Fountain of Youth

In Guy Ritchie’s “Fountain of Youth,” archaeologist cum treasure hunter Luke Purdue (John Krasinski) recruits, nay, semi-extorts his museum curator sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman) into helping him locate the mystical eponymous eternal life-giving water source. Bankrolled by Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), a tech billionaire who is dying of cancer (or is he?), their globe-trotting quest is threatened not only by Interpol but by Esme (Eiza González) and the Protectors of the Path, a secret society entrusted to safeguard the Fountain’s location lest idiot humanity be able to harness its awesome power. These details suggest “Indiana Jones,” of course, but specifically “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade” while the map to the mystical fountain being located on the back of various Rembrandt paintings evokes “National Treasure.” Ritchie, however, cannot imbue the same sense of awe as Steven Spielberg while Krasinski is just a little too in on the joke to impart the same sort of crucial zany-eyed earnestness as Nicolas Cage following a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

That’s not to rule “Fountain of Youth” entirely out of order. Ritchie keeps a blistering pace, opening with an action scene on the streets of Thailand and then segueing right into another action scene on a train and then segueing right into another action scene at the National Gallery in London. These scenes tend to be more amusing than thrilling, underscored in Ritchie’s agreeably fluid camera, putting the action-packed puzzle in a way to underline Luke’s spur of the moment problem solving. I especially liked his riding the motorbike onto the train platform and right up to the train, as if it were a motorized horse in an old western. The problem is, despite this larger-than-life adventure, James Vanderbilt’s screenplay connects the dots with too little panache, and Ritchie imparts no sense of discovery nor wonder.

This is a movie that makes raising the freaking Lusitania (part of it, anyway) ho-hum. Luke is reduced to literally observing that they are first people to board the doomed ship in decades because Ritchie cannot live that line through his moviemaking. When Luke and Charlotte step inside they may as well be walking through the front door of some newly constructed McMansion in Destin, Florida. The Fountain of Youth itself, meanwhile, proves less a moving Lucas Cranach the Elder painting than akin to the computer-generated gloom with which “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” conveyed the same legendary spring. It all just reinforces my belief that when it comes to cinema, at least, CGI is too often a crutch that impedes imagination rather than unleashing it.

Carver is a potentially interesting character, reconfiguring the evil N*zis of “Indiana Jones” as a selfish technocrat posing as your best friend, but Gleeson never brings that idea to life with real relish. As Esme, González has nothing real to do and her chemistry with Krasinski never sizzles because Krasinski’s part and performance are stranded somewhere between Brendan Fraser and John Hannah of “The Mummy,” playing an annoying brother more than a dashing romantic lead. When Luke prattles on to Charlotte about seeking adventure in your life, it sounds less like a call to action than a smug dismissal of the life she has built for herself. Charlotte’s yo-yoing between wanting to go home and wanting to go after the fountain feels too much like confused writing, but Portman, at least, cagily plays to that confusion by rendering a true sibling relationship. One minute, Charlotte can’t stand her brother and the next, she loves him to pieces, the two feuding in these arrestingly exact, erudite sentences that kept making me tilt my head at the screen like a dog whose just heard an oddball noise it can’t quite place. That’s a welcomingly weird vibe for a would-be summer blockbuster. I can’t claim it saves “Fountain of Youth,” but a faint pulse is better than none.

Notes on Celebrity

During the New York Knicks NBA playoff run that ended just a few games short of the finals, the celebrities watching their team courtside at Madison Square Garden became almost as prominent as the Knick players themselves. Cameras lingered on the celebrities, articles testified to their devotion as fans, some Knicks enthusiasts even conceded they were the best part. It was reminiscent of the last couple years in which Taylor Swift synergized her brand with the NFL’s by appearing at Kansas City Chiefs game to support her beau, Travis Kelce. Honestly, though, I’m less interested in this idea of celebrities and sports through a cultural or social lens than an aesthetic one. Celebrities at football games are in skyboxes, high up and away from the action, meaning Swift was always at the mercy of the television control room, like an actor is at the mercy of the editor, hoping they choose the best take, as Javier Bardem once wryly noted upon winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Celebrities at basketball games, on the other hand, the ones courtside, at least, are always in the shot.

