incessant quest for spirituality is no more righteous than our tawdry sexual lusts. The film shows a great deal of respect for books and bibliophiles- the protagonist treats books with such esteem that he will not kill anyone who lends him one to read- and Pearline’s books are in her lunch box, obviously, to compare literature to food.

The funny thing about the film is that killing is, of course, impure, but it is treated as pure here and as some form of transcendence (which is not exactly the most responsible of mentalities). Murder is about playing God, and Hagakure, in a way, instructs the reader on how to be God while still paying heed to a higher God, which is a retainer’s master. Though Ghost Dog isn't always captivating, it always leaves you with a certain atmosphere, and the wonderful Robby Müller’s immaculately unattractive cinematography makes the film look subtle and unadorned, yet also makes it give off rays of unpleasantness. And despite the fact that I don’t believe it to be a masterpiece and do not regard it as my favorite movie of 2000, I think it's the most perfect movie of the year, perhaps because it's about the desire to perfect oneself.

By Andrew Chan [JAN. 15, 2001]