Bill Murray Movie:

Editorial Review:
Jim Jarmusch has been the cinema's deadpan poet of lives in transit, from his breakthrough feature Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Broken Flowers (2005). Limits of Control pretty much consists of deadpan and transit as it follows--make that contemplates--the mission of an enigmatic hitman through some picturesque but sparsely populated corners of Spain. Whom this "Lone Man" (Isaach De Bankolé) is supposed to kill and why are matters not shared with the viewer. Neither is the content of the various minuscule messages Lone Man periodically receives, reads, then swallows. Presumably they cue the next stage of his itinerary, which includes encounters with John Hurt as a guitar-toting philosophe who disdains the word "bohemian," Tilda Swinton as a platinum-blonde-wigged femme fatale emulating Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai (and reminding us that that glorious movie made no sense either), and Pas de la Huerta as a young woman called, with incontrovertible aptness, "Nude." Throughout, De Bankolé's magnificent carven-ebony features register little, not even exasperation that every conversation begins with someone saying to Lone Man, "You don't speak Spanish, do you?"--in Spanish.

Most of the little that's said in Limits of Control is stuff like "Everything is subjective ... Reality is arbitrary ... Life is a handful of dust" (though that gets translated as "Life is a handful of dirt"). You've gathered by now that no way is this a thriller, although it teases against the outline of one. Its hipster self-consciousness includes name-dropping (Eliot, Rimbaud, Hitchcock; the title is from William Burroughs), homage (Citizen Kane, Contempt, De Chirico), and quite a bit of cutting from paintings to actual scenes that resemble them, and vice versa. It's all impeccably shot by Christopher Doyle, who knows just how to light De Bankolé and his dark monochrome outfits against dark monochrome backgrounds, and make us glad he does. Otherwise, Limits of Control pales in comparison to Jarmusch's other film centered on a taciturn black assassin, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), with Forest Whitaker. There the minimalist narrative took on an aura of ritual, devotion, and genuine mystery. The rituals being observed in Limits of Control feel empty and played out. --Richard T. Jameson

The Limits of Control [Blu-ray] Reviews:
The limits of narrative - Jarmusch at his most opaque and fascinating
2009-12-30 - The Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé, hard and cool and tough without ever doing much of anything) sits across from Creole and French. Creole speaks Spanish; he doesn't understand and French translates. He's to go to Madrid. They give him a book of matches. He goes to Madrid by airplane. There he meets several people and exchanges boxes of matches with them; he sits at an outdoor café and always order 2 espressos. When he meets Nude (Paz de la Huerta) she tries to seduce him, but she fails. Not while on the job. He wears a metallic blue suit and looks awesome; eventually he wears a metallic rust-brown suit and still looks awesome. Then he goes back to the blue. He is always queried: "You don't speak Spanish, do you?" He always replies "No" in English; his speech is accented, but where he's from, where anyone is from....no clues.

In each book of matches is a tiny piece of paper with cryptic symbols; the Lone Man reads it quickly and then eats it. He moves on, from person to person, sometimes given instructions verbally, sometimes not. He travels by train to Seville, there to pick up a guitar and give it to someone else; at one point, his box of matches is filled with diamonds. He is an agent - or a courier transporting stolen goods - a mafioso - we don't know. Eventually he moves out into an arid, scrubby, rural area. There is a big house, almost a fortress, that seems connected to the helicopters we see occasionally throughout the film. He meets someone to whom he does not deliver matches, and something else happens...

Jim Jarmusch continues in the parody or deconstruction of various action/macho genres that he started with in DEAD MAN (western) and continued with GHOST DOG (samurai & gangster film). This time, he's riffing on the cools 60s thrillers like John Boorman's POINT BLANK and some of Jean-Pierre Melville's films, as well as perhaps James Bond and the whole cold war spy thriller genre as popularized by John Le Carré. His style though seems more French New Wave than anything else - Jacques Rivette's sense of duration and often-imagined conspiracies along with the very light, playful dialogues punctuated by long silences; Chantal Akerman's something-about-nothing, drama built from absolutely nothing happening; Alain Resnais' precise visual textures. It's probably his least-funny film up to this point, his most ambiguous and challenging, the farthest he's gone from hitting any tones that would resonate with a conventional audience. No wonder it failed to get much of a release.

But for me, it's easily his best film since DEAD MAN. The growing disquiet and sense of something wrong - not with The Lone Man in particular, or anyone else in fact until the last person he encounters, in that fortress-bunker-mansion in the wilds - but a disquiet at the sense of aimlessness and purposelessness both of this character and of much of modern existence. Time spent in airports, on buses, in cars, walking here and there - but little time spent actually doing anything. The Lone Man remains always a cypher: he seems not to sleep, we see him in bed, always with his eyes open; he stays in expensive hotels, given the keys by various people on his journeys - how does he pay? where does he live?; he goes to museums and stares at Spanish Cubist paintings.

This is minimalist filmmaking, all right, a film that is full of gorgeous surfaces (courtesy of DP Christopher Doyle), sounds (Boris and others) and allusions to much of Jarmusch's earlier work, in particular DEAD MAN. The regular, rhyming repetition of the question about Spanish echoes the joke about tobacco, and indeed the use of match boxes provides another point of similarity. Like William Blake in the earlier film, The Lone Man does not seem to be part of this world, though unlike Blake he's aware of it and is traversing it for his own obscure reasons. And as that film is full of poetic allusions, THE LIMITS OF CONTROL features regular movie allusions, sometimes coming more or less out of nowhere - this in itself alluding in a way to the New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard in particular; as in the earlier film, the lead character seems completely ignorant of what everyone else is trying to tell him with these references. The whole film is a journey, but though we do end up with a climax of sorts it is deliberately, completely hollow, and we are left with more questions than we started with. The surfaces may be mirrors, or opacities from which very little can be pried without intense effort. Maybe there's nothing there, and maybe you'll think this is just a big pretentious, hipster Jim Jarmusch joke on you. Could be. But if you respond to it, you will enjoy wondering about that, being maddened by it.

