The film opens in Los Angeles with a tough, chain-smoking young cabbie named Corky (Winona Ryder) who looks like she's 12, but dreams of being a mechanic. Her fare is a cell-phone-wielding, high-powered casting agent (Gena Rowlands), and although the two are worlds apart socially and economically, over the course of the ride they find certain commonalities. Similarly, in the second story a newbie German émigré named Helmut Grokenberger (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a former clown, picks up black Brooklynite YoYo (Giancarlo Esposito) and then YoYo's aggressively feisty sister-in-law (Rosie Perez). The theme here is culture conflict, and although there isn't exactly a sense of resolution, there is, like the first story, the idea that connection across great social valleys is possible.

The third story moves the action across the pond to France, where an Ivory Coast émigré driving a cab in Paris (Isaach De Bankolé) first picks up a couple of dignitaries, who playfully, but cruelly deride him, and then a blind woman (Béatrice Dalle) who proves that her lack of sight is more than compensated by her attitude and vigor. From there we go to Rome and the most broadly comic of the five tales, which stars Roberto Benigni (who had previously appeared in Jarmusch's 1986 film Down by Law) as a motor-mouth cabbie who takes advantage of his fare being a Bishop (Paolo Bonacelli) by running off a list of increasingly hilarious confessions that have a rather unexpected, blackly comic effect. Placing this story right before the final tale, which takes place in Helsinki, seems to have been a conscious act of conflict by Jarmusch, as the film finishes with the saddest of the five stories. The Finnish cabbie (Matti Pellonpää) picks up three men, one of whom is so drunk he cannot stand, and they spend the cab ride exchanging tales of woe, which allows Jarmusch to end on a note of profound melancholy, suggesting that the fine line between laughs and tears is a fine one indeed.

Like any anthology film, Night on Earth has its strengths and weaknesses, with some stories cohering better than others. Yet, the cumulative effect of Jarmusch's nocturnal journeys through the chilly city streets is what makes Night on Earth work. As a fascinating study in human observation, it is never dull, despite the fact that very little actually happens. Jarmusch's dialogue, whether in English, French, Italian, or Finnish, is consistently engaging--by turns witty, deft, vulgar, and insightful. His characters are mostly sketches (their limited screen time of about 20 minutes apiece doesn't allow for much more), but he works enough depth into the shading to make each memorable in his or her own way.

The camera remains confined to the inside of various taxicabs for most of the film, with only static shots of each city to define the locations (after that, they become an interchangeable blur outside the windows, again suggesting a connection across the stories). Jarmusch's deft balancing of humor and pathos has always been one of his assets, and here he has a larger canvas on which to spread his act. Like a great collection of short stories, Night on Earth works in both the micro and macro, giving us brief snapshots of humanity and then assembling them into a meaningful collage that puts each story--funny or sad--into a shared human context.

Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick

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