Thanks, I Hate It: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Jim Jarmusch is not a subtle man. If he wants to imply that vampire Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's ghost writer, he will say it. If he wants you to know what his characters' favorite books are, they'll talk about them at length. His magpie approach toward collecting and identity through objects can create astoundingly real and lived-in spaces, but it can also be dull, didactic, and insultingly broad. In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, his Forest Whitaker-led drama about a gangland assassin who read Hagakure and got way too into it, Jarmusch's propensity for show and tell eclipses all traces of the actual movie.

Long stretches of Ghost Dog consist of nothing but huge, multi-paragraph white-text-on-black-field extracts from Hagakure, an 18th-century volume on the Samurai code of bushido, read aloud by Whitaker. These segments are plodding at best. I can respect the desire not to reduce such a seminal cultural touchstone to snippets of deep-sounding bullshit which fail to say anything about the underlying text, but the movie winds up missing the trees for the forest, immersing viewers in so much workmanlike, granular text and philosophy -- none of it, with apologies to the samurai, very interesting -- that no coherent thought can escape the sheer weight of it all.

The movie's bizarre reliance on vintage animation to anchor its action scenes is likewise alienating. More than one sequence begins with a character watching a zany black and white cartoon the outsize violence of which then plays out in real life. I doubt anyone but Jarmusch could explain why this belongs in a samurai movie, especially one already weighted down by quotations and long discussions about canonical novels. Whitaker's Ghost Dog is what you'd expect, quiet and reserved but utterly relentless in keeping to the particulars of his code of service as retainer to a mid-ranking Italian gangster. It's a perfectly fine performance lost in a sea of unconnected artistic idiosyncrasies. His cute relationships with an ice cream salesman and a young girl feel unbearably forced.

Ghost Dog has a fair bit to say about the handing down of violence through tradition, about the destruction of the individual by codes and systems of belief, but it lacks the clarity or brevity to communicate its ideas. Instead it lumbers on for what feels like twice its 116-minute run time before ending, as it began, with another thuddingly dull recitation from its mother text. Nothing Jarmusch decides to have read aloud or play out on a screen within the screen couldn't be better communicated through primary visual illustration and light dialogue. Read charitably it's a movie made by a nerd more concerned with showing you his collection of mint-condition miniatures than with taking them out of their boxes and holding them in his hands. Less kindly it's a creepy, Japanophilic forum post on r/bushido with a budget of $2 million.