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Well, this is a deeply strange film as only Jim Jarmusch could do I suppose. In the end it turns out to be a more interesting experiment than a successful film. But Forest Whitaker is fantastic in the central performance. Alternately commanding, intimidating and soothing, melancholic, his Ghost Dog is as contradictory as the film that surrounds him. Born into the ghetto of an undisclosed city while expressing an obsession with Japanese culture and working as a samurai/killer-for-hire for the Italian mafia, there’s a cross-cultural influence going on here for certain yet I’m not sure it ends up making a lot of sense. It’s a fascinating idea though.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai would seem primed and ready to begin a discussion on post-modern identity and inner-city life, but instead choses to explore violence and almost offering up a compare-and-constrat view of Mafioso lifestyles and samurai’s honor code. It’s a neat idea, but then he starts adding on a bunch of strange details that detract from the central conceit for me. Characters reading Rashomon like it was as normal as breathing is strange, and perhaps too heavy-handed in pushing forward the point that Ghost Dog is bound to someone through two very different memories of what happened. And his lone friendship with an ice cream truck driver who only speaks French feels entirely superfluous, as if it had been added solely to remind us of the parallels between this film and Le Samourai.
Bringing up these parallels to better films only serves to remind us how frustrating and obtuse Ghost Dog is. It doesn’t always seem to be moving towards anything of real value or note for extended periods of time, and the big twist at the end was something that felt clearly marked for anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention. I’m still glad to have watched it, as frustrating an experience as it could become. A bit too heavy with the symbolism and allusions to other work, but still well-made and solid as its own entity with a deeply strange and conflicting sense of self. It only helps that the film has Whitaker to anchor it. He’s an underrated talent who I think could possibly make even the more opaque of characters sympathetic and watchable.
