Stranger Than Paradise

1984 - Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch.  Starring John Lurie, Eszter Balint and Richard Edson

★★★★

Not all of the Jarmusch I've seen has worked for me, but this, his first proper feature, is the kind of slice-of-life weirdness where I think his strength lies.  Sometimes, that slice is of on-again off-again vampires in Detroit trying to just make their way in the 21st century and sometimes that life is a hitman who follows the bushido code as he protects some really, really low-rent mobsters.  There is a joy in his best movies about finding the specialness in the every day, even if sometimes it might feel a bit fantastical.


Here, it's decidedly more normal, for lack of a better word.  Eva (Eszter Balint), a new immigrant from Hungary to the USA, has come to stay with her cousin Willie (John Lurie) in New York, where he oved a decade before, before moving on to Cleveland.  He has a friend named Eddie (Richard Edson), they hang out a bit, Eva moves on the connect again a year later in Cleveland when Willie and Eddie come to visit.  Seems a pretty basic story but the devil is in the details.

There's a lot of hanging out.  A lot of mild drinking.  A lot of card playing.  A trip down to Florida.  You might say almost nothing happens in this, and you might be right, but that normalcy while not coming across as a simple documentary is what makes it special.  Here are these three people in differing levels of what a few years later would become slackerhood*, and it's somehow not annoying to hang out with them because they're real.  They do have some low-level passions (it's pretty obvious Eddie is into Eva, and Willie is yearning for some sort of connection with his family he hasn't had for a decade) and they're usually pretty broke, and if that's not a normal American, what is?

*You can absolutely see the influence Jarmusch has in this movie on the up-and-comers of the early '90s Sundance explosion.   This movie is a harbinger of the Kevin Smith and Richard Linklaters to come, whether it be Clerks or Slacker.