An impossible, unfathomable, beautiful and endless film; among the 2 or 3 best new films I've seen in 2009, and easily something that I expect to improve and grow on me further with subsequent viewings.


The Limits of (your) Patience and Perseverance
2009-12-27 - Well. An important hint is given in the supplementary feature by director Jim Jarmusch. When asked about the movie, he explains it in terms of everything it's not (except the naked babe): action, explosions, chases, naked babe etc...in reality, the movie could be described as the anti-action-mystery-movie. I would have to conclude that it is intended as a parody of the type of movie he describes, or possibly as the inverse of such a movie. A stone-faced, mostly silent mystery man wends his way through Spain, exchanges mysterious matchboxes with various characters who spout banal juvenile philosophical observations approximately equivalent in depth to, for example, 'How long is a short string?' or 'How many bubbles in a bar of soap?', even though these specific examples are not used. (Jarmusch is free to use them if making a remake - I do not claim copyright). The Silent Traveler receives cryptic notes in each matchbox he receives; he glances at these notes and then eats them. I presume they give instructions to reach his next meeting - and he must be a really quick read, because I would find them very difficult to remember - where he will exchange matchboxes again, etc etc. At each of these many meetings, he is asked (in Spanish) if he speaks Spanish. Between such meetings, big black helicopters occasionally pass over or hover nearby. And yes, there are Corporate bad guys. Now what all this means, other than being an anti-movie I will not speculate, other than to make the observation that it is paralyzingly boring, rather like the Warhol movie entitled, I think, Sleep, whereupon a man is photographed sleeping for 8 hours, or 24 hours, or whatever.
I bought this movie because of some terrible opinions I heard about it (I'm like that), or maybe just because of the naked lady, and I must say I can't say I was misled.
The single star granted is for the cinematography (Christopher Doyle - he never disappoints), which is excellent and would have been worth more stars in itself but for the fact that the 'story' negated any extra stars due for the camera work.


A Metaphor Film
2009-12-20 - This film is not for those who expect the director to do all the thinking for them. In fact, this is the kind of film where the audience must assume every single aspect of the story, the characters backgrounds, and meaning of the film. Nothing is explained. We don't know who the Lone Man is or where he comes from. We don't know who the people are who continue to give him his instructions in French match boxes. We're not even sure that Lone Man isn't able to speak Spanish. We don't know who the Lone Man is working for or why he must find Bill Murray's character. Nothing is disclosed.

As for the films meaning. It is my opinion that the entire film is a metaphor for the amount of control human beings have on their environment and lives. The Lone Man passes his time throughout the majority of the film visiting art museums. The mysterious characters who pass instructions onto him are always blabbering about movies, linguistics, and scientific theory. They represent the directors belief in intellectual thought and its importance in the human condition. Bill Murry's character is a white collar business man who heads a criminal enterprise. He exclaims in the final scene that such ideas have poisened humanity's true understanding of life: which is in his opinion, a darwin-like fight to the finish. But the Lone Man responds, "Reality is arbitrary".

Jim Jarmusch is trying to show us that artistic culture, or at least free-thinking culture, has the ability to make the world a better place. It is not just for those searching to transcend life, but it gives us the tools to approach it. The Lone Man sneeks past dozens of armed guards in a fortess in the Spanish countryside. Murray asks him how he was able to do it. The Lone Man responds, "I used my imagination." --Connor de Bruler

Basic Jarmusch
2009-12-15 - Visually beautiful, but otherwise a little hollow movie. Maybe Jarmusch did a film too Jarmusch-like, allthough I still like the way Jarmusch paints a picture about post-modern alienation. And when it comes to the casting of this film, Bankolé is just made for the role of a mysterious loner (and most of the side characters do a brilliant job too). Anyway, this film is definitely worth seeing.

The intervals between events, the thriller minus the thrills - visually stunning, minimalist take on the existential hit man
2009-12-10 - Limits of control is fascinating to watch. A delightful merging of the elliptical minimalism of Jim Jarmusch and the dreamlike fascination of Chris Doyle's camera. Both mundane and surreal. Restrained and frenetic.

The lone man gets a message. He follows up and waits. He gets another message. Same thing twice, and then again; repetition with variation.

Some messengers ruminate on art and life and meaning. Another strips bare. The lone man says nothing, or not much, and does everything always the same way. He wears monochrome suits. Tai chi, every morning. Sits in an outdoor cafe. Two espressos, separate cups. He visits a museum, and contemplates a single painting. The art of waiting.

We know nothing. There may be nothing to know.

Not for everyone. Elliptical and elusive. Still, beautiful strange. I liked, a lot.

Note: there are a few intriguing extras on the dvd, but the little documentary following Jim Jarmusch around as he makes the film was a bit of a disappointment. He's a brilliant filmmaker, who says a lot be saying very little. When he is pressed to speak, however, for the purposes of the short documentary, he ends up saying nothing very interesting. If he could say it, I guess, he wouldn't need to make a film of it - but, more likely, you can't expect much of anyone on the spot when you shove a camera in their face, and he doesn't seem the type to like sounding profound. The documentary is more interesting when instead of asking Jarmusch or Chris Doyle to speak, it shows them in action, doing their thing. It did, also, convey the satisfying impression that the "waiting around, not doing much, only occasionally acting, or being struck by an idea" that characterizes most of what Jarmusch tries to depict in his films is in fact what mostly happen on his sets.