NYFF: In Father Mother Sister Brother, Jarmusch Equates Subtlety with Stillness

When I was in a college poetry class, a professor once gave us an oddly specific assignment: “Write an abecedarian that includes the scent of something pleasant, a body of water, a textile, something heard in the distance, a historical personage, the night sky, a delicious piece of fruit, and at least two named animals.” The next week, it was fascinating to see how many ways a single prompt could splinter, with each poem technically following the rules but expressing a different temperament, tone, and logic of feeling.

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother feels like a film born of a similar challenge. Imagine three Jarmuschs tasked with following this prompt: “Create a short, simple film about two grown children negotiating uneasy relationships with their parents, featuring an overhead shot of characters drinking a hot beverage, the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ slow-motion skateboarders, red-accented outfits, significant periods of time spent inside cars, and a conspicuous Rolex.” Stitch those together, and you get something like this, a triptych that’s gently self-aware and intermittently funny, but