Waiting for the King: Mystery Train on DVD

Mystery Train (1989) opens with a sort of image that recurs with almost dreamlike regularity throughout the work of Jim Jarmusch: the world as seen from a moving train. Traveling abroad for the first time, teenage Yokohamans Mitzuko (Youki Kudoh) and Jun (Masatoshi Nagase) are drawing near Memphis. The shape of their window recalls the widescreen aspect ratio. Through it American landscapes pass like some cinematic travelogue. Soon they’ll disembark and, like the protagonists of the fantasy in which some fissure in reality allows one to slip from the audience and into the movie, Mitzuko and Jun will explore the largely abandoned streets of a mythical place.

They’ve come to Memphis as rock and roll pilgrims, dressed for the part, Mitzuko in her black leather jacket with the wonderfully ridiculous ‘MISTER BABY’ emblazoned on the back, the taciturn and flamboyantly affected Jun sporting a vintage rockabilly ensemble topped with immaculate pompadour. They debate whether Elvis or Carl Perkins was the real king. Mitzuko keeps a notebook filled with images that compare Elvis’ visage with those of the Buddha or the Statue of Liberty. As is often the case in Jarmusch’s work, especially the immediately preceding films, American culture attains substance when appropriated by outsiders. Through their eyes Jarmusch’s comic confluence of history, geography, legend and everyday absurdities chug into life.

Mitzuko and Jun’s holiday, in which they taste sexual freedom, confront the eerie indifference of realized desire, and confirm that it is indeed cool to be 18 and far from home and in Memphis, is the first of Mystery Train’s three distinct yet interconnected and chronologically simultaneous episodes—another Jarmusch motif, variations on a theme. In the second tale, Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi, excellent), forced to overnight in Memphis while en route to Italy with her dead husband’s remains in tow, wanders the city and attempts to fend off petty grifters with little success before spending the night with a lonesome chatterbox (Elizabeth Bracco) and a confused ghost (Stephen Jones). In the third, a drunken Englishman (The Clash’s Joe Strummer), also ostentatiously pompadoured, suffering from the loss of his job and his woman, takes to Memphis’ streets with a workmate (Rick Avilles), a barber (Steve Buscemi) and a gun, eventually getting into some serious trouble and winding up at the nexus where all Mystery Train’s routes converge, a somewhat seedy hotel overseen by a red-suited night clerk (outré R&B singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) and his comparatively diminutive bell hop (Cinqué Lee), a vaguely Beckett-like pair whose brief scenes of interaction constitute some of the film’s finest moments of elegantly evoked down-time.

Photographed in Edward Hopper muted tones by Robby Müller, who had already shot Down By Law (86) for Jarmusch, Mystery Train is a gorgeously composed and carefully coloured film whose dramatic trajectories are in each case essentially a lark, elevating the simplest of conflicts to the level of finely crafted art. Themes of the misleading significance of familial bonds—Buscemi’s wonderful as the barber thrown for a loop when he discovers his brother-in-law never actually married his sister—and the dangers of living in a city lorded over by ghosts and undercut by racism and poverty provide these stories with just enough gravity to keep them grounded, yet at bottom Mystery Train is a superb example of a certain strain of deadpan, unhurried comedy over which Jarmusch possesses a singular mastery.

It’s also a remarkable document of not only a great and neglected American city, but of several mavericks of cultural importance—Hawkins and Strummer, Tom Waits and Rufus Thomas—coming together to play. This final element of Mystery Train is nicely highlighted on Criterion’s new DVD and Blu-ray packages, which feature excerpts from a documentary about Hawkins and a short film that tracks changes in Memphis from the birth of Sun Studios to the making of Mystery Train and right up to the present.

The long and winding road: A conversation with independent film producer Jim Stark

Jim Stark occupies the unlikely position of independent film producer. Originally from Ohio, he’s based in Manhattan, though most of his contacts are in Europe, South America or Asia. He’s helped some of the landmark indie films of the 1980s get made and get seen. Most recently he produced and co-wrote the Charles Bukowski adaptation Factotum, a movie about a guy who accepts and abandons a seemingly endless string of jobs. I spoke with Stark on behalf of Vue Weekly about his own string of jobs, the many roles he’s inhabited in a career of making the sort of movies that, as Stark says, “no one makes for the money.”

Vue Weekly: Your film career begins with Jim Jarmusch’s early features. Did you guys know each other from Ohio?

Jim Stark: No, I was a corporate lawyer in New York and had met his girlfriend Sara Driver, who’s also a filmmaker. She approached me, and I got involved in Stranger Than Paradise, which starred my 86-year-old grandmother, among other people. She plays Aunt Lotte. Some people think she steals the movie.

