Jim Jarmusch won the top prize at the Venice International Film Festival in September for “Father Mother Sister Brother,” and that would be a gratifying outcome in any year. A director who has stayed committed to his offbeat aesthetic since his breakthrough with “Stranger Than Paradise” (1984), Jarmusch is a filmmaker for whom just about all corners of cinephilia have some affection.
But “Father Mother Sister Brother” isn’t a culminating achievement, not least compared to “Paterson” (2016) less than a decade ago. Mellow even by Jarmusch standards, the new film finds the writer-director returning to his familiar anthology mode. It combines the triptych structure of “Mystery Train” (1989), in which three disparate sets of characters crossed paths at a fleabag hotel in Memphis, and the globe-hopping conceit of “Night on Earth” (1991), which observed five cab rides in five cities.
This time, Jarmusch, who opens the film with a haunting rendition of “Spooky” from the musician Anika, presents three stories in three locations: New Jersey, Dublin and Paris. All three revolve around parents and their adult children. Certain motifs (skateboarders, wristwatches, the phrase “Bob’s your uncle”) turn up in every segment, often with unexpected twists, and the stories harmonize in delicate ways. But they aren’t all of equal quality.
The first chapter, “Father,” begins by crosscutting between its title character (Tom Waits) and his children, Jeff and Emily (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik), who are on their way to visit him for the first time in a while. Emily wonders how exactly their dad survives, living alone in what appears to be a remote, wooded area of New Jersey. There can’t be any Social Security checks since he never held a real job. Jeff reveals that he gave him money for repairs.
They arrive to find their father disheveled, possibly in need of medication and — in one unnerving moment — unsteady with an ax. His home is a shambles, and he doesn’t have much to serve except for water (a beverage their mother loved, he notes, in a sort of apology; conversations about drinking water surface in all three segments). It’s an awkward encounter that Jarmusch paces as such, before landing on a punchline better suited to a sketch. The director deserves credit, though, for underplaying a revelation that might have other filmmakers going for an easy laugh.
The similarly overextended Dublin chapter, “Mother,” offers the biggest gulf between the talent involved and the inconsequence of the material. It essentially reverses the dynamic of “Father”: Here, the mother (Charlotte Rampling), an author, is the successful one, and her daughters, Lilith (Vicky Krieps) and Timothea (Cate Blanchett), live in a state of flux. They see her only once a year, for tea, doing their best to keep lingering acrimony in check, with Lilith cagily hiding the fact that she is seeing a woman. But the episode, perhaps by design, never comes to life, as if it were held back by the characters’ own reluctance to communicate. Even if Timothea is supposed to be, as her mother says, “a little bit lost in the world,” Blanchett, barely recognizable in short red hair and glasses, has rarely commanded less attention.
Yet the third segment, “Sister Brother,” is so lovely it prompts reconsideration of the first two. It stars Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat as Skye and Billy, twins taking one last peek at their bohemian parents’ Paris apartment. They share memories, pore over pictures and converse in an entirely credible shorthand that they attribute to “twin factor.” Moore and Sabbat are superb, and it’s the only chapter in which both the children and their parents come across as fully imagined characters — even though the mother and father, who died in a plane crash before the action starts, are unseen except in photos.
When the twins pop in an eight-track to play their mom’s favorite song (the Dusty Springfield version of “Spooky”), they give “Father Mother Sister Brother” a pleasing symmetry. It’s a wondrous interlude, and Jarmusch at his best.
Father Mother Sister Brother Rated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters.
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