Ghost Dog is an anachronism that haunts the world, trapped between lost eras and clashing cultures, a modern-day samurai who speaks the poetry of war. Writer/Director Jim Jarmusch pays tribute to Jean-Pierre Melville, Seijun Suzuki and classic film noir while DP Robbie Muller’s compositions frame our protagonist in solitude and shadows.
Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is a hitman, a killer for hire who collects his payment one day a year on the autumnal equinox. He considers himself retainer to Louie (John Tormey), a mobster who saved his life eight years prior, and Ghost Dog follows the Bushido code to its fatal climax. When a hit goes sour, Louie’s own master orders Ghost Dog to be erased permanently. This conflict between warlike codes of conduct, where Louie feels kinship with the target he must destroy, and Ghost Dog’s decalogue whose law won’t allow harm to come to his master, sets the stage for mass murder and a mano-a-mano showdown.
Jarmusch subverts tropes of the traditional mob film by depicting his gangsters as unglamorous, barely able to pay the rent, their time not spent on felonies but in boredom, old men playing cards in a dirty storeroom. There are no flashy cars or wads of cash, no buxom women or handshake drugs: this is the anti-Goodfellas! He isolates the protagonist like Melville’s samurai and even surrounds him with birds. Jarmusch livens the film with irony and humor, as we get a rapping Italian mobster and a gangland of sobriquets, counterpointed by ignorance and blinded by bigotry. In one scene, Ghost Dog is aiming his rifle towards his target, but his sight is blocked, not by a butterfly, but a small bird. He even completes a kill through a drainpipe like Suzuki’s Number Three Killer! Jarmusch evoke the spirit of Kurosawa too, as the novel RASHOMON is passed between cultures and generations. Even Ghost Dog lives an absurd temporary life, his best friend speaks only French and his protege is a little girl who is bequeathed his Hidden Leaves. RZA drops beats which scores the tempest, giving emotional context to the film. It’s a brilliant score that allows the story to move and breath on its own yet becomes its heartbeat.
Ghost Dog must die to live and be true to his code, so the final shootout is one-sided. “Better you than me”, Louise says, but you can see his sadness like falling autumn leaves, this sorrow of change. But Louis answers to his own master, and as his future seems limited, a little girl’s future is just blossoming.
Final Grade: (A)