VW: Had you been practicing law long?

JS: About four or five years, doing mostly corporate litigation, trademark, contracts, intellectual property stuff. Jim and Sara needed help on this movie and they couldn’t afford to pay anybody. The last person Jim wanted to meet was a corporate lawyer, but we were both from Ohio, both Indians fans. We got along well and worked on the film together for a couple of years, which turned into a surprising success. He made some others I was involved in—Down By Law, Mystery Train, Night on Earth—and then made somewhat bigger films, where I wanted to stay doing what I was doing. I’ve worked with a number of different directors since.

VW: Did you always have aspirations to work in film?

JS: I took film classes as a teenager. I was very interested in European films, much more than American films. I spent a week at USC until I realized that, at that point, there was no use in getting a film degree. So I returned to New York and went to law school.

VW: Once into film, were you happy producing or hoping to be involved more creatively?

JS: I enjoyed being involved in the process of making movies, particularly starting at the beginning. Some I’ve had more creative involvement in, some less. I had a tiny bit of creative involvement in Stranger and Down By Law, but as time went on Jim insisted that he make all the creative decisions. With other directors, I’ve been more involved in terms of casting, editing or, in a couple of cases, writing. My entrée into this was through being able to organize things and get the money, push the project through to completion, which is often the hardest part.

VW: Cold Fever was your first screenplay. How did that come about?

JS: Mystery Train was invited to the Reykjavík Film Festival. Jim, not being a big Festival guy, didn’t want to go, but I’d always been fascinated by Iceland, so we asked if they’d invite the producer. They would have taken the gaffer, because not so many people come up to Iceland, so off I went. The airport’s about 40 minutes outside Reykjavík, and the landscape is this sort of unbelievable moonscape of lava fields. I’d never seen anything like it. For somebody who does road movies, it was like a billion dollars in free production design. By the time I got into town I really wanted to make a movie there. I’d enjoyed working with Masatoshi Nagase on Mystery Train and somehow these two ideas got entwined in my head: I thought, I’m going to do a movie about a Japanese guy who comes to Iceland and goes on the road! Anyway, I had a good experience collaborating with Fridrik Fridriksson, but that was my only writing experience until I met Bent Hamer, who already had this idea to film Charles Bukowski’s Factotum.

VW: The novel’s quite episodic. Was it an arduous adaptation?

JS: The biggest challenge was to give the film multiple layers. When you read the book, it’s just full of ironic observations; if you take away the descriptions, and just show what’s going on, you don’t get a feeling for this man’s keen intelligence. That’s why we inserted the poetry, which is largely from sources other than Factotum.

VW: What about updating the novel from the ‘40s to the present?

JS: It’s funny. I had people telling me nobody drinks anymore, it should be about drugs. Well, these people don’t get out much. I remember the last night we were shooting in a rooming house, and as I was sitting on this very decrepit furniture in the hall, these people would come out, use the communal toilet and go back into their tiny rooms, living very much the life Bukowski was describing. When we took a break, somebody came in and stole all our liquor bottles.

VW: The sense of alcoholism and loneliness is addressed quite differently in Factotum than it is in Barfly (the 1987 film written by Bukowski). I wonder if that doesn’t have something to do with Hamer being from Norway, where alcoholism is less veiled in the culture.

JS: Probably. I drink very little, but Bent, as you pointed out, comes from a society where drinking’s very much the norm. He was fascinated from the beginning about alcoholism and what it takes to stay there, the work involved.

VW: Did Bukowski’s concerns resonate with you?

JS: I was very admiring of his style. I wasn’t as attracted to the lifestyle, as many fans of his are. Neither Bent nor I were Bukowski fanatics, and I’ve run into a bunch of those since we started with this. We had our own take on it. For me, what was most interesting was this need of Bukowski’s to reject all of the trappings of bourgeois society, not to have a house, not to have a job, not to have a relationship, because all of these things will interfere with and cheapen your art, that to be a real artist means to be an outsider.

VW: Factotum premiered in spring 2005, finally opened in US theatres in autumn 2006, and, as we speak, is still making the rounds. Is it draining to sit through this protracted process of watching a film get distributed?

JS: Well, people think that everything that happens in a movie happens on the set, but that’s not making the movie. It’s the year or two or more before, the script, the casting, pre-production, financing. Then a year of post-production, editing, sound, all the technical work to get a finished print. Then it circulates for a year, year-and-a-half, sometimes more. Canada’s not the last country. I think they’re waiting for Factotum in Japan. Then there’s licensing, DVD, and later re-licensing ... it goes on forever. But it’s always been this way. It’s just a little harder now. You just have to get out there, try and get people to see it, to be interested in it, because no one’s going to do it for you.