Ivory Tower Of Babble

How do you like your cool? You can have it greasy and winking (Quentin Tarantino), sweet and uniformed (Wes Anderson), or offhand and absurd (Spike Jonze). Jim Jarmusch, the godfather of independent cinema, takes his cool like he takes his coffee: tall, black and silent. (Technically, there's no such thing as a noisy coffee, but I think Jarmusch would appreciate the non sequitur.) In other words, he takes it like Isaach De Bankolé, the star of his new no-thrills thriller, The Limits of Control. De Bankolé takes his coffee as espresso, in two separate cups: It's some sort of signal, apparently, for his nameless secret-agent character to rendezvous in Spain with a gaggle of undercover oddballs, but what it's supposed to symbolize I couldn't say—although the waiter who brings him his cups smokes cigarettes, and Jarmusch once made a movie called Coffee and Cigarettes, so there's that.

If I'm grasping at straws, The Limits of Control dispenses limited clues. De Bankolé's hit man receives his directive in an airport, in the form of lyrics to a 14th-century flamenco song: "He who thinks he is bigger than everyone else must go to the cemetery. Here he will see what life really is. It's a handful of dirt." (I know these are flamenco lyrics because I read an interview with Jarmusch in New York last week. Otherwise I would have assumed they were off a Starbucks cup.) He receives further instructions: Life is arbitrary. Life is subjective. Everybody wears sunglasses. This last rule is never stated aloud, but since everybody in the airport is wearing sunglasses—in the middle of the day—I extrapolated. This is a movie with no shortage of cool.

But does it have anything else? Jarmusch got his reputation as a purveyor of hip by taking established genres—the Western (Dead Man), the gangster movie (Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai), the prison-break picture (Down by Law)—and elongating them until they hummed like guitar wire. The Limits of Control works by taking the conventions of assassination thrillers and hollowing them out into a brittle shell. De Bankolé holds his coffee meetings with Tilda Swinton in a platinum wig, John Hurt mumbling about bohemians, and Gael García Bernal lounging in skintight jeans. Each of them passes him a folded piece of paper inside a matchbox. He looks at the encrypted lettering, then swallows the notes with a gulp of espresso. These are not clues. They are time markers. Each one means we're one step closer to the movie being over.

There's more, or less. De Bankolé practices t'ai chi. He eats a pear. He visits art museums. He stays in a deserted hotel that looks like a bird dropping left by a spaceship in 1975. The hotel—it's called Torres Blancas, and it's in Madrid—is beautiful, because it's shot by genius cinematographer Christopher Boyle. The girl who visits De Bankolé there is beautiful, because she is played by Paz de la Huerta and is naked. They do not have sex.

If I haven't made this clear by now, The Limits of Control is an enormously irritating movie. It is a puzzle box that contains no hints about life, only references back to other surrealist artworks and Jarmusch's own films. The director, for all his cool, has previously shown himself deeply attuned to pleasure—both its practice and its denial. In Coffee and Cigarettes, he had Tom Waits praise the benefits of smoking cessation: "The beauty of quitting is, now that I've quit, I can have one, 'cause I've quit." This movie, like its hero, won't tolerate any such backsliding. Its asceticism is complete. "No guns, no mobiles, no sex," de la Huerta complains. No nada, kid.

Eventually, De Bankolé gets to his target, a sinister suit played by Bill Murray, and sends him to the cemetery. By this time, Jarmusch had shown me fear in a handful of dirt. But my worry wasn't that I was going to die someday. It was that the movie wouldn't end first.

is rated R. It opens Friday at Cinema 21.

WWeek 2015