Father Mother Sister Brother makes hipness a family trait.
Remember when Jim Jarmusch was considered a hipster? Time has forced him to consider the domestic upbringing he abandoned for bohemianism. In his latest film, Father Mother Sister Brother, a package of three short stories like Mystery Train (1989), Jarmusch entertains the familial traditions that hipsters denounce. At age 72, Jarmusch trains his indie cinema perspective on the conventional — the great leveling of ancestral awareness we all come to experience the longer we live. It adds universal poignance that is new to his once-modish, subcult filmmaking.
Acknowledging the rambunctious disco track “T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)” recorded by the group Mother Father, Sister Brother (also known as TV’s Soul Train theme), Jarmusch switches his supercool stance and pegs his theme to Dusty Springfield’s version of “Spooky,” the sauntering skeptic’s love song first recorded by Classics IV (the white R&B Florida group best known for “Stormy”). That accounts for Jarmusch’s usual esoteric, cross-racial appropriation — played out here in three tales that connect a white American patriarch (Tom Waits), an Irish matriarch (Charlotte Rampling) and a pair of black American expatriates in Paris.
It is through this multiculti underground that Jarmusch reveals our familial roots. His intergenerational stories use role-reversal psychology. In “Father,” straightlaced siblings Emily and Jeff (Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver) look after elderly widower (Tom Waits), an eccentric nonconformist who hides his interior life and still reads Wilhelm Reich and Noam Chomsky. In “Mother,” an alienated literary patrician (Charlotte Rampling) undergoing psychoanalysis endures an annual high tea ritual with her daughters, arts bureaucrat Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and closeted compulsive liar Lilith (Vicky Krieps), all three products of emotionally distant independence. In “Sister Brother,” twins Skye and Billy (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) reminisce over artifacts bequeathed by their recently deceased hipster parents.
Each story is linked by repeating details — a Rolex watch, discussions about water, recreational drugs, recreational philosophies, family pet phrases, and repeated styles of estrangement. Jarmusch puts together pieces of a world broken by different generational habits. The reclusiveness and hidden secrets these families share evokes a common dissatisfaction, perhaps derived from hipsterism itself, about individuals burdened by convention and nature (reproduction).
These themes are recognizable, sometimes amusing, without ever being convincing. Too many rhyming quirks and coincidences prove Jarmusch’s poor dramaturgy. In spite of his mid-’80s acclaim for the beatnik comedies Stanger Than Paradise and Down by Law, he did not invent new dramaturgy, as film critics once thought. Now he tries reinventing the wheel.
The gimmick of examining what happens when hipsters age and assume personal responsibility — and guilt — indicates some fresh thinking. Yet Jarmusch’s personally discovered wisdom isn’t new. Father Mother Sister Brother recalls traditional, well-made theater plays like Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father and the marvelous 1952 film of Wynyard Browne’s The Holly and the Ivy.
Drug culture hasn’t changed human nature (“Psilocybin resets everything,” Skye tells Billy), but Jarmusch shows unexpected nostalgia for the lost freedom of youth and nonconformity; this is symbolized by the recurring image of skater kids seen around the world, observed in slow-motion as if stared at in a dream. “They grow like weeds,” Jeff tells Emily, recognizing their past selves in that aimless street-style liberty.
The film’s obvious three-part structure and enervating narrative seem tied to the self-indulgence that always makes Jarmusch’s work seem listless yet obtrusive. Here, it comes in “microdoses,” the drug quotients preferred by Skye and Billy, the black exemplars of hip. Whether in New Jersey, Dublin, or Paris, these neo-hipsters all seem deracinated, like in the 2023 indie film Past Lives, which also served Jarmusch’s style of tired hipsterism in microdoses.
