The Dead Don’t Die could use more brains

Zombie comedy doesn't offer the biting critique it hopes for

By: Ann Hornaday Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Friday, Jun. 14, 2019

In Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, Adam Driver and Bill Murray play Ronnie and Cliff, a pair of amiable police officers in a small town called Centerville that could be upstate New York or the Poconos — a rural, pleasant redoubt that when the movie opens is seen behind a scrim of gentle mist. “A Real Nice Place,” reads a welcome sign later in the film, which of course can only mean that it’s not going to stay that way for long.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/06/2019 (2661 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ronnie and Cliff are on their way to see Hermit Bob, the prime suspect in a local crime spree. “Don’t break any more laws,” Cliff says in his measured, easygoing tone. “Just calm down.”

That low-key equanimity is completely in Murray’s wheelhouse, but it won’t do much good when Centerville starts to go kerblooey. First, with some bizarre solar phenomenon, then phones and radios start acting strangely and finally, there is the arrival of staggering, staring, intestine-eating wraiths.

Frederick Elmes / Focus Features
Frequent Jim Jarmusch collaborator Adam Driver plays Officer Ronald Peterson in The Dead Don’t Die. — Frederick Elmes / Focus Features Frequent Jim Jarmusch collaborator Adam Driver plays Officer Ronald Peterson in The Dead Don’t Die.

Does the chaos that engulfs Centerville have something to do with the strange new undertaker Zelda (Tilda Swinton), who practises arcane martial arts and converses with her deceased clients with a heavy Scottish burr? Is it brought on by a horror movie aficionado named Bobby (Caleb Landry Jones), who runs the corner convenience store? Has a boom in polar fracking tipped the Earth off its axis? Or, as Ronnie and Cliff’s earnest colleague Mindy (Chloë Sevigny) says worriedly, is the world just “kind of strange lately?”

The Dead Don’t Die is animated by the same mordant humour that has become Jarmusch’s trademark since making his debut a generation ago.

Indeed, the entire opening credit sequence reads like an honour roll of downtown New York street cred. Such venerated elders as Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop and producer Sara Driver play supporting roles, along with relative youngsters like Selena Gomez and Sturgill Simpson.

Jarmusch lards his script with self-referential nods that reward viewers heavily invested in their own cool, in-on-it knowingness. And sure, the callbacks and inside jokes bounce along charmingly at first, invoking not just Jarmusch’s oeuvre, but that of his stars. But the banter eventually becomes stifling, as claustrophobic and oppressive as Centerville itself.

When Jarmusch made a vampire movie — the exquisite 2013 film Only Lovers Left Alive — he turned it into an elegant, elegiac comment on dependency, urban decay and rebirth. Here, his organizing principles are much fuzzier. As things get weirder in The Dead Don’t Die, that’s all they do: get weirder (and gorier), but not sharper or more illuminating.

A sight gag involving a slyly re-worded MAGA hat suggests that Jarmusch is mounting an impassioned critique of his times. But the sundry political swipes never add up to anything beyond throwing shade.

Two separate groups of young people — a houseful of kids in juvenile detention and some road-tripping hipsters — point to a kids-will-save-us optimism that never bears fruit. When the ragged, often graphically yucky apocalypse reaches its most fervid expression, Jarmusch sets his sights on the myriad ways we distract and self-medicate in a culture that’s become addicted to materialism and convenience. But that idea vaporizes in the wake of a deus ex machina cheat.

Frederick Elmes / Focus Features
Tilda Swinton plays an undertaker in 'The Dead Don’t Die.' — Frederick Elmes / Focus Features Tilda Swinton plays an undertaker in 'The Dead Don’t Die.'

The absurdism wears gratingly thin in The Dead Don’t Die, whose deadpan tone gives way to tiresome, grindingly repetitive inertia. Jarmusch might be seeking to pre-empt criticism when he has a character bemoan hipsters “and their irony,” but that’s precisely the kind of winking meta-commentary that winds up deep-sixing his own film.

The Dead Don’t Die looks like it was a blast to make. But, ultimately, it’s the audience that gets it in the neck.

— Washington Post

Movie review

The Dead Don’t Die

Starring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny

McGillivray
14A
105 minutes

2 stars out of five

Other voices

It’s hard to figure out why this film was even made, beyond the fact that it could be made, that there was a loose idea and talented people willing to join in the fun.

— Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Jarmusch bites down hard on capitalism, consumerism and race relations in a film that’s akin to Joe Dante’s Matinee in its satire of wilfully destructive human behaviour.

— Katherine McLaughlin, The List

The shambling, tossed-off quality of Jarmusch’s zombie riff is its most appealing trait. But that’s all it has besides the performances, especially by Swinton and Driver. It all adds up to an apocalyptic afterthought.

— Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

As always, Jarmusch knows how to get laughs with timing. It’s so integral to his movies that he probably wouldn’t be able to explain how he does it; it’s probably more like waiting for a bird to land on a branch than anything.

— Stephanie Zacharek, Time

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