The Limits of Control
Jim Jarmusch | USA | 2009
116 min

Jim Jarmusch is an original. As critics and audiences celebrate Inglourious Basterds, Limits of Control is the year 2009’s genuine swansong to film culture; most subversively, it is a fuck-you to blockbuster cinema and quirky American indies from a maverick independent filmmaker in complete command of his craft and technique. Limits of Control seeks to study the nature of existence through the eyes of a hero (that rarely speaks), but the film is not taxed with ponderous philosophizing. Although Jarmusch has always been interested in big ideas — ideas about love, sex, death, reality; it is his idiosyncratic approach to these themes that protects and improves him as a innovator of cool and the new in cinema.

Working off an anti-psychological base for the story’s protagonist, called only Lone Man, the film uses a series of aphorisms which serve both as jokes and little haikus. Lone Man’s job is to kill people and he is on an unspecified mission in Spain. He drinks two espressos in separate glasses, does not like mobile phones and, despite the torments of his naked and luscious temptress, he will not have sex while he is working. Lone Man is driven by habits, a personal code and unique understanding of the world; he is the perfection of control, the rational man. This is an archetype that Jarmusch has continually explored in other films, most evidently Ghost Day: Way of the Samurai.

But Limits of Control breaks new ground for Jarmusch because it accords his favorite archetypal hero a major benefit: power over fate. There is a scene in the film when Lone Man meets a beautiful Japanese informant in a train (homage: Hitchcock; look for several more) and she warns him that “there are those that are not among us;” he replies, “I am among no one.” Another crucial scene features Lone Man breaking into a highly secured facility that is being run by the villain, a Donald Rumsfeld-esque boss called American (Bill Murray): no shots are fired, no fights take place, there is no lock-picking…Lone Man just appears in the boss’ bunker. When the exasperated American asks him “how the fuck did you get in?” he is simply told “I used my imagination.” And if you are able to use yours, then the exquisitely crafted Limits of Control can reward you infinitely. Maybe.