In the Washington Post, Will Leitch argued that it’s these moments courtside, in the throes of a typical sports fan’s insanity, hugging, screaming, wigging out, when we see stars like Timothée Chalamet and Ben Stiller for real. In specifically considering Chalamet’s enthusiasm during the Knicks run, however, Defector’s Diana Moskovitz was a bit more circumspect. “As for how much of this is real versus how much of this is performance, that is always a question, especially with someone who makes a living by being charming, present, and giving people what they want.” Even so, she concluded: “But who are we to judge?” I’m not judging, not exactly, but the question of the line between those two still intrigues me. Indeed, my man David Thomson waded into this topic in his book “Why Acting Matters,” pondering where those lines between onscreen and offscreen selves blurred and where they dissolved completely. He didn’t write about actors sitting courtside at basketball games, mind you, but it’s at basketball arenas where those two selves seem to become most spellbindingly muddled.

It’s appropriate. The basketball court, after all, is a place for performance as much as competition. And not just in the dark arts of exaggerating to draw fouls. No, I’m talking about trash talk, frequently referred to by its practitioners as an artform, a mind game but also a means of creative expression. Players don’t merely have signature moves but signature taunts and celebrations. In a league newly built on the back of three-pointers, the ones who shoot them best, from the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson to league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder, all have their own post three-point celebratory gestures. And when the Pacers completed an improbable comeback in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Knicks to send the game to overtime (where they would ultimately win), upon hitting the three-point shot that completed it, Tyrese Haliburton backpedaled and looked to the crowd while putting his hands to his neck, the universal sign of “choking,” as in, the Knicks, your Knicks, had succumbed to the pressure.

Haliburton’s choke gesture was a conscious echo of another Indiana Pacer, Reggie Miller, from over 30 years ago. Miller not only made the choke gesture; he directed it at Spike Lee, the Knicks superfan who spent all of Game 5 in the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals jawing at the Pacers star from his Madison Square Garden courtside seat. As Miller himself said in “Winning Time,” the 2010 ESPN documentary chronicling the Knicks/Pacers rivalry, by sitting courtside, Lee wanted to be part of the game and so he obliged him. It suggests courtside celebrities as akin to Parisian café dwellers, both spectators and participants in the action. Indeed, in the 2003 NBA playoff game between the Los Angeles Lakers and San Antonio Spurs, when Lakers fanatic Jack Nicholson stood up from his courtside seat and berated the referees over a foul called on the team’s star Shaquille O’Neal, nearly getting himself ejected, he seemed to be burying himself in the role of a lifetime: Jack Nicholson as Los Angeles Lakers Head Coach. That’s sort of the ultimate manifestation of courtside celebrities, or how we think of courtside celebrities, in a sense playing to the game on the court as the players might play to the crowd. That’s what made Indiana’s T.J. McConnell dragging Chalamet and his lady friend, the Other Kylie, so apropos; if you wanna “play,” you’re gonna pay.

That brings us to Beyoncé. She went viral during Game 3 of the 2019 NBA Finals when she appeared to side-eye Nicole Curran, the wife of Golden State owner Joe Lacob, who was sitting to her left while conversing with Knowles’s husband Jay-Z to her right. This assessment of the situation was immediately denounced by Beyoncé’s publicist and anyway, that phony drama doesn’t pique my interest. Lost in all that hullabaloo was the moment at the start of the third quarter of the same game when Beyoncé and Jay-Z were ushered to their courtside seats a few moments after the second half had begun. Because the game was already in progress, the two stars had to wait until the action was at the other end of the court, meaning they strode to their seats in full view of the crowd and TV audience while the players were playing the NBA Finals. And yet, ineffably, you could feel every eye in the house drawn away from the game and to these two celebrities.

Jay-Z, beer in hand, was sort of sauntering in that laid-back I’m Kind of a Big Deal way, performing by trying to make it appear as he if wasn’t performing. Beyoncé, on the other hand, was shrewder. She was just walking to her seat. She could have been anybody if she hadn’t been Beyoncé. But she was Beyoncé. All these other courtside celebrities, consciously or not, are seeking out the camera, spiritually urging the TV control room to cut to them. Beyoncé did no such thing. If certain actors know that acting is being, Beyoncé knew that celebrity was being. Shit, even the Queen had a box at Royal Albert Hall with her name on it. Queen Bey remade the sideline, the court, and the camera in her name without lifting a finger to write it figuratively or literally. Nobody has ever looked more famous.

