J Paul Johnson
While The Criterion Collection has been busy, to our collective content, adding lovely new content like James Huston’s The Dead and the Spike Lee-David Byrne joint American Utopia to its 4K UHD offerings, there’s also been a steady stream of upgrading extant catalogue content from Blu-ray to 4K disc. This month it’s the 1995 Jim Jarmusch acid western Dead Man getting the upgrade treatment in a stunning restoration supervised by the director. As Criterion had released a lively Blu-ray special edition back in 2018, there is no new supplemental content—everything packaged alongside the disc is just as it was then—but that hardly negates the fact that Dead Man features one of the most varied, lively sets of supplements in the entire Collection or that its picture quality is practically unparalleled.
Dead Man may be a Western, but there’s nothing traditional nor conventional about it. It’s a Jim Jarmusch film in all the best ways. The film was the director’s first to go outside a contemporary milieu, and in examining the nineteenth-century American West, Jarmusch created a Western landscape that hadn’t been seen before onscreen. There is no romanticization of pioneer ruggedness, no adherence to Manifest Destiny as a guiding, God-given principle for westward expansion. In Dead Man the West is an existential wasteland, decaying at every turn, ravaged by industrialization and grappling directly with a new country’s earned legacy of cruel violence and casual prejudice.
But I’m making Dead Man sound deadly serious. And while it is, it’s also incredibly funny, at times whimsical, leavening its morbidity with the director’s trademark timing and humor. It begins with a meek accountant who just happens to be named William Blake (a pre-scandal Johnny Depp, back before we learned his claims of Cherokee heritage were false) but is not—and is not even aware of—the Romantic poet and painter of the same name. Blake barely arrives in one of the West’s most godawful outputs named Machine before he finds himself in the middle of the fatal lovers’ quarrel that gives rise to the film’s slim plot. Wounded and confused, Blake flees, bounty hunters in pursuit.
While there are moments of some traditional Western action tropes—gunplay, pursuit, and the like— as Blake goes on the lam, it’s when he meets a Native American named, if that is the right word, “Nobody,” played to perfection by Gary Farmer, a First Nations actor who is one of the first ever given a leading role in a major motion picture. His pithy perspective and deadpan delivery echoes, just a bit, that of Chief Dan George in Little Big Man and is every bit as hilarious. Nobody guides Blake on a journey that becomes more spiritual than survivalist in its purpose, while Blake begins to wonder if he has been, literally, a “dead man” all the while.
The 1990s were a time of revisionism and reconsideration for the Western genre. Films began to deconstruct the good-guy-with-a-gun mythos more explicitly both in Hollywood and independent fare alike, inviting into the conversation more female leads (e.g. The Battle of Little Jo) and alternative perspectives. Dead Man is as important a film in the arc of the Western as the higher-profile Unforgiven or Dances with Wolves from the same decade: it’s lesser seen but in its own way more artful and wholly idiosyncratic, with a well-researched Native American philosophy informing its aesthetic.
And speaking of aesthetics, Dead Man is both a visual and aural delight. Its austere imagery, shot in beautifully stark black-and-white by Robby Müller, is full of splendid detail in this 4K remaster. Neil Young provides the memorable score, improvising on his electric to create motifs and melodies that underscore the edgy, live-wire ambience of a Western landscape a million miles away from those by, say, Elmer Bernstein or Dmitri Tiomkin.
Müller’s cinematography and Young’s score benefit from the 4K digital restoration here, supervised and approved by Jarmusch with a 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. No one, to my knowledge, ever complained about the picture quality on Criterion’s 2018 Blu-ray release, but details are indeed slightly sharper and blacks even more pitch on 4K than on the Blu-ray disc. As progressivist and idiosyncratic a Western as has been made before or perhaps even since, Dead Man deserves the best image and sound quality possible, and that’s what Criterion delivers here.
Special Features
Commentary. In lieu of a full-movie audio commentary track, sound designer Drew Kunin and production designer Bob Ziembicki comment on several scenes from the film, providing insights to the complexities of its visuals and audio. It’s an excellent study for those interested in the film’s more technical details. There’s no Jarmusch and no moderator, and one never knows which scenes will offer commentary, so this featurette would probably work better edited down to those scenes commented on, but no cinephile will be disappointed with its content.
There are no subtitles for the Deaf and hard of hearing available for this commentary or for any of the other featurettes. That’s in line with Criterion’s policy, which I’ve argued against in nearly every one of my “Off the Shelf” reviews of their releases. Oddly, in this case, there seems to be on the Blu-ray disc no option to turn on SDH anywhere at all, not even for the main feature.
Q&A with Jim. This 48-minute audio recording features the director answering over 30 questions from fans around the world. Jarmusch is, of course, engaging and amusing, so much so that you won’t even mind that this is only an audio recording supplemented with a single still image from the film. There’s even an index that allows access to each question separately—though the questions are without exception detailed and probing. There are few fans as sharp as Jarmusch’s! This, like almost all of the supplemental content provided, was recorded by Criterion in 2017 specifically for their Blu-ray release.
Gary Farmer. In this lively 27-minute interview, Nobody himself provides his personal perspective on the film, working with Depp and his other co-stars, Jarmusch’s direction, and more. Farmer is every bit as pithy and smart as you might imagine from watching his character in action.
Reading Blake. Where can you hear Alfred Molina (“The Everlasting Gospel”), Iggy Pop (“Proverbs of Hell”), and Mili Avital (“Auguires of Innocence”) read poems by William Blake? Nowhere else but right here, in this seven-minute sequence, accompanied by location scouting photos taken by Jarmusch across the American West. Like the Q&A, this supplement features its own index.
Deleted Scenes. This 15-minute segment collects several additional sequences. They’re in pretty rough visual quality and there is no index (one would be more helpful here than those provided for the Q&A or poetry reading). But they’ll be of interest to completists.
Neil Young. This 25-minute featurette presents footage shot by Jarmusch of Young composing the Dead Man score and includes the 1996 music video they created together. For some reason, there is also an option to hear Johnny Depp read a Blake poem over the video.
Black and White in Color. This brief but lively slideshow rotates color pictures taken during the production.
Also included in Criterion’s double-disc clear jewel case packaging is a trailer for the film and a 24-page black-and-white insert—the same as in the 2018 Blu-ray edition—featuring essays by film critic Amy Taubin (“Blake in America”) and music journalist Ben Ratliff (“Earth Wind and Fire”), the latter focused on Neil Young’s soundtrack.
Altogether, Criterion’s 4K UHD upgrade to its Spine #915 from 2018 is just that and nothing more: a spectacular-looking 4K remaster of a film that as much as any warrants it. Dead Man looks fantastic in 4K. For the upgrade, none of the special features are new and repeat all of those extant from 2018. Whether or not it’s worth the upgrade is a decision only each potential consumer can make, even if to my thinking one would need to be a Jarmusch or Criterion completist to upgrade from the prior version. And to anyone who does not already own a Criterion version of Dead Man, here is a new opportunity to pick up a beautiful new remaster replete with a bevy of amusing, informative supplements.
