Jarmusch's Wild West

"Dead man" by Jim Jarmusch may well be the best western I've seen in my life.

William Blake, a young accountant from Cleavland, travels to a distant settlement in the West, called Town of Machine, to begin work for a metalworks company. He arrives only to find out that his position has been taken up by another man. Shortchanged by the ruthless owner of the business, the almighty Mr Dickinson, he ends up in the street and this is where he bumps into a beautiful, warm-hearted girl. Next morning, they wake up in bed together just as the room is intruded by the girl's fiancé returning from a voyage. In a gunfight, the heartbroken fiancé takes aim at Blake, but when he pulls the trigger, his girlfriend lunges to the newcomer's defence and is shot dead. Blake pulls out the girl's pistol and guns down her fiancé, saving his own life. He dashes off the scene shocked and seriously wounded.

It soon turns out the victims were related to Dickinson, who recruits the top killers in the area to get Blake, dead or alive.

When Blake regains consciousness, he's being taken care of by a round-faced Indian in the desert. Impossibly, Blake's rescuer proves to be a devoted fan of William Blake's poetry and takes William Blake the accountant for William Blake the English artist. How come an Indian in the middle of the Wild West is so well-read in English literature, reciting "Auguries of Innocence" from memory? Well, it's hard to believe, but he was captured by English soldiers at the age of 9, shipped across the Atlantic, first displayed in England as a curiosity, then placed in schools where he received detailed education, falling in love with Blake's poetic visions. It's so refreshing and liberating to see an Indian hero with a difference, more self-aware and outspoken than most white characters.

Together, a wounded accountant mistaken for the poet and his dedicated fan, embark on an unlikely journey as they try to evade the assassins.

It's Jarmusch as usual, slow-paced, awkward, rough, but it's the tension between the Jarmuschian way of doing films and the sterotypical expectations for western that makes a difference here. It's a western with a difference.