Most film directors are content to signal boredom, tedium, ennui and the passage of time with a couple of yawns, maybe a fidget or two, and perhaps the chipmunk rotations of a speeded-up clock. (There are exceptions.) Jim Jarmusch is exceptional, and he’s also not most film directors. So when he sets out to convey boredom etc, it’s exciting. The first five minutes — before even the titles — of Dead Man are a thrilling train journey across America, in the company of a beautiful Johnny Depp and a changing assortment of “interesting†types. The sequence is breathtaking, as you wonder what might be about to happen and then wait, and wait, and wait for it actually to happen. The slaughter of buffalo from the train windows is as much of a shock to the viewer as it is to Depp. And then it is over and still nothing has happened. It’s a great opening to a great film. As with Mulholland Dr., there’s no point in doing a synopsis or anything like that. What Jarmusch has produced is a kind of gritty, hyper-real magic-realist movie, gloriously shot in black and white, full of astonishing dialogue, amazingly wonderful scenery, and superb performances from all in sight. I was a bit disappointed by Broken Flowers. Having finally caught up with Dead Man, I wish Jarmusch would get back to films like this and Ghost Dog. Oh, and the music, courtesy of Neil Young, is superb. As much a part of the picture as Ry Cooder is of Paris, Texas.
Rating: 
Dead Right
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Yeah, good movie. I loved the way Depp plays the transition from city slicker to natural born frontier killer. Lots of cool cameos too. And did you notice the structure? Begins and ends with a journey, the first followed and the second preceded by walks through very similar villages.
BTW, I think the opening scene of ennui is an homage to Leone’s magisterial take on the subject in One Upon a Time in the West (http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue10/infocus/onceuponatime.htm)
I did notice the jurneys at either end, and the time given over to them, but not the symmetry of the walk through the villages. I wonder whether the whole thing is symmetrical.
It is a long time since I saw OUATITW, and now that you mention it, one of the similarities might be the heightened noise.
It’s always fun when a film-maker screws with the conventions. It’s been done for the crime thriller, for example by killing off the hero(ine) way too early, as in Psycho and To Live and Die in LA. It’s been done for science fiction. Blade Runner’s vision of a “used” future was deeply disconcerting and subversive. It’s been done with the noir, big time. Look at Altman’s The Long Goodbye, or even The Usual Suspects. Or even, in a way, the self-same Blade Runner. Or, indeed, Minority Report, where actually the mind-fuck is a bit more subtle than usual, because what’s being flouted is the conventional wisdom on Spielberg’s maudlin endings. It doesn’t work if you don’t know that Minority Report is a Steven Spielberg picture. And it’s been done for the western. Most insidiously perhaps by The Unforgiven. And, in a meta-way by the spaghetti western. And it occurs to me that Jarmusch, a very European America, may be aiming to undermine the conventions of the sub-genre that undermined the conventions of the western.