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This is what happens when “The Dead Don’t Die” dies. That scintillating Jim Jarmusch movie, from 2019, a mashup of comedy, science fiction, horror, and apocalyptic rage amid brazen cruelty, is the kind of late masterwork that a longtime director occasionally unleashes if the stars line up. In its uninhibited inspiration, it’s also the kind of special project that highlights the tragedy of other filmmakers who saw their careers truncated. (Where is Elaine May’s later masterwork?) But what happens when such a bold film flops, both critically and commercially, as Jarmusch’s, alas, did? His answer is evident in his new film, “Father Mother Sister Brother”: confronted by obtuse reviewers and indifferent audiences, he circled the wagons and regrouped.
That focus on the inner circle—the family—distinguishes “Father Mother Sister Brother” from its spectacular predecessor. “The Dead Don’t Die” was set almost entirely in public: it hardly ever showed characters at home. “Father Mother Sister Brother” is, as the title suggests, a family movie that’s centered on private lives and filmed largely inside characters’ homes—though “home,” here, is defined not as the place where one lives but as the place one has to go back to. The film is episodic, comprising a trio of stories, with no overlap in characters, yet the three parts are ingeniously unified, both by striking repetitions in the script and by the virtual handicraft of Jarmusch’s visual compositions.
The episodes—“Father,” “Mother,” and “Sister Brother”—are set, respectively, in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris, all in the present day. “Father” finds a pair of siblings, Emily (Mayim Bialik) and Jeff (Adam Driver), in a late-model S.U.V. driving to the remote country house of their unnamed father (Tom Waits), who’s widowed. The sister and brother are urbane upper-middle-class types who are visiting him grudgingly; they resent his incorrigible irresponsibility—he’s never held a job, has no Social Security, and tries to cadge money from them. During their visit, the conversation mainly revolves around practical matters: Dad offers glasses of water (his pump is working because Jeff, who’s been promoted at work, paid for it to be fixed). Jeff tests his old corded landline for a dial tone. Emily examines heavy-duty books on Dad’s shelf (Osip Mandelstam, Noam Chomsky, Wilhelm Reich), but there is little talk about them. She notices their dad’s imposing watch—a Rolex knockoff, he says, though she suspects it’s authentic. The conversation lurches from the furniture to groceries and health, to the price of fuel and the view out the window.
The silences among them, though uneasy, hardly compare with the frozen-solid ones that burden the gathering of the Dubliners in the second part, “Mother.” In this family, money is no object for the elder generation: the mother (Charlotte Rampling), a best-selling author, lives in a large house in cozy luxury. She’s awaiting her two daughters—the proper and businesslike Timothea (Cate Blanchett), called Tim, and the showy bohemian Lilith (Vicky Krieps)—for afternoon tea, their yearly visit. The sisters arrive separately, by car—Timothea drives one that breaks down en route, and Lilith is driven by a friend (Sarah Greene) but insists on sitting in the back seat in order to feign, for her mother’s sake, that she can afford an Uber. At tea, Tim speaks little of her life, mentioning only a small promotion, whereas Lilith spews an elaborate fiction about her wealth and her success; their mother, meanwhile, resists talking about her work altogether.
The parallels mount: both families speak about water, take note of a Rolex, devote attention to cars, use the term “Nowheresville,” refer to the catchphrase “Bob’s your uncle,” and glance at old photographs. These elements then recur in the third episode, “Sister Brother,” featuring a pair of fraternal twins, Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) who reunite in Paris. This time, though, the parents are beloved figures who have recently died, in a plane crash, and Jarmusch develops the episode with substance and style that aptly reflect those differences. Skye and Billy, New Yorkers by birth who were raised in Paris by their American émigré parents, tool around the city in their parents’ vintage sky-blue Volvo and hit a café for a coffee before heading to the family’s apartment. Unlike the previous siblings’ visits, the twins’ return—to an empty home—is poignantly sentimental, as they discuss family photos with fond reminiscences and receive a cheering visit from a concierge played by the great Françoise Lebrun, who invests a handful of lines with life-worn emotion. For the most part, “Father Mother Sister Brother” is an earnest, scripty movie, whose ideas emerge mainly in its scenes of extended dialogue that are directed functionally, with little visual identity. But, in the third section, the motifs that have recurred, albeit modestly, in the two earlier ones now burst out to dominate the action and, in the process, cast the previous stories in their retrospective light.
Jarmusch has long worked with many of the most accomplished and original actors of the time. Though he makes low-budget independent films (even, by all accounts, “The Dead Don’t Die”), and his understated style relies on tamped-down dramatic performances, his filmography is nevertheless as star-studded as that of any Oscar winner or blockbuster impresario. That’s because, far from restraining his actors, he exalts them, in ways that differ from those of other directors: his reserved approach doesn’t suppress feeling but, rather, magnifies details and nuances of expression to reveal a refined and expanded emotional range.
In the first two chapters of “Father Mother Sister Brother,” the characters are precise and clipped, straining to sustain any connection. They seem limited, faded, and Jarmusch films them, if not altogether impersonally, at least uneventfully. These first two parts of the movie are especially scripty—because the characters are scripty. To all appearances, Emily and Jeff and Tim and Lilith were raised scriptily, with their familial interactions rendered formal, encumbered by parentally imposed limitations and expectations. In all three episodes, parents are long-standing mysteries to their children—but only in the first two are the mysteries toxic. Skye and Billy’s progenitors, by contrast, are revealed to have been free-spirited and independent-minded people who simply left out lots of their complicated, peripatetic story. Billy and Skye, accordingly, display a casual, ingenuous ease that’s captured in loose-limbed, warmhearted performances by Moore and Sabbat.
The very aesthetic of the third section is similarly more expansive. All three stories feature the pleasure of visual contemplation—especially in alluring sequences in which the characters, arriving by car, gaze through the windshield and savor the sights along the road ahead. But, in the first two episodes, Jarmusch’s images are no less tightly clipped than the dialogue, even when depicting such pleasures, and he reserves his most startling shots for domestic moments of the grown children preparing to depart, which are captured at juxtaposed angles that embody the awkwardness and the brokenness of the familial dynamics. The counterpart to those shots in the third section, though, is a quietly spectacular cinematic embrace: a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan that takes in the late parents’ entire emptied-out apartment and conjures the memories with which it’s filled. Also, the third episode’s street scenes are far more copious, varied, and catchily edited, as if Jarmusch’s own senses were energized by the aesthetic of Paris—and as if he were spotlighting the parents’ choice to uproot Skye and Billy and raise them there as a mark of a good upbringing, a bold embodiment of fearlessness and freedom.
In the intricate unity of its script and the canny range of its visual repertory, “Father Mother Sister Brother” is an elegant rarity—it’s an experimental film in the literal sense. Its three episodes form a sort of social-science experiment, in which the stories’ multiple common elements serve as the control variables, foregrounding the independent ones, the things that change according to the families’ circumstances and their distinct pasts. In effect, Jarmusch is standing Tolstoy on his head and suggesting that unhappy families share common forms of misery, whereas the happy ones are happy precisely because of their differences—because of the idiosyncrasies that place them outside convention. Still, despite the scope of the film’s implications, despite its clarity, cleverness, and contemplative splendor, “Father Mother Sister Brother” is a minor achievement, a wise and empathetic divertimento—frank and straightforward, tonally moderate, technically undemanding, neither enraged nor outrageous. With the film’s relative modesty, Jarmusch is tuning up—while also retuning the world of cinema, its critics and its viewers, to his own distinctive note and preparing them for his higher harmonics to come. ♦
