Now streaming on Netflix, The Dead Don’t Die (2019) surely is the most PRESTIGE zombie movie ever made. Directed by career indie auteur Jim Jarmusch — he of Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, Down by Law and, most thematically appropriate in this particular context, vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive — pieces together a star-studded ensemble from his stable of top-shelf actors for a riff on Romero that maybe could’ve been great, but is ultimately less than that. How much less is the question.
THE DEAD DON’T DIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Centerville, Pennsylvania, America. Population 738, give or take, soon to be a fair amount of take. It’s the kind of place where a farmer can call in a stolen chicken and two-thirds of the town’s cops pile into a prowler to investigate: Police Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver). They question the odd little man known as Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) about the chicken, and he fires profanity and what I think was a paintball back at them. He’s not the chicken-thieving type, Cliff says, and Cliff would know. He’s been police chief of this town for decades now. Besides, who cares about the chicken, because Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi) is a racist gun-hoarding cretin who wears a red hat that says “KEEP AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.”
Really, what else are they gonna do in quiet, quiet Centerville? Investigate how polar fracking nudged the planet off its axis, causing everyone’s watches and cell phones to stop working and making the sun set way later than it should? That’s above their pay grade. Maybe they can look into why the cows have all R-U-N-N-O-F-T and the local motel owner (Larry Fessenden) can’t find his cats. Or why Adam Driver keeps breaking the fourth wall. He and Cliff keep hearing a song on the radio, titled “The Dead Don’t Die” and sung by real-life star Sturgill Simpson. Why do they hear it over and over? “Well, ’cause it’s the theme song,” says Adam Driver, who also has a Star Wars keychain.
Anyway, one of the side effects of the fracking/axis phenomenon is government officials lying that it ever happened. Oh, and people emerging from graves and shambling about, skin pale and jaws slack, eating living people and turning them into dead people and then into undead people who can be decapitated and turned back into dead people. A number of Centervillers (they are NOT Centervillians) are caught up in the hoo-ha, including: The local buddhist-samurai undertaker (Tilda Swinton), the local hardware store operator (Danny Glover), the local “Wu-PS” delivery driver (RZA), the local convenience/comic book store guy (Caleb Landry Jones), the local third cop (Chloe Sevigny) and others. Adam Driver doesn’t say he has a bad feeling about this in exactly those words, but he does repeat “This isn’t going to end well” like a mantra, and says he knows this is all going to end badly because “Jim” let him read the entire script, where Bill Murray only got to read his own scenes.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: When the zombies here wander the streets with smartphones moaning, “WI-FI… WI-FI,” you can’t help but recall the Dawn of the Dead zombies mindlessly consuming things in a shopping mall. So The Dead Don’t Die is like that Romero classic crossed with a Deadpan Bill Murray outing like Rushmore or Broken Flowers.
Performance Worth Watching: Murray delivering smashed-flat lines? Sure. Waits muttering things to himself? Yeah. Buscemi embodying modern-redneck ideological caricature? OK. Driver knowing he’s absolutely in a movie? I dunno, maybe. Swinton as a lunatic, again? Yes!
Memorable Dialogue: “The only way to kill the dead is to kill the head.” — the comic/general store nerd-guy
Sex and Skin: Nah.
Our Take: In movie-cricket parlance, there’s a clear demarcation between flimsy and slight. Those without clear artistic vision or technique? Flimsy. Those that feel like a lark and are nonetheless fairly amusing? Slight. The Dead Don’t Die is slight — slight like a fox. I translate the film’s overtly self-referential furbelows as a nudge in the ribs, telling us that it likely exists first and foremost as a hangout session for Jarmusch and his friends, less so as any satirical commentary on the state of the environment (“polar fracking”), the quaintness of small-town existence, modern political rigamarole or 21st-century consumer tech.
There is that new kind of thing where a movie was made in pre-COVID times and we watch it in a middle-of-COVID time, and we’ll maybe see an accidental analogy spring up about a worldwide malady turning people into monsters. But as far as zombie analogies go, The Dead Don’t Die definitely has some, and they’re familiar, and shallow, and knowing Jarmusch’s capability of digging deeper into thematic morasses, one assumes his eye was on a different ball here. And that one is, having a laugh, maybe casting A-listers against type, writing the deadest-pannest dialogue possible and indulging yey-wouldn’t-it-be-funny-to-see-Iggy-Pop-as-a-zombie impulses.
I wasn’t intellectually enriched by the film, nor did I admire it for its groundbreaking aesthetics or storytelling. No, it’s more an exercise in tone, Jarmusch toying with the concept of a far-beyond-blase approach to apocalypse, instead of the usual hysterical one, as a means of subverting the genre and illuminating its joys and cliches. It plays less to hardcore horror masticators, and more to those of us experiencing growing zombie ennui in the wake of the subgenre’s re-explosion roughly a decade ago. So take it or leave it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. I’ll take it, for one viewing. I chuckled, raised an eyebrow, maintained my deep appreciation for dyed-in-the-wool weirdos like Murray and Waits. As for a second viewing, I’ll likely leave it.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
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