Night on Earth
1991 ‧ Drama/Comedy film
Initial release: 1991
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Story by: Jim Jarmusch
An anthology of 5 different cab drivers in 5 American and European cities and their remarkable fares on the same eventful night.
1. What kind of information you expect to find in a film review?
2. Watch the Rome episode of Night on Earth.
3. In pairs, compare and contrast the following two reviews of Night on Earth.
Each student in one of your groups will one of the reviews and answer the questions about the review in the appropriate column of the worksheet. when you have completed your notes, use the worksheet on the next page to compare information you have gathered from the reviews and fill in the remaining column in your worksheets.
Review A
Ebert, R. (1992) Night On Earth Movie Review & Film Summary (1992) | Roger Ebert, All Content. Available at: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/night-on-earth-1992 (Accessed: April 15, 2016).
In Los Angeles, a casting agent tries to convince a tough young female cabbie that she might have a career in the movies. In New York, a black passenger becomes convinced that his driver, from Germany, will never make it to Brooklyn without help. In Paris, a taxi driver from the Ivory Coast throws out some tipsy African diplomats and picks up a harsh, wounded blind girl. In Rome, a cabbie insists on describing his sexual peculiarities to the priest who is having a heart attack in the back seat. And in Helsinki, on the edge of a cold winter dawn, it’s a toss-up whether the passengers or the drivers have a more tragic story to tell.
Jarmusch is a poet of the night. Much of “Night on Earth” creates the same kind of lonely, elegaic, romantic mood as “Mystery Train,” his film about wanderers in nighttime Memphis. Tom Waits’ music helps to establish this mood of cities that have been emptied of the waking. It’s as if the minds of these night people are affected by all of the dreams and nightmares that surround them.
Jarmusch is not interested in making each segment into a short story with an obvious construction. There are no zingers at the end. He’s more concerned with character; with the relationship that forms, for example, between a tattooed, gum-chewing, chain-smoking young cabdriver (Winona Ryder) and the elegant executive (Gena Rowlands) who wants to cast her for a movie. “I’ve got my life all mapped out,” says the Ryder character, who hopes to work her way up to mechanic. “There must be lotsa girls who want to be in the movies. Not me.” The movie doesn’t insist that the cabbie is right or wrong; it simply reports her opinion.
As the film moves on from Los Angeles, Jarmusch creates a worldwide feeling of kinship; we will hear Spanish, German, French, Italian, Finnish and even a little Latin. Only the venue remains the same: the inside of a taxi in the middle of the night. Many questions are not answered. What about the young blind woman in Paris, for example? Where is she coming from? Where is she going? Why does she want to walk alone on the edge of a canal? How was she so deeply wounded? Her cabdriver, an African, asks her shyly what sex is like for her – what it’s like to make love with someone she can’t see. He asks her what she thinks about colors. She is abrupt in her answers.
She knows more about colors, and sex, than he ever will. Her entire organism is involved. “I can do everything you can do,” she says.
“Can you drive?” he asks. “Can you?” she shoots back.
The New York segment is the funniest. Armin Mueller-Stahl plays the German, Giancarlo Esposito is the passenger who insists on driving himself, Rosie Perez (from “White Men Can’t Jump”) is the shrill counterpoint voice from the back seat, and each man (named Helmut and Yo-Yo) thinks the other has a ludicrous name.
The segment in Rome is the least successful, although Roberto Benigni, a favorite of Jarmusch, has fun with his zany monologue as he races through the empty streets before picking up the priest. The segment in Helsinki is the saddest, almost unbearably sad, as the driver hears what a bad day one of his passengers has had, and then tops him.
Jarmusch essentially empties the streets for his night riders. The cities are lonely and look cold; even in L.A., “it gets dark early in the winter.” His characters seem divorced from the ordinary society of their cities; they’re loners and floaters. We sense they have more in common with one another than with the daytime inhabitants of their cities. And their cabs, hurtling through the deserted streets, are like couriers on a mission to nowhere.
Review B
Travers, P. (1992) Night on Earth, Rolling Stone Magazine. Rolling Stone Magazine. Available at: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/night-on-earth-19920502 (Accessed: April 15, 2016).