Some Drivel On...Ferris Bueller's Day Off

This year marks the 39th anniversary of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” not the 40th, but it does mark the 40th anniversary of the school day Ferris Bueller and cronies skipped. At least, it does if you believe the internet sleuths who have in part used the Chicago Cubs game the hooky-playing trio attends to pinpoint the date as June 5th, 1985. (The Cubs lost to the Atlanta Braves 4-2 in extra innings when Lee Smith surrendered a two-run homer to Rafael Ramirez. “I’ve got nothing to say,” the wire services reported Smith as saying afterwards, which was probably about as much as Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, had to say on June 5th, 1985.) And in some ways, this 40th anniversary feels more useful than the official anniversary by illustrating how John Hughes’s classic 80s comedy has come to be viewed less as a movie to be critiqued and more as a cultural artifact to be endlessly re-interpreted and mined for content. The three most popular quote-unquote reviews of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on the social media movie-watching diary Letterboxd implicitly prove the point.

The first one is a common revisionist analysis that every yute who watches “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” for the first time thinks they just invented, the second embodies how long ago the film’s art stopped imitating life and life became a way to deliberately imitate its art, and the third demonstrates its emergent status as a pop culture philosophy lodestar. I’m not immune to all this myself. Though it often gets derided as an emblem of Reagan era radical individualism, well, Ferris himself is the one who tells us he doesn’t trust “isms” in any form and who does that sound like? Gen-X, that’s who, slackers like me that went from rhetorically asking “How can I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?” to “How can I possibly be expected to handle work on a day like this?” And though I’m not sure you could deem Ferris a true flâneur, a leisurely observer of urban life, given his spiritually itemized list of stuff to do on his day off, there is still plenty of crossover between that lifestyle and the Ferris mantra memorably imbued on the poster: Leisure Rules. Yeah, it does!

But look at me, interpreting, when I should be talking about how “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was made, how its story was told, how I can now confirm with some manner of authority that Hughes effectively encapsulated the way a perfect summer day in Chicago makes you feel. Indeed, I have always thought of white cumulous clouds not as “Simpsons” clouds but as “Ferris Bueller” clouds. More than anything, though, writer/director John Hughes innately impressed upon me the concept of mise-en-scène before I would have had any idea what mise-en-scène meant, let alone flâneur. Hughes had Ferris break the fourth wall to render us co-conspirators in his caper, costumed the eponymous character’s best friend Cameron in a Detroit Red Wings jersey to evince how he viewed himself as an outsider in his own mind, turned props like flip-up sunglasses into punchlines, utilized the Art Institute to create a sequence of reverie, and emphasized faces of other characters as much as his principals. Like the roll call scene featuring Ben Stein’s hapless economics teacher.

It is difficult to pinpoint “Ferris Bueller’s” most famous scene out here in the future (present). But even before tariffs became foremost in every frightened American’s thinking, that Ben Stein scene and his monotone asking “Bueller? Bueller?” had become a staple of our meme culture. Before he gets to the absent Bueller, however, he goes through a litany of A names. As he does, Hughes provides a shot of each student, each one and his or reply comical in their own way. Yet, what I had somehow never noticed, or maybe just never fully ingested, despite having watched this movie, I dunno, 52 times over the years, was the unnamed student who doesn’t speak in the background as “Adams” confirms his presence in the foreground.

At her facial expression, I erupted with a hearty unanticipated laughter. That expression is a little disgusted, a little pained, and a little perplexed. In “Superbad,” when Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) tells the girl the time without her having asked, that spiritually evoked how I felt during most of high school. And this extra’s deer-caught-in the-headlights-aura evokes it too. Like her, every day in class I wanted to be anywhere else in the world. Like her, I knew of no other option than to grimace and bear it. Like her, I never would have followed Ferris Bueller and seized the day.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Tom Cruise has been star and producer of the “Mission: Impossible” movie series since its 1996 inception, but the first few films were driven as much by the visual and narrative style of a rotating cast of directors. That changed when Christopher McQuarrie took in 2015 and then subsequently stayed on for three more movies, elevating the franchise to new heights by stepping back, so to speak, and centering Cruise and his relentless commitment to stunts. McQuarrie’s “Rogue Nation” (2015) and “Fallout” (2018) were the twin peaks of twenty-tens pop moviemaking and though “Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023) couldn’t live up to those two, graded on a curve, it was still exceptional. Whether “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is, as the title implies, really the end of the series, we will see. I have my doubts. But the finished product suggests it’s probably time to call it quits. If in the wash, it’s good, it’s also overlong, overstuffed, occasionally plunders its own past, and turns Cruise’s devotion to big screen entertainment into messianism. 

