Still buzzing: Twenty years of Coffee & Cigarettes
A dive into the Overstreet Archives reveals that the 2004 movie with the most impressive and eclectic cast was an arthouse novelty that many have forgotten. But it's still a savory pleasure today.
Jack White has a new album — No Name. And, track for track, it’s one of his strongest!
In fact, almost everyone who appeared in Jim Jarmusch’s star-crowded 2004 feature Coffee and Cigarettes is still busy making music or movies or other kinds of media today. Bill Murray has done much of his best work since then. Cate Blanchett is still at the top of her game. Alfred Molina hadn’t played Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2 yet when he played a struggling, despairing actor here. And Steven Wright? Having kept a low profile since his late ‘80s standup success, he’s now writing novels! (I didn’t see that coming.)
When I wrote this review, director Jim Jarmusch had not yet risen to the top of my list of favorite American filmmakers. Today, as I look back on so many films that have become meaningful to me—particularly Paterson, Only Lovers Left Alive, and Down By Law—I realize that I cannot wait to see what he does next. He’s so unpredictable in his passions, even as his style is so consistently defined by a zen vibe, a spirit of patient and observant curiosity, and a focus on seekers and outsiders taking existential journeys. It could be Part Two of Coffee and Cigarettes, and I would be deliriously happy.
Here’s my review of Coffee and Cigarettes, which was originally published in an abridged edition on June 11, 2004 at Christianity Today. As I read over it today, I’m making some new notes that I’m including either as bracketed text or as footnotes.
If you could sit down and have a cup of coffee with anybody in the world alive today, who would you choose?1
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has done even better than that. He's brought together many of his favorite pop culture figures and filmed them while they talk to each other over cups of coffee. He's been doing this for twenty years, and now moviegoers get to enjoy the results. Coffee and Cigarettes is a film for people who want something more than predictable entertainment. It's for people who love to watch people.
Coffee and Cigarettes is the latest experimental entry in a fascinating career. Jarmusch's consistently challenging and innovative work has earned him cult status in independent filmmaking circles. For this film, he abandoned plot entirely and instead focused on documenting a variety of amusing, thoughtful, sometimes surreal interactions between his former cast members and other musicians, actors, and familiar pop culture figures. This isn't a documentary—the performers are working from sketchy scripts that lead to surprise, discomfort, and, sometimes, understated punchlines. The pleasure of watching this collection of brief meetings is in the contrasting personalities, expressions, and improvisations that fill up the minimalist material.
Some of the meetings are more rewarding experiments than others.
The film opens with a meeting of spectacularly different personalities. The flamboyant and erratic Roberto Benigni—who starred in my favorite Jarmusch comedy Down by Law as well as Life is Beautiful (which won him an Oscar)—joins comedian Steven Wright, whose photograph belongs next to the word “deadpan” in the dictionary. Benigni's faltering English and Wright's worried mumbling lead to a feeble-at-best conversation that culminates in a moment of unlikely decision. This meeting was filmed all the way back in 1986.
The meeting between British comedian Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People) and actor Alfred Molina is a hilarious play on Molina's career as a torturous struggle for success despite the incredible run of great films in which he has performed (Frida, Magnolia, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the upcoming Spider-Man 2). Coogan creates a similarly phony version of himself as an insensitive egomaniac, treating Molina like an annoying fan instead of as the great actor of stage and screen that he is. The plot thickens when Molina presents a startling discovery he's made, and Coogan's disregard for his colleague backfires.
Fans of actress Cate Blanchett (The Lord of the Rings, Veronica Guerin, Elizabeth) will be delighted to see her deliver the film's finest performance. Blanchett plays herself in a meeting with her cousin, who shows up at a ritzy hotel during a film junket to make sour remarks about the attitudes of the rich and famous. Blanchett plays both sides of the conversation so convincingly, some viewers may never figure out the joke.2
My favorite meeting takes place between French-Canadian actors Alex Descas3 and Isaach de Bankole, who say very little out loud, but their interplay of critical and bewildered glances becomes a comedy in itself.
There’s a casual verbal sparring match between a couple of opinionated Italians (Joe Rigano and Vinny Vella), laced with excessive use of a certain expletive (you can guess which one) that might be offensive if it was used in a meaningful fashion. But only those who cannot tolerate encounters with profanity will come away without some affection for these cussing coots. Sure, swearing, like smoking, can be a bad habit, polluting conversation and communication.4 And it sometimes betrays a certain sense of insecurity, weakness, or desperation in those who do it. But sometimes it can be a meaningful form of expression and emphasis. And sometimes it can make speech more musical, sparking like percussion or punctuation. It can be hilarious from characters who seem oblivious to their own carelessness. As it is, the two fill the stereotypes formed from a thousand gangster flicks, reacting as if the entire world appalls them.