In a box-office world of hot sex (Basic Instinct), hot laughs (Wayne’s World) and hot shots (White Men Can’t Jump), the cool comic detachment of Jim Jarmusch is a bracing alternative. Jarmusch offers a hip, urban, brooding take on a pop culture closed off to feeling. In his last film, Mystery Train, the filmmaker obliquely observed foreign tourists adrift in the after-hours of Elvis-haunted Memphis. Now, in the lyrically funny and stunningly visualized Night on Earth, Jarmusch takes us on five taxi rides in five cities — Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki — over the course of a single winter night. The five stories — or puzzle pieces — are linked only by synchronicity and the scrutiny of Jarmusch, who monitors the interaction of drivers and passengers from the alien, but never hostile, perspective of a visitor from another planet.
The film begins in the stars, with the camera looking down on the first story from the darkness. It’s past sunset at the L.A. airport (clocks are used throughout the movie to show the time in various countries). Corky (Winona Ryder), a gum-chewing cabdriver who wears army fatigues and layers of attitude, picks up a fare to Beverly Hills. Her passenger is Victoria (Gena Rowlands), a power-tongued casting agent who wields her cellular phone like an Uzi. The finely calibrated teamwork of Ryder and Rowlands suggests there’s more at stake than a fare.
In the cocoon of the cab, the two women trade war stories. Though a generation separates them, Victoria sees star potential in the foulmouthed driver. Corky, maybe the only one in greater Los Angeles who doesn’t want to make it in movies, would rather be a mechanic. The conflict drives a wedge between them.
Admirers of the director’s minimalist, deadpan style in Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law and Mystery Train may be thrown by such Jarmusch firsts as big stars, a fat (for him) budget and a grand canvas. But the joke is that Jarmusch has traveled all over the globe and put his actors on wheels only to create a still life. Abetted by the haunted bleat of Tom Waits’s vocals and the spare elegance of Frederick Elmes’s cinematography, Jarmusch makes the world whizzing by those taxi windows a thing of beauty and terror, but it’s caught only in glimpses. More than ever, Jarmusch bypasses traditional narrative in favor of mood and stasis.
The film’s formal structure emerges more clearly in the second story. In New York, Helmut (Armin Mueller-Stahl), an East German who can barely drive, picks up Yo-Yo (Giancarlo Esposito), a black Brooklynite who needs a cab home. On the way they collect Angela (Rosie Perez), Yo-Yo’s outspoken sister-in-law. The culture clash is hilarious, letting Perez — the dynamo of White Men Can’t Jump — add more luster to her rising star. But now there’s an edge to the laughter.
By the time of the third story, set in Paris, the edge is cutting. A cabby from the Ivory Coast (Isaach De Banko) questions his beautiful and blind French passenger (a fiercely funny Beatrice Dalle) and learns some hard lessons about condescending to the handicapped.
The comedy gets wilder and blacker in the fourth story, as a Roman cabby (Roberto Benigni, the convict clown of Down by Law) improvises a confession to an old priest (Paolo Bonacelli) dozing in the back seat. Jarmusch has written a marvel of a monologue for Benigni, whose comic dexterity makes it a tour de force.
The last story, set in Helsinki, the sorrow that tinges the humor in the other tales runs deep. The driver (Matti Pellonpaa) and his three drunken passengers (Kari Vanaanen, Sakari Kuosmanen and Tomi Salmela) try to laugh off their problems with jobs and families. But when despair overcomes one man left at the curb side at dawn, Jarmusch’s gift for locating the poetry in displacement is movingly realized.
It’s possible to criticize Night on Earth on a story-by-story basis as fast or dull or sad. It’s possible but irrelevant, since the film’s cumulative power is what matters, and that power is undeniable. Jarmusch is a true visionary; he knows his films can’t bring order to the ravishing chaos around him, but he can’t resist the fun of trying. In this compassionate comedy of missed connections, he makes us see the ordinary in fresh and pertinent ways. But the flickers of humanity in those taxis are soon dulled by barriers of time, sex, race, language and money. They are flickers in a vast emotional void. In Jarmusch’s decidedly un-Disneyish view, it’s not a small world after all.