No, this is not a posted sign in the film. The tobacco companies tried to include it, but Director Jim Jarmusch had too much integrity to allow it. But what could be a more natural setting for sucking on the killer weed than the inside of a taxi cab? Here we've got five of them. The tobacco companies saw the script and fronted mass bucks, or actually in this case, for a small Indie episodic venture by a director without a commercial hit to his credit, they fronted small bucks and sent an accountant. Anyway, this is a collection of five short stories filmed at night in five cities, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. In the first, Winona Ryder is an L.A. cabby looking like a ninth-grade grunge girl with her own sweet dreams who picks up Hollywood casting director Gena Rowlands at LAX and takes her to Beverly Hills. It's a cute idea, their bonding, but Ryder is without subtlety and clichéd to the hilt in dark glasses, bubble gum, baseball cap on backwards, and the endless puffing, talking sarcastically out of the side of her mouth: "All right, MOM." I actually expected some Joan Jett and the Blackhearts in the background. Rowland is very good however and overcomes a cloying script. In New York, veteran German character actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, looking for all the world like a dead ringer for Albert Einstein, is the cabby, Helmut, and Giancarlo Esposito is Yoyo, his fare. Problem is Helmut drives with one foot on the gas pedal and the other on the brake so that the cab starts and stops every two seconds. So they switch positions. Meanwhile Rosie Perez arrives for a cameo. In Paris, Isaach De Bankolé is the cabby and blind Béatrice Dalle, in white zombie contact lenses, is his fare. This is perhaps the best piece. Bankolé, who is a black dude from the Ivory Coast, asks her kindly, "Don't blind people usually wear dark glasses?" She has the great rejoinder, "Do they? I've never seen a blind person." Roberto Benigni is the cabby in Rome. He picks up a priest and to the priest's great discomfort confesses in vivid detail his rather revolting sexual experiences. Finally in Helsinki we have Matti Pellonpää as the "taksi" driver. The stark lighting on the snow and the empty streets captures well the cold northern night. Incidentally, the European stories are done in the local language with subtitles. This is obviously an art film and requires a relatively sophisticated audience. The editing isn't sharp (some of that's deliberate) and the dialogue is uneven, but some of the camera work is excellent. See it for the acting, which is mostly very good.
Review of Night on Earth
