—three sticks of doom

Jim Jarmusch likes the mundane. He likes those quotidian moments that happen between dramatic episodes, because that's where some of the greatest truths of human interaction are revealed. To make a film about such moments requires tremendous skill and subtlety, and lucky for us, Jarmusch has both of these attributes in spades. The problem is—to paraphrase Sigmund Freud—sometimes a mundane moment is just a mundane moment.

Coffee and Cigarettes, which Jarmusch wrote and directed, is comprised of 11 black-and-white vignettes. These vignettes are not related or necessarily sequential, but there are common themes and phrases that repeat throughout. Almost every vignette features someone who says, "Coffee and cigarettes—that's not a very healthy lunch." Another repetition occurs when RZA and GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan discuss the inherent connections between music and the practice of medicine. This comes after a bar scene in which Tom Waits informs Iggy Pop that he was late because he had to perform a tracheotomy with a ball point pen.

Yes, Coffee and Cigarettes is funny. How could it not be funny when it opens with Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright chatting neurotically in a cafe? Their table is littered with empty coffee cups, and they've clearly had so much of the beverage that both sets of hands are shaking. They keep switching seats. They also engage in weird, tentative conversation that sometimes falters because the manic Benigni (who is a native Italian) doesn't quite understand what Wright is saying. At one point, Steven Wright announces that he drinks a full pot of coffee before bed so he can dream faster.

The pieces are witty and consistent within themselves, too. In one of them, Alfred Molina (International Treasure!) is gushing hilariously over a stand-offish Steve Coogan. Molina presents Coogan with a genealogical chart demonstrating that the two of them are distant cousins. Coogan becomes increasingly freaked out and refuses to give out his phone number. A crestfallen Molina prepares to leave, but just then he gets a call from Spike Jonze (of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation fame), and suddenly Coogan is all foam and sputter, furious at himself for having ruined a chance to meet him. It's clever, see? Cause just like genealogy, you never know who's related to whom in show business. Unless you're really, really good at 'Six Degrees of Separation'. Which I happen to be.

In another of the episodes, Joie and Cinque Lee (Spike Lee's brother and sister) are irritable twins whose libations are continually interrupted by a sunny, hillbilly-like Steve Buscemi (who has some great theories about Elvis). In another, called "Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil," White Stripes members Jack and Meg White are sitting in a cafe with a little red wagon beside them. In the wagon is a Tesla coil that Jack has built. As the device begins to spark and sizzle, Jack and Meg (who are wearing protective goggles) begin to giggle like a pair of crazed aviators. Jack explains that Nikola Tesla considered the earth to be "a conductor of acoustical resonance," and Meg thinks this is a very groovy. The phrase is also used later in the film, when two old men sitting in an armory mysteriously hear Mahler playing. This final vignette is a shadowy, strange excursion that is weirdly reminiscent of Bergman by way of Salvador Dali (minus the sliced eyeball). It's also kind of scary, in that "we've always been here, doing this" sort of way, which is the way I feel when I've been standing in a checkout line too long and I start to think that my whole life has been a dream. Watch out, kids. Boredom breeds existentialism.

Here's where I was mentally when I watched Coffee and Cigarettes. (We can never watch movies in a vacuum, right? And even if we could, the noise would drive us crazy). Like New York, my own fair city of Lawrence, Kansas has just banned indoor cigarette smoking. Watching all these celebrities guzzle and puff their way through mundane conversations, I felt a stab of melancholy. These kinds of scenes are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Where will the glitterati gather in the future? Where will the intelligentsia ingress, or the commoners collide? Sure, the children have stopped coughing, but have we not done them a greater disservice by robbing them of this fecund breeding ground for cognitive discovery? Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, J'accuse . . .!

Back to the show. Coffee and Cigarettes was entertaining and thought-provoking, but I'm not sure it was a brilliant film. At least not in its entirety. Periodically, I was actually bored, and caught myself trying to remember how many vignettes had gone before so I could calculate how many I still had to endure. That's never a good sign. By the time I was five or six sketches in, I felt like I'd already gotten the point twenty times over. I'm not sure how this could have been remedied. The film might have been more effective if more of the vignettes had been of the Steven Wright/Roberto Benigni variety (i.e., inexplicably weird and funny—no structure needed) and fewer of them had been like "Cousins," in which Cate Blanchett plays herself and a jealous cousin. I'm sorry, but I think everyone is aware that celebrities are coddled and that non-celebrities are not. I was spacing out during this vignette, trying to decide if I should buy that Velvet Underground collection I saw in the record store the other day. The same thing happened with the episode about the two Italian guys harassing each other, except that this time I was pondering how greatly Neil Gaiman has changed the face of science fiction. "No Problem" was okay, I guess—it sort of reminded me of the failed communications that occur in Pinter's plays—but there was nothing to do during "Renee" but wonder how that woman got her hair to sit up like that in back. Seriously, was she wearing one of those Spanish combs, or what?

Having said all that, I really liked Coffee and Cigarettes. It's definitely worth watching, if only for the scene in which Bill Murray talks homeopathic medicine with the Wu-Tang Clan. Nothing mundane about that.