Other highlights include Bill Murray's appearance in a feeble disguise as a diner waiter. He joins hip-hop artists RZA and GZA, who can't seem to call him by anything but his full name as they advise him against drinking coffee straight from the pot. Rising alt-rock stars The White Stripes puff cigarettes and ponder a malfunctioning invention, one that everyone except its owner knows how to fix. And, speaking of rock’n’roll, eccentric rock legend Tom Waits has an amusing meeting with Iggy Pop, who can't avoid stepping on Waits' toes, no matter how good his intentions.
Another interesting variation is the contrasting styles of the various cinematographers, including Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet, The Ice Storm), Robby Muller (Breaking the Waves), Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Tom DiCillo (Stranger than Paradise). In the film's most sublime episode, actors Taylor Mead and Bill Reed share a table at night behind a restaurant where the light illuminates Mead's magnificent face in such a way to create a sort of holy moment—a picture worth capturing in a frame.
The conversations occasionally crisscross on similar themes and recurring statements, leading us to consider the way bits of news and quotable quotes thread their way from relationship to relationship, affecting each person differently. “The earth is a conductor of acoustical resonance,” they muse, some of them profoundly intrigued, others completely perplexed.
Many will walk away from Coffee and Cigarettes shaking their heads, wondering what the purpose of such a meandering, plotless, talky motion picture could be. Others will be bothered by the film's frequently rough dialogue and the proliferation of nicotine. But it would be wrong to consider this a failed experiment. Viewers simply need to adjust their lenses to focus on smaller things, quieter moments, and quirks of personality.
It would also be out of line to call this a glorification of smoking [as many Christianity Today readers are sure to do]. In fact, several characters describe obvious detriments of smoking. Still, it's undeniable that smoking can be an expressive and revealing indulgence, and the huffing and puffing sometimes becomes a dialogue in itself. After a while, the coffee and cigarettes take on an almost symbolic significance, as if each smoke and each cuppa joe represent the common everyday moments that are burnt up, sipped away, with very little notice.
It is certainly fair to say that other filmmakers might have come up with more entertaining exchanges, wilder personality contrasts, and more imaginative situations than these. A few of the episodes never quite come to life. They never aspire to explore such ambitious territory as other “talk movies” like My Dinner with Andre or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Waking Life.
But Coffee and Cigarettes performs a valuable service, reminding us that moments of revelation and inspiration happen outside of the typical contexts of big screen movies. Jarmusch's intention is to celebrate the simple things that bring us together, and to enjoy the wide variety of personal styles, faces, voices, and experiences that manifest themselves right in front of us every day. A film like this can help us enjoy each other more. It can help us appreciate how much we reveal about ourselves in our most casual and typical exchanges. It can also de-glamorize the cultivated images of celebrities and remind us how much we all have in common, how each one of us can make the briefest of encounters either meaningful, memorable, and revealing, or else cold, empty, and wasted.
The late Gene Siskel once commented that he sometimes measured films by whether or not they would be as good as a documentary of the same actors talking over lunch. He probably would have enjoyed this film. Hopefully Jarmusch will inspire other filmmakers to consider turning their cameras toward unconventional matters like this.5 Every hour of our lives is sacred and worth examining. And, really, how worthwhile is it to dwell on car chases, serial killers, scandals, and shallow romances anyway?
Other questions come to my mind as I revisit this film today: Do you have a favorite “episode” from this film? Do you have any ideas about who you’d want to set up at various tables to smoke and sip coffee if this became a series?
It’s amusing to look back at this Blanchett-versus-Blanchett scene now, as we had no idea that she would go on to apply her chameleonic powers in playing Bob Dylan himself for Todd Haynes in I’m Not There. And later, in Manifesto, she’d give us a one woman show full of diverse personalities.
Descas was still four years away from my favorite performance of his: Lionel in Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum. A year after that, he was with Bankolé again in Jarmusch’s mind-bending crime drama The Limits of Control. Bankolé had already starred in in Denis’ Chocolat. Both have had very busy careers full of great performances since then.
It’s funny to look back on how anxious I was about recommending this movie to Christianity Today’s readers, knowing how so many of them rate profanity as an intolerable sin, and condemn movies for it far more severely than they condemn movies that contain violence, vanity, misogyny, or worse. Often, these reviews were like an excuse to get to defend things I had seen routinely dismissed in my churches and schools.
I wonder how many of the quirky, episodic films I’ve seen since Coffee and Cigarettes that might have been inspired by that film. One recent example that comes to mind is The Balcony Movie, which I reviewed here in April 2023.