Bovie Movie

A dark, bitter commentary on modern American life cloaked in the form of a surrealist western, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man stars Johnny Depp as William Blake, a newly-orphaned accountant who leaves his home in Cleveland to accept a job in the frontier town of Machine. Upon his arrival, Blake is told by the factory owner Dickinson (Robert Mitchum) that the job has already been filled. Dejectedly, he enters a nearby tavern, ultimately spending the night with a former prostitute. A violent altercation with the woman’s lover (Gabriel Byrne), also Dickinson’s son, leaves Blake a murderer as well as mortally wounded, a bullet lodged dangerously close to his heart. He flees into the wilderness, where a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer) mistakes Blake for the English poet William Blake and determines that he will be Blake’s guide in his protracted passage into the spirit world.

Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan comedy-of-the-night is a collection of five vignettes taking place in the enclosed space of a cab ride, each occurring simultaneously in five different cities and five different time zones — Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. The Los Angeles episode takes place at dusk, as high-powered casting agent Victoria (Gena Rowlands) gets a ride from L.A. International Airport with tomboy driver Corky (Winona Ryder), who would rather go on driving her cab than take up Victoria’s offer to make her a superstar. In New York City, novice East German cabbie Helmut Grokenberger (Armin Mueller-Stahl) has difficulty working the foot pedals to his hack, and his passenger, YoYo (Giancarlo Esposito), ends up driving himself to Brooklyn, picking up the shrill-voiced Angela (Rosie Perez) along the way. In Paris, an African cab driver (Isaach De Bankol?) ejects a collection of drunken African diplomats from his cab and picks up a beautiful but surly blind girl (B?atrice Dalle). In Rome, cab driver Gino (Roberto Benigni) engages in a heartfelt monologue confessing his past sexual exploits to his passenger, a priest who is dying of a heart attack in the back seat. The film winds down in the last melancholy vignette, taking place in Helsinki, as taxi driver Mika (Matti Pellonp??) picks up three inebriated workmen who regale him with hard-luck stories. But Mika has a much harsher story of his own to tell.