**½/****
starring Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch
by Angelo Muredda When Alexander Payne’s Venice jury awarded Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother the Golden Lion last fall, Reddit and Twitter prognosticators and amateur sleuths combing through his fellow jurors’ Instagram posts and likes theorized that Payne must not have responded to either the politics of audience favourite The Voice of Hind Rajab or the formalist fireworks of No Other Choice. More likely, he meant it as a gesture of goodwill from one endangered independent American filmmaker of a certain age to another, using his influence as jury chair to invest in Jarmusch’s latest understated comedy-drama, which is about as slight as major international prize winners get. A late-style checklist of Jarmusch’s aesthetic predilections–from the laconic tone to the episodic anthology structure to the recurring motif of deep conversations in cars to the appearance of Tom Waits–the film is an amiable but decidedly minor work about the common and unique ways families communicate, talk past each other, and either play into or subvert their parts in one another’s life stories.
The film is split into three chapters, each looking at a different fractured family coming together for a social occasion. The first, set in New Jersey and titled “Father,” follows bougie sister and brother Emily (Mayim Bialik) and Jeff (Adam Driver) as they drive through the countryside on an overdue sojourn to the home of their eccentric father (Tom Waits), a mysterious scammer introduced messing up his place with piles of books and clothes before their arrival, playing up his financial need for ever-obliging beloved son Jeff (to Emily’s chagrin), only to gussy up his wardrobe and demeanour for a date the moment his offspring leave. Jeff’s outburst after the visit that “You can’t choose your family”–a truism he reassures Emily does not refer to her–is underlined in the Dublin-set second chapter, “Mother,” where we meet a wealthy author (Charlotte Rampling) as she lounges on an elegant couch flanked on either side by photos of her arrested adult daughters, Tim (Cate Blanchett), looking buttoned-up and proper, and Lil (Vicky Krieps), looking a bit scrappy with her pink hair and playful attire–supplied, as is true of the entire cast, by fashion house Yves Saint Laurent, whose Saint Laurent Productions put up up the funds along with a score of international partners. Arriving in a broken-down car, in Tim’s case, and a friend’s ride posing as an Uber, in Lil’s, the sisters intersect at their mother’s for their yearly tea date, where they passive aggressively brag about their professional accomplishments–Tim receiving a promotion onto a heritage board and the under-employed influencer Lil accruing a host of new followers for whatever woo-woo community she’s cultivated online. The sisters’ strained relations find their opposite in the warm, loving bond between the siblings in the final, Paris-rooted section, “Sister Brother,” in which fraternal twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luke Sabbat) meet in the family Volvo to visit the emptied home of their recently deceased parents, looking through their effects one last time before deciding what to take, what to discard, and what to leave in storage.
Although the three sections are disconnected in terms of character and geography, Jarmusch creates a vibes-based aesthetic and thematic universe that binds them, linking them through song choices (Anika’s cover of Dusty Springfeld’s “Spooky” bringing us in and taking us out in the opening and closing credits), nonrepresentational interstitial interludes with pixellated and zoomed-in video footage of lights and pastel colours projected onto walls, and other motifs. The latter includes the repeated sighting of a group of skateboarders our protagonists spot drifting past them in slow-motion, a trio of Rolexes (or replicas of them) that unexpectedly find themselves on the wrists or in the stockpiles of characters who oughtn’t be able to afford them, and rhetorical questions over whether it’s appropriate to make a toast with water or tea. Some of these motifs, like the cliches that cosmically drift from one character’s impromptu tea party in New Jersey to the next’s proper one in Dublin, charm as a result of the unusual juxtaposition, while others, like those globe-hopping skateboarders, feel a bit tired in their self-conscious artiness, the Jarmusch equivalent of the floating plastic bag in American Beauty, or the elderly person putting a bottle in a recycling bin across the films in the Three Colours trilogy. The Rolexes, an elastic symbol for the kinds of things parents leave their children (as well as the sort of class signifier that strivers acquire to transcend their origins), feel particularly clunky, their recurrence not offering the intended thematic coherence so much as suggesting Jarmusch is the type of person who’s seen a lot of luxury watches up close.
There’s some truth to the idea that family archetypes repeat themselves across different cultural contexts. But it doesn’t add much to Jarmusch’s programmatic structure that the performances are by and large fairly stilted and delivered at the same sleepy pitch throughout, matching the generic section titles and delivering the basic father, mother, sister, and brother you might expect: a series of different faces saying the same words, first in oddly composited shots in cars (a weird stylistic blip for a filmmaker who has set so many of his films in vehicles), then in a series of awkward kitchen-table rendezvouses. If the goal is a formal experiment to highlight how even distinct personalities like Blanchett, Driver, and Waits can be reduced to somebody’s sister, brother, and father, then mission accomplished, one supposes, but there’s only the mildest friction in the decision to cast faces we know as types of family members we recognize.
All the same, once you settle into Father Mother Sister Brother‘s relaxed groove and get accustomed to the variations on the theme, there’s an easygoing allure to Jarmusch’s associative approach, as there so often is. Though the grifted or duped or inherited Rolexes say more about Jarmusch than they do about the characters who sport them, there’s an offhanded specificity to how Waits’s uptight children both momentarily lose themselves in repose while sitting in his rocking chair and looking out at the frozen lake past his house, as well as a compelling shorthand to the way the flower vases on Rampling’s tastefully arrayed table strategically block her eyeline to her daughters, as though they’re secondary to the scenery. Like the Saint Laurent clothes that do much of the work of delineating the somewhat thinly drawn characters–particularly the disparately dressed Mother Rampling and her wayward daughters, united only by red tones that suggest three birds of differing plumage–it’s the wryly observed details that give the film its modest pleasures.