When “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” concluded, a villainous Artificial Intelligence program called the Entity was threatening global destruction, but super-duper Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his motley crew had acquired a key that could unlock the AI’s source code to stop it. It’s just, that source code was aboard a Russian submarine sunk deep in the Bering Sea. A scintillating and simple set-up, and yet, “The Final Reckoning” takes too long to engage thrusters, laboring under the weight of addressing the Entity’s human emissary Gabriel (Esai Morales) also having gone rogue, an American government that wants Ethan to bring them the key, and myriad callbacks to characters and moments from previous movies as a kind of feting of the entire franchise. Maybe this would have worked had it been rendered with the joie de vivre that defined McQuarrie’s other entries, but the overall mood in “Final Reckoning” is oddly funereal, not festive, underlined in both an early twist and exposition scenes without the wit of those in “Dead Reckoning Part One.” None of this is helped by the absence of Vanessa Kirby, something like the co-villain of the previous two movies; Morales’s lack of verve is all the more conspicuous without Kirby’s delightfully bemused evil around to counteract it. Paying so much tribute to past characters that left no impression and they can’t even pour one out for The White Widow. 

Despite this protracted wind-up, however, the sequence in which Ethan does finally break into that submerged sub is sensational, taking the titular notion of an impossible mission and even by the standards of these movies stretching it with exuberant abandon. It is not merely the escalating complications that he encounters underwater but everything that gets him to the submarine in the first place; from the intervention of the President (Angela Bassett) to an aircraft carrier where Hannah Waddingham as its commander lays down the law (her line reading of “mister” is to die for) to a surprisingly sexy American submarine with a pair of powerful bit players in Tramell Tillman and Katy O’Brian and finally to the sunken Russian sub. And just when you think McQuarrie doesn’t have one more damn thing to heap on top of everything else, he pulls an ace with a reference not to May 22, 1996, a date that keeps echoing through “Final Reckoning,” but to August 5, 1983. I’ll let you figure it out for yourself. Suffice to say it’s the sort of moment that hits the action movie sweet spot, so ludicrously thrilling (thrillingly ludicrous), it makes you laugh out loud.

The DIY nature of Ethan’s mission, however, is also telling. “Rogue Nation” had fun with Ethan’s absurd invulnerability by having Alec Baldwin’s CIA director deem his IMF nemesis “the living manifestation of destiny.” “The Final Reckoning,” however, douses the knowing twinkle of that assessment by taking this living manifestation into some other sort of megalomaniacal dimension. Ethan, after all, proves the only one able to hold the Entity in the palm of his hand without fear of being tempted for ultimate power. And for as often as other characters insist that Ethan has always operated primarily from deep loyalty to his IMF cohorts, it’s noticeable how little impact those cohorts make. Paris (Pom Klementieff), Gabriel’s henchwoman from “Dead Reckoning Part One,” has switched sides to Ethan’s team, though despite Klementieff’s indelible presence, she is given virtually nothing to do. Hayley Atwell’s Grace has gone from an argumentative love interest to a cult member. Even the unexpected face from a previous impossible mission, not to be revealed, makes sure to thank Ethan for saving his life. 

The conclusion in which Ethan battles Gabriel aboard a biplane while his team attends to bomb-diffusing business on the ground comes out of nowhere and is essentially a loose remake of the climactic parallel by air and by land storylines of “Fallout,” as sure a sign as any that McQuarrie’s creative tank is approaching empty. Even so, it’s hard to deny that in and of itself this sequence doesn’t deliver by taking us back a hundred years to the barnstorming tours of the 1920s, as if this really all is just about the stunts, and wowing us in transforming wing walking into wing hanging. It’s a virtual Looney Tune, as Cruise’s face and hair stretched and squished with what might be amusing exaggeration if we didn’t know all this was real. No other actor, I thought, would be so willing to let himself look so ridiculous onscreen, the ultimate renunciation of vanity even if at the same time, that he was up there and performing this stunt at all was the ultimate vain exercise. Both are true, and it’s the moment where once and for all, whatever divide was left between character and actor falls away, the two physically and spiritually merging in service of blockbuster entertainment, a fitting coda to what came to be a phenomenal franchise, so long as Cruise has the paradoxical temerity to finally say, “Enough.”

