First Pass: The Limits of Control

If it weren’t summer I might love Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009) or hate it. But it is summer, and my standards are different this time of year.

A winter movie, you see, is a movie trudged to through icy winds and over snow-covered sidewalks. It is a movie watched in damp socks and fiercely debated afterwards over multiple cups of coffee or pints of beer in a coffee shop, diner, or bar only reluctantly abandoned at closing time or last call for the long walk home. A fall movie is a movie chosen over football games and autumn leaves and bonfires and pumpkin patches and all of the other wonderful things that go along with my favorite season. It is a movie that has been singled out from the crowd of prestige pics, foreign films, and Oscar contenders that pack theaters in the weeks and months leading up to awards season. It is, like a winter movie, a film that has to be worth it.

A summer movie, though, is more often than not just an excuse to sit in the air conditioning, away from the sweltering heat, or a way to pass the hour or two between the end of the work day and sunset. It is fodder for a meandering discussion over cocktails or iced lattes sipped beneath an umbrella on the patio of a favorite café, one topic among many in a conversation that will inevitably play second fiddle to the pleasures of sitting outside in the shade.

The Limits of Control works for me as a summer movie, as an alternative to the “superspy” movies that usually number among the season’s major studio releases. The film’s Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé) is, like James Bond or Jason Bourne, an attractive, well-dressed man on a mission who knows what he wants (to drink, for instance) and what he’s doing. He does it in a series of exotic, enticing locales populated by alluring women and interesting men.

The Lone Man is a slightly different kind of hero, though. Where Bond and Bourne are fit and ready for physical combat, he is “centered” and at peace, prepared to do battle with his wits, will, and imagination. Where B&B are in demand, the targets or prizes of evil geniuses, government agencies, and world leaders, he is off the grid (“No mobiles”). They are digital, he is analog. They are constantly in motion, he is still. They dictate the rules of the game, he merely follows orders.

What we have here, I think, is a James Bond movie for people who don’t want to be 007. Or, rather, a James Bond-type movie that has been adapted to a different set of sensibilities: it works on about the same level, but not in the same way. It is an escapist fantasy that acknowledges itself as such by offering a “real-world” source (the paintings in the museum) for everything that happens in the film and a “moment of awakening” at the end. The bad guy is not one who opposes Anglo-American cultural and political hegemony, but a stand-in for those who propagate it. It offers us a beautiful woman to look at, but it does not condone womanizing. The emphasis is not on action or movement, but on architecture and landscape.

The Limits of Control is a movie that cries out for discussion: is it just a James Bond movie that it’s “okay” to like, or is that selling it short? Which one of the many different interpretations that it supports (as S.T. VanAirsdale notes, “the beauty of Jarmusch, of course, is that the clues are almost certainly there”) do you favor and why? Do the monologues about movies in which people sit and say nothing and molecules spinning in ecstasy add anything to the film? If so, what, exactly? And would we rather talk about those subjects? And what does that mean if we do?

Maybe there’s more to the film than this: I will eventually see it again and decide. For now, though, it’s enough for me that I loved Spain, loved the suits, loved discussing the film and reading the debates held by others. Because it’s summer, and I don’t typically ask for much more from a movie until at least September.

The Limits of Control is currently playing in Pittsburgh at the CineMagic Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill. Recommendations for further reading: I basically agree with Karina Longworth’s assessment of the film, I like Dennis Lim’s profile of Jarmusch in the New York Times for its insights into the director’s intent, and Michael J. Anderson and Lisa Broad at Tativille make a compelling case for the film as one of the year’s best so far.