Big changes are afoot at Wildwood, the weekly series that has recently brought classics as varied as John Waters’s Desperate Living and Barbara Loden’s Wanda to local cinemas for packed-room repertory screenings.  Firstly, the series doesn’t officially appear to be called Wildwood anymore; all social media presence has been temporarily rebranded to “WWCinema” while the programmers soul-search for a new name.  More importantly, it has switched times & locations to Wednesday nights at The Broad, which is much more easily accessible to me by bus than their previous slot on Thursdays at Canal Place.  So, it was my solemn duty to attend WWCinema’s “debut” at The Broad this month, despite the fact that I don’t particularly care for the films of notorious No Wave slacker Jim Jarmusch.  Programming Jarmusch’s 1986 prison escape comedy Down By Law in any local screening series is kind of a no-brainer, since it’s the exact kind of high-style, low-ambition filmmaking that convinces college-age hipsters from around the world to move to New Orleans and inspires lifelong New Orleanians to pick up cameras to capture the local mise-en-scène.  It’s often cited by cineastes as the best movie ever set here (an honor that actually belongs to Paul Schrader’s Cat People, also a former Wildwood selection), which always sets my teeth on edge even though it is, from what I can recall, the only Jarmusch movie I’ve ever fully enjoyed.  Thankfully, rewatching it with an enthusiastic crowd did remind me exactly why I have vaguely fond feelings for Down By Law despite all of its minimal-effort hipster posturing & N’awlins Y’all cultural cachet, which already makes me grateful that Wildwood is moving closer to home.

My knee-jerk resistance to Down By Law comes from two separate places of distrust.  The major issue is my longstanding bias against Jarmusch as a filmmaker with an incredible wealth of resources who often deliberately chooses to do nothing with them, because doing nothing is the Gen-X ideal of cool.  Speaking more personally, this is the project that brought that performative Gen-X slackerdom to my home turf, making hip-cred outsider musicians Tom Waits & John Lurie the poster boys for laidback New Orleans cool.  When I hear someone declare Down By Law their favorite film set in New Orleans, I automatically assume they idolize the kind of dirtbag alpha male behavior exemplified by those two leads, who are both role models for a specific kind of French Quarter hipster that’s been around as long as I can remember (likely because this movie was released the year I was born).  Waits stars as a WWOZ radio DJ with a dumb little porkpie hat & goatee combo to match his dumb Cool Guy™ personality.  Lurie co-leads as a suave street hustler out of a classic shot-on-location noir starring a Sal Mineo or a James Dean (or, in the case of King Creole, Elvis doing his best impersonation of Dean).  They’re both framed for crimes they didn’t commit and are locked up in a small cell at OPP, spending the rest of the picture trying to out-alpha each other as top dog of their block.  For the first twenty minutes or so, Down By Law is the exact ambitionless, inert slacker drama Jarmusch always delivers, more concerned with cool cred than artistic ambition.  Then, the film’s third lead arrives in the form of Roberto Benigni as an Italian tourist who was arrested for manslaughter – the only one of the cellmates who wasn’t framed for his crime, and the movie’s saving grace.

I have whatever rare brain disorder causes people to find Robert Benigni funny; in my worst moments, I’m convinced he’s the funniest man who ever lived.  If nothing else, he’s the only comedic performer who’s ever dared to ask the question “What if Harpo Marx was obnoxiously loud?”, a true visionary.  Setting his chaotic cornball energy loose on an otherwise typically laidback Jarmusch set is the genius of Down By Law, a magic trick the director only ever came close to repeating with Mia Wasikowska’s vampire-brat in Only Lovers Left Alive.  Jarmusch clearly understands the value of what he has in Benigni, and he allows that vaudevillian presence to reshape the entire movie to great effect.  While Lurie & Waits are participating in an imaginary Cool Guy™ contest, pretending to heroically care the least about what’s going on around them, Benigni strives with every atom in his body to be classically entertaining.  He wills the movie into becoming more exciting, citing The Great Escape as an example of great American cinema because it has “lots of action.”  His cellmates put on stoic Tough Guy personae, but he’s the only character in the movie who hunts, who kills, who fucks.  By the final scenes the difference between him and the other boys verges on the philosophical; Lurie & Waits split into arbitrary, opposing directions just to spite each other while Benigni finds happiness staying in place, a fully content man.  In short, the problem with New Orleans these days is that too many young, impressionable dudes watch Down By Law and move here with ambitions to become suave street hustlers and hipster radio DJs, when what we really need is more classical Italian clowns.

The funny thing about Down By Law‘s reputation as New Orleans’s finest moment onscreen is that very little of the film’s runtime actually showcases the city.  Sure, it opens with sideways pans of shotgun homes & cemetery tombs set to one of Tom Waits’s greatest hits, but just as much of the third act features forward-facing boat trips into mysterious channels of the swamps outside the city.  The story opens with Waits & Lurie committing petty crimes as French Quarter gutter rats, but after they’re pinched by the NOPD we never return to the city streets.  Shot on cheap black & white film stock and deliberately ignoring the basic facts of New Orleans geography, the film often recalls the Poverty Row noir aesthetics of schlock like the 1956 Roger Corman cheapie Swamp Women.  The OPP cell block looks like it could’ve been filmed in a hastily decorated warehouse or apartment.  The prisoners’ escape from OPP directly leads into swamp water instead of the intersection of Tulane & Broad.  The cops-and-hounds hunt for the escaped prisoners is represented entirely as distant sounds to keep the costs of casting down.  This is scrappy, D.I.Y. filmmaking from the height of the Indie Boom that made festival darlings like Jarmusch moderately famous instead of desperately auditioning them for career-crushing deals with Marvel or Netflix.  WWCinema is pitched to its audience as a series programmed by and for legitimate working filmmakers, so it’s not surprising Jarmusch’s current go-to editor Affonso Gonçalves selected Down Bay Law for the series, given its local connections and its inspirational model for high-style, low-budget filmmaking.  Let’s just hope most of the impressionable young men in the audience latched onto the right role model at that screening; the city already has more than enough Tom Waits wannabes hanging around, doing nothing especially worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet