The Subtle Mysteries of Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother

The seeming sleepiness of a movie like Jarmusch’s new and prize-winning triptych Father Mother Sister Brother is deceptive and also instructive. The film’s selection as the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival over more superficially bold—and overtly topical—art house fare like Bugonia, No Other Choice, or The Voice of Hind Rajab was seen in some quarters as puzzling (or perhaps as a sign of jury president Alexander Payne’s parochial—i.e., American—taste). But there’s something to be said for art that swaps out sensory overload for a more subliminal sort of programming. The effect of Father Mother Sister Brother’s three vignettes—each about 35 minutes long, and each concerning a family whose members are unhappy in their own ways—is simultaneously surreal and recognizable, in a way that intensifies, rather than deadens, our identification. To paraphrase our old pal Ghost Dog, who places stock in the idea that life is but a dream, the world we live in is not a bit different from this.

The opening sequence of Father Mother Sister Brother finds Jarmusch on familiar geographical as well as rhetorical turf; the frozen tundra of exurban New Jersey, the backdrop of Jarmusch’s lovely 2016 drama Paterson. That film, for my money one of Jarmusch’s best, cast Adam Driver as an NJ Transit driver seemingly named after his birthplace; while circumnavigating Paterson, New Jersey, by bus, the taciturn Paterson (no surname given) scribbles verses in his notebook in homage to William Carlos Williamson’s five-part modernist epic titled (you guessed it) Paterson. Here, Driver’s character, Jeff, is once again behind the wheel; he’s ferrying himself and his older sister Emily (Mayim Bialik) to the isolated, dilapidated cottage where their unnamed father (Tom Waits) lives alone. Jeff has been in touch with his dad, and Emily hasn’t; she’s dubious about the older man’s mental health, and about how he’s guilt-tripped his son into subsidizing his existence as an unemployed and intransigent widower. Father doesn’t say much about his life, except to list all the drugs, legal and otherwise, that he swears he’s not taking, and nor does he have much curiosity about theirs. Apparently, he’s getting by.

I say “apparently,” because while the siblings’ visit mostly proceeds according to script—compressing years of alienation and estrangement into a self-fulfilling prophecy; photo albums and small talk over ice water precipitating loaded silences and a hasty exit—there are so many small, weird details, pertaining to both the decor of Father’s place and to his behavior, that this banal series of exchanges starts to vibrate on a more enigmatic frequency. Gradually, small things become matters of great concern. Why is Waits wearing a Rolex? Is it real, or a fake? What about the character’s hermit-like remove from the world? Is that real, or fake? Is he genuinely happy to see them, or just counting the seconds until they depart? Does it have to be either-or?