The Honorary Paume Brûlée

Keith David got his first proper screen credit in John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), his first television credit opposite no less than Mister Rodgers in 1983 and first appeared on Broadway in 1980 in “The Lady from Dubuque,” written by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Edward Albee. Still, the first time I remember seeing David was in Emilio Estevez’s second go as writer/director, 1990’s “Men at Work,” sort of comically riffing, I would realize a couple years later when I finally saw it, on his character in “Platoon.” Is that bad? Is explaining the sanctity of a man’s fries, as he does in “Men at Work,” more or less vital to the culture than explaining how the rich are always screwing over the poor, as he does in Oliver Stone’s Oscar winner for Best Picture? (The way David says, “What we got here is a cru-sader” remains a top-tier comic undercutting of idealism.) Who knows? Probably it doesn’t matter. “Men at Work” doesn’t come up in David’s Random Roles interview with Will Harris for The AV Club in 2014 nor in his 2019 interview with Jennifer Wood for Vulture. But I’m sure whatever my first Keith David movie had been, he would tell me he was proud to have it be that one.

Wood began their chat by asking after David’s chief goal as an actor to which he replied: “I wanted to work. My goal was to be working actor.” I don’t mean to bash David’s fellow New Yorker Timothée Chalamet, but the latter pronouncing his desire to be one of the greats in his recent SAG Award winning speech is still a useful counterpoint to David’s more modest yet nevertheless noble aim. Noble, and successful. David has racked up more IMDb entries than, say, Johnny Bench, or Gil Hodges, or Tony Pérez had home runs. Even when most of his turn in the cult classic “Road House” wound up on the cutting room floor, well, David admits some sadness to Wood in their interview about that fact while also noting that role paid for his new car and his new apartment. Which isn’t to suggest acting is just about making a living. David attended The High School of Performing Arts and graduated from Juilliard Drama, and in interview after interview, he describes acting as a calling, and as a craft. And it’s why, I realize, when I think of David, I don’t necessarily think of any one movie, or any one performance, but the kind of cumulative effect, of his deep voice, his unmistakable presence, and above all, his sturdy professionalism. 

That cumulative effect, I suspect, is why Jordan Peele cast David in his sensational 2022 horror/sci fi film “Nope.” The role of Otis Haywood Sr. was small, just a few flashes really, but the character was immense, in Peele’s telling a descendant of the Black horse jockey in Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, widely considered the first motion picture. That is to say Otis Haywood Sr. was meant to represent the full scope of Black history in Hollywood and no doubt Peele knew that David’s mere presence would embody it. And that’s what I thought upon learning that Denzel Washington had recently been bestowed an Honorary Palme d’Or at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival.

I have nothing against Denzel Washington. Who would have anything against Denzel Washington? Denzel is Denzel! In my imaginary recalibrated Hollywood Walk of Fame, I gave Denzel a star. But he has received awards: Oscars, a Tony, the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, the freaking Presidential Medal of Freedom. Keith David deserves an award too. And while Cinema Romantico has made a (not) annual tradition of awarding Burnt Palms, our answer to the Cannes Film Festival’s Golden Palm, we have never bestowed an Honorary Burnt Palm. And though the Paume Brûlée has tended to be flippant in nature, it has always gone to people this blog adores, like Nicole Kidman, and Marion Cotillard, just to name a couple. Cinema Romantico adores Keith David too and his Burnt Palm is straight from the heart. 

Drop

What’s more terrifying than a first date? Nothing, and that’s the joke at least partially embedded in “Drop.” Cursed with an exemplar middling thriller name, Violet Gates (Meghann Fahy) begins Christopher Landon’s premise-of-the-year picture by slipping on a dress, leaving her five-year-old son in the care of her sister, and going out for a blind date dinner at a restaurant housed inside a glittering skyscraper, pausing before she enters, the mood and the music making it seem like it’s the Spook Central building in “Ghostbusters.” Indeed, the marvelous set design turns the entrance to the chic dining room into a kind of tunnel, like one leading to a rollercoaster ride. Convenient, because that’s what Violet is essentially about to go on, and us too, as once she sits down with Henry (Brandon Sklenar) to peruse the menu and see if maybe this is a match, her phone lights up with threatening messages ordering her to kill Henry or else a man inside her home will kill her son. It’s a superb set-up, and Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s screenplay does a solid job continually re-stacking the deck and setting up a gallery of suspects, though Landon’s direction does not synch enough with Fahy’s crucially grounded performance to imbue a true sense of increasing emotional and mental claustrophobia and isolation given that she is almost exclusively locked into one locale and the killer dictates she can’t tell her date what’s going on.

That dictum, in fact, saddles Sklenar with a nigh impossible task, which is why I don’t want to be too harsh on his underwhelming turn, needing to seem a little suspicious but also a little charismatic and ingratiating but also a little bit like a pinball in a pinball machine getting bounced around by the game of life. In the end, Sklenar just winds up inert. Fahy has better chemistry with Gabrielle Ryan as the bartender who’s been around the block. The villain, alas, lacks real juice, and the ultimate confrontation between the villain and Violet is a letdown, ineptly staged and rushed, and probably rushed because it’s so ineptly staged. But then, “Drop” isn’t about the villain anyway. It’s about Violet confronting the lingering fear and trauma of domestic abuse, set up by the opening scene. That’s a weighty topic, a little too weighty, really, given where “Drop” ends up going. It’s not too weighty for Fahy, who imbues it in her performance, but as “Drop” increasingly untethers itself from reality, the more it creates an unworkable contradiction. The culminating twist seems ripped from the deliberately over-the-top “Commando,” but yields an incredulous cackle rather than a euphoric laugh. What’s worse, the last scene has a bad joke fake-out so mean-spirited given what Violet has gone through that, for a second, I swear, Fahy seems to step outside the character, saying “That’s not funny” to the writers more than her fellow actors. It might be the most piercing moment in the whole movie. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Permanent Vacation (1980)

Even for Jim Jarmusch, and even for my taste, his virtual no budget feature film debut “Permanent Vacation” can be a little too slow, and a little too opaque, and as it sometimes goes with student films (he shot it while still enrolled in NYU film school), occasionally just feels like a canvas for his diary entries and to show the world his vision board. And yet. If there are times during its hour-and-fourteen-minute run time when I felt myself tuning out, there were just as many moments when I was transfixed, not suggesting or hinting at Jarmusch’s future but they, themselves, implicit evidence of his already existent talent while also setting the table for the ideas and themes that would intrigue him. 

“Permanent Vacation” begins by cutting between scenes of a teeming New York City and a desolate one of people just outside society. Some seem to want it that way, like Aloysius ‘Allie’ Parker (Chris Parker). Purposely out of time with his pompadour, uninspired by traditional ambitions or motivations, Allie is not so much a cultural tourist as a life tourist, meaning he goes on less of a journey than an aimless wander. He encounters likeminded folks, such as the young woman serving popcorn (Lisa Rosen) at a movie theater who seems more interested in her book than her job, and he encounters people who have wound up on the fringes of society not exactly by choice, like the veteran (Richard Boes) evidently suffering from PTSD that Allie encounters. When he does, we hear bombs and helicopters on the soundtrack, and though it took me a minute to get there, I realized that Allie was essentially passing through someone else’s reality. The grace Allie shows him, it’s truly moving. 

Allie’s opening voiceover essentially tells us right up front that this is all in the past tense, that he is just someone passing through, and when he writes his name in graffiti on some cement wall, it’s like a punk rock version of Brooks Was Here. “Permanent Vacation” ends with Allie moving on, the camera aboard a boat hastily putting the island and WTC in the rearview mirror, a shot Jarmusch is content to hold for a long time, evoking his Zen tendencies, the end of one thing, the beginning of another, permanent impermanence, but also his indie bona fides. The shot suggests the concluding one of Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” though without any fancy time lapse photography. Sometimes all you have to do is set up a camera on the Staten Island Ferry and let it roll.