Mark Reviews Movies: THE DEAD DON'T DIE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 13, 2019

The world is ending, and nobody seems to particularly care too much about that fact. That's the central joke of writer/director Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die, a laid-back comedy about massive environmental change and apathy, featuring a cast of eclectic characters—some of whom are zombies.

Here, basically, is another zombie story, in which the undead are created through an upheaval of the natural order, which has been directly caused by human activity. There are scenes in which the characters learn of the problem by way of the news on the radio and on television, as reporters mention that the axis of the planet has shifted by multiple degrees, changing the cycle of day and night, altering the behavior of animals, and, eventually and somehow, making the dead rise from their graves. The most likely and almost certain culprit is fracking taking place at the Earth's poles.

While most zombie or other kinds of tales about apocalyptic threats would treat such information as accepted back story, Jarmusch's approach is slightly different. During those news reports, representatives of the companies doing the fracking openly deny that the industry is to blame, even though there's no other rational explanation for the sudden change in the Earth's natural order. Some characters listening to or watching the news accept the obvious answer, but others either don't care or simply go by what the so-called "experts" are saying about how fracking can't be the cause. Even the ones who do accept the actual truth—that the problem is real and we are the cause—don't seem to think much of it.

There's no big scene where the deniers are proven wrong in karmic fashion. We have to assume they're spreading the spin as the zombies rise, and we also have to assume that people continue to buy the misinformation, even after their friends and loved ones have turned or been killed. The good news, one guesses, is that zombies don't have opinions and don't have to care about scientific facts transformed into cynical, destructive political debates. The bad news is that this isn't much of a change for these people.

In case it isn't clear by now, Jarmusch really, really wants to make a point with this movie, and he also wants us to know that he wants to make a point. Jarmusch is so keen on these points that he's essentially an unseen character in the story, in which one character points out that the filmmaker showed him the entire script (which is why he keeps saying it's all going to end badly and knows the movie's theme song) and another is upset that he only saw the lines for his scenes (He thought they were friends).

It's an amusing meta-joke, but the purpose is clearly for more than just easy laughs. This is comedy as a means of lecturing. While the result is sometimes funny and sometimes thought-provoking, the combination never fully gels to make a sound point.

The character in on what's to come is Ronnie (Adam Driver), an officer with the police department in Centerville (middle of the country, riding the political fence, or whatever other metaphor you want to derive from the name), and the character who's later mad that the filmmaker didn't let him in on the full screenplay is Cliff (Bill Murray), the chief of police. There's a third cop, named Mindy (Chloë Sevigny), who, like everyone else in the movie, has no clue that she's in a movie.

The rest of the characters are broad archetypes—the sort you might find in a middle-of-the-country, middle-of-the-road town like this. Danny Glover plays a hardware store owner, who seems in a good defensive position when the zombies arrive, and Caleb Landry Jones plays a comic-and-movie-obsessed gas station attendant whose knowledge of an undead uprising is mostly theoretical.

Tom Waits plays Hermit Bob, who watches the chaos unfold from the safety of the woods, and Tilda Swinton is the newly immigrated Scottish undertaker, who's better with a samurai sword than with making a corpse presentable. In the most blatant example of a political dig, Steve Buscemi plays a local farmer, donning a red baseball cap adorned with a Presidential slogan that's adapted to get at the core meaning of the man and his ideology.

There are some other characters, too—a trio of juvenile delinquents who seem to be only ones who care about what's happening to the planet, a trio of visitors who are done away with before they can mean anything, and Roise Perez as TV news reporter Posie Juarez (Get it?). Soon, zombies appear, looking for things they obsessed over in life (coffee, wine, internet access, etc.) and killing some folks along the way.

The whole affair is played in a dry, off-hand sort of way, which is a constant reminder that, for all of the low-key grandstanding and political jabs, this is a one-note joke, making a depressing point slightly more tenable. In the end, The Dead Don't Die just feels like a jaded, nihilistic lark—the least fun kind of lark and a most unsatisfying vehicle for pessimism.

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