The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 18-24
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
The starting point of Ghost Dog is obvious: Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is a variation on Alain Delon’s stoic hitman in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï. But whereas Melville merely paid lip service to the samurai ethos—in the form of an on-screen quote at the beginning of the film attributed to an apocryphal Book of the Bushido—Jarmusch layers his film with a dizzying array of multicultural associations. Ghost Dog’s obsession with ancient Japanese customs clashes with the general amorality of the Italian mobsters who eventually go after him; one of the mobsters, Sonny Valerio (Cliff Gorman), turns out to be almost as much of a hip-hop enthusiast as Ghost Dog; the eponymous main character’s best friend is a Haitian ice cream man (Isaach de Bankolé) who can’t speak much English, though language doesn’t appear to be much of a barrier in their interactions.
More than just a playful, rich essay in cross-cultural ties in a globalized modern age, Ghost Dog is also a study of a deeply contradictory figure: a man with one foot in the present and another in a past he only knows through literature. Jarmusch doesn’t let Ghost Dog off the hook for his foolishness in holding onto a code of honor that clearly has no place in the contemporary world, but on a certain level, he empathizes with it. Perhaps the character’s final passing of the Book of the Samurai torch to young Pearline (Camille Winbush) is less a validation of the character’s overly romanticized worldview than a more modest acknowledgment of the worth of remaining aware of both the past and of cultures outside our own—which just about sums up Jarmusch’s own lifelong artistic credo. Kenji Fujishima (January 20, 21, midnight at the Nitehawk)