The Limits Of Control

I try not to read reviews of pictures that I plan to see until after I’ve written about the pictures because I don’t want someone else’s ideas to get into my head when I’m trying to do my own writing; and no, there’s no Joe Biden joke here - I just prefer not to have someone else’s opinion, whether favorable or unfavorable, cluttering up my head when I’m trying to organize my own thoughts about a movie. However, I was helpless to keep from reading Roger Ebert’s review of The Limits of Control, because of the one-half star that he gave it.

Here’s the thing about Roger Ebert, whether you like him or not: ever since the cancer, this cat has been positive about the lion’s share of movies he’s reviewed. Not so with the new Jarmusch movie, though the review itself doesn’t exactly spell out things about the movie that are bad or that Mr. Ebert did not like; in fact, he spends the entirety of the review writing from the point of view of Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé), one of the characters - and the whole thing comes off as a backhanded slap at the film.

I also understand, having seen the picture, how some people might hate it. I used to love watching movies with Justin and Jason after work at Clearwater, especially when the film was a comedy with lots of low-brow humor - because even if the movie (say, the Deuce Bigalow sequel) wasn’t funny, listening to Jason and Justin laugh was funny. I’d like to sit down and watch The Limits of Control with my buddy Steve for the exact opposite reason. It’s not a comedy, so he won’t be laughing - but when the lights come up, Steve would have this look on his face that is meant to indicate that he thinks I have quite the high amount of mental dysfunction to have thought that sitting through this movie was a good idea. I can’t really explain it - it’s sort of like the reaction shot when Archie Bunker looked back at Edith when she said something that proved that the point he was making was asinine.

After getting that look - which is a funny one by design, I think - I would then like to go immediately to either the Chatterbox or the Slippery Noodle - or maybe Nicky Blaine’s for cigars, because they were out of the Arturo Fuente Short Story, which I love, the last time I was there - and talk about the film with Steve over the course of one hour and two or three glasses of beer. I have no illusions that I would convince him of anything, but I would love to do the back and forth.

Has it escaped your attention that I haven’t said anything about the actual movie yet? That’s sort of by design, too - because I’m not sure exactly what to say about it. It’s the only Jim Jarmusch picture I’ve seen, so I can’t compare it with other things he’s done; and I get the feeling that not having that sense of his style probably kept me from getting everything that was going on in the picture in the way that Jarmusch intended it be gotten.

On the other hand, I know what I like; and I liked this movie - probably because it was hard, and I like hard movies even if I don’t get every single thing that’s going on. (That’s why I was able to enjoy Mulholland Drive as much as I did.) The Limits of Control is about a guy doing a job, but it’s not even really about the guy doing the job or the job that the guy is doing; it’s about the doing of that job, with tremendous attention to detail paid to where Lone Man must go, whom he must meet, and what he must do.

This is the cinematic equivalent of reading a great book almost entirely because the writing, the actual prose itself, is what moves you to the reading. It’s why people rave about Marcel Proust - not because the things he writes about in In Search of Lost Time are interesting (they aren’t - I’ve started Swann’s Way three times and never finished it), but because the prose flows from page to page and you get lost in the rhythm. When you talk to someone about the water park at King’s Island, what do they say is their favorite ride? Lazy River. Why do they like it? Because it just carries you along, just like Proust (and Roberto Bolaño in his remarkable novel, 2666), and just like Jim Jarmusch in The Limits of Control.

And yet there’s a difference, because reading a novel is always a linear progression - even when you’re reading something by Mark Danielewski; but with film, it’s much easier to form circles out of lines (think Groundhog Day) because you can’t look down at the book and see how many pages you’ve left behind and how many you have left to go. There is the vague sense of time passing, but the change from one scene to another, done a certain way - say, by watching the sunlght coming through the blinids and gradually increasing while the camera holds on a man in bed who is fully dressed and not sleeping - can neatly cut the linear progression and form a loop.

The scenes begin the same way, but the characters in each scene change; all the questions they ask of Lone Man are different, but each of them ends with the words “by any chance.” No accident, that - and not just repetition for the sake of repetition; the word chance invokes a faceless spiritualism and vaults a seemingly innocuous conversation into the realms of the metaphysical. Each of these scenes is a doorway into another part of the story; getting their isn’t just half the fun - it’s practically one hundred percent.

And to where do we get? Some satisfactory place where all of the ends are tied up nicely and you aren’t left with any questions? Well, no - we don’t. You didn’t really think we were going to get that kind of place, did you? No...we get to a place where Lone Man is asked, “How did you get in here?” He replies by saying, “I used my imagination.” That’s a figurative expression meaning to be creative; but it takes a literal meaning here, too, and that sets at least as many questions as it answers. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind pondering the kinds of questions that a movie determines it’s not going to answer, you might find a winner here.