Director Jim Jarmusch continues to indulge his fascination with America's cultural residue, this time going directly to one of the more reliable sources: Memphis, Tennessee, home of the Once and Future King himself, Elvis Presley. Like other Jarmusch films it's a deadpan, deadbeat sampling of offbeat Americana, seen by outsiders on the inside looking out: an Elvis-idolizing Japanese tourist and her cool, catatonic boyfriend; a young Italian widow who receives a ghostly visitation from the King; and an expatriate English drop-out bearing an unfortunate resemblance to the Man From Memphis. It's certainly the most tightly controlled of the director's features to date, but at the same time the most relaxed and disarming. All the action (what little there is) takes place in and around a dilapidated downtown hotel over the course of a single night, with each episode occurring simultaneously but told in sequence, connected only by the repetition of otherwise incidental details. It may not add up to anything more than a shaggy dog joke, but (in its own offhand way) the film works, with Robby Muller's atmospheric photography providing a wonderfully effective after-hours ambiance.
Review of Mystery Train
