Coffee and Cigarettes (2004)

Jim Jarmusch assembled eleven black and white vignettes between 1986 and 2003, and the resulting anthology concerns itself with caffeine, nicotine, Tesla coils, and the difficulty of holding a conversation with a cousin. Subjected to a cultural audit, it returns almost nothing. The cast is thoroughly multiethnic, from Roberto Benigni to Cinqué and Joie Lee to GZA and RZA to Isaach De Bankolé, but these performers occupy their chairs as individuals, not as statements. Nobody here is asked to stand for a demographic. The women present, Cate Blanchett twice over, Renée French, Meg White, register as people drinking coffee rather than as arguments about gender. Labor, capital, the climate, the body, the wiring of the mind: the film holds no position on any of it, which in 2004 was still an option available to filmmakers.

The single flicker of social commentary arrives in the Twins segment, where Steve Buscemi's bartender shares his theory about Elvis Presley's evil twin and, along the way, recounts the urban legend that Presley once made racist remarks about African Americans in a magazine interview. Cinqué and Joie Lee sit across from him and listen. It registers as a genuine burst of racial consciousness, but it functions as texture inside a shaggy anecdote about celebrity mythology. The film never returns to it, never builds on it, and never asks the audience to do anything with it. No sustained argument follows. A joke about the King does.

Elsewhere the film sets its sights on fame, with Alfred Molina as an eager admirer and Steve Coogan as a minor monster of vanity, and on the quieter grievances of family. Nobody eats the rich. Nobody lectures. The vignettes are content to let two people disagree across a table and share the ashtray anyway. The result is a relic of a pre-flashpoint sensibility: warm, rumpled, untroubled by the questions that would soon dominate the discourse. Classification: unremarkable. Rating: none assigned, and none earned.