You know Mike Tyson is no saint, so expect a rough ride. There’s no doubt that James Toback has real affinity for Tyson as a subject, given Toback’s similar penchant for doing things his own way and that his recent films have dealt with race and relationships. He even cast Tyson in his 1999 film Black and White. So it seems perfect that he should take on a profile of this multifarious, great fighter.
The film has a lot of split screen and layered images. I expected this would get tedious – that it would be a cheesy way to keep our attention and hide too much reliance on the interview. But that turns out not to be the case at all. His quirky approach becomes like a documentary confession. Obviously Tyson had great trust in the director. There are a lot of hard close-ups on Tyson. Much of it does seem to come from one interview. The effect is that the audience becomes father confessors, or maybe psychologists for Tyson. As such there are bound to be radically different reactions to the boxer as a person, as a subject, as a man, and as an athlete.
What is clear is that he was a mighty, mighty boxer and a very troubled person. Despite his power as a fighter, there is little of the artistry, grace, and intelligence of anyone approaching the stature of Mohammed Ali. For better, and definitely for worse, Tyson is a brutal man in a brutal sport. But Toback in his respect for the man has revealed the poetry beneath the surface. That isn’t to say he lets him off the hook for some really bad behavior, but he doesn’t judge him. Tyson literally speaks for himself. I also don’t think that Toback would want to exploit Tyson who, it seems, has been exploited enough. Tyson’s contradictory, sometimes inarticulate, attempts to come to grips with his past life are filled with a lot of humor, shock, and honesty. He is not an educated man, but he is a blazing example of a superstar as anti-hero.
All the emotional confusion and ambivalence that are part of his colorful life are well served by Tobacks’s audacious style. There’s a lot of laughter at the sheer daring of Tyson’s claims, but also revelation at the emotion he has telling about his own life, his mistakes, his losses. So many questions, even at a psychological level are not commented on and are speculated on only in passing.
There are plenty of pre-conceptions about Mike Tyson, or maybe about boxing, in general. But the great archival footage makes the rise and fall of this chubby, short Brooklyn kid, afraid of getting picked on, and with little family to fall back on, to the “most feared man on the planet” worth millions and millions is clearly a compelling and very American story. Ultimately the brilliance of the film is that Toback commits his vision to the street poetry of Tyson’s own soul.

Jim Jarmusch begins his new film The Limits of Control with this quote from The Drunken Boat by Rimbaud

As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers

And so it is in Jarmusch’s film. We will slowly drift through this story of a secret agent, played by the ultra cool Isaach De Bankolé as he goes on an undefined mission in very specific places with an indefinite sense of urgency. He encounters a series of indeterminate characters played by Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, John Hurt, Paz de la Huerta and the big bad guy, Bill Murray. Directors and perhaps even stories themselves are what mediate and guide an audience through a film – finally providing some kind of catharsis. There’s no such guidance here. It is a collection of unhurried unfolding, seemingly important details that lead to the unsettling fact that you will, in the end, have to put together your own damn story.

As I understand reader-response theory, it is the reader (or viewer) who is the one who causes art to exist, that it is the audience interpretation that gives life to the work of art. That seems to explain the Limits of Control as much as any anything. Jarmusch has artfully employed all the elements of genre, plot, character, event, symbolism, and even climax – just not in a way that leaves the audience in the same place about what has happened. He attends masterfully to important movie moments like lingering on beautiful stars and beautiful spaces. He dwells on De Bankolé’s face as a work of art. He catches the ambience of the Madrid’s architecture, cafes, museums, and streets. He explores the exact light of Spanish mornings and afternoons. It reminds me at times of Antonioni’s The Passenger, but with even less of a narrative thrust. Narrative clues abound, but they are less clues than random genre situations, and you make what you can of them. I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of the slowly and randomly delivered genre moments, but they are great fun.

By deconstructing his film to pure cinematic and movie elements, without a cohesive narrative, he has created a wonderfully patient and surprising absorbing work of art. As he says in the screenplay “Everything is subjective,” and “Reality is arbitrary”. But there is more going on than that. The decision to resist the ‘manipulation’ of a narrative is, of course, wickedly anti-commercial. Fans of the director’s minimalism will probably have the patience to bask in the formal compositions and wonderful cinematography by the great Christopher Doyle(paranoid Park, In the Mood for Love). Small events read like a series of arch noir and spy movie clichés – the naked beauty he finds on his hotel bed (“I never have sex when I’m working” he tells the naked women, who reappears several times in a transparent raincoat) codes and messages appear in box matches, in the café he always orders two cups of espresso in the same café each day. Is this a clue to people he is meeting? The secret to whether you are ‘one of us’ seems to be the phrase “You don’t speak Spanish do you” . But who are “us”!?
The pace is languid, the details clever, the humor intentional. It’s a different kind of movie experience. You just need to be prepared to write it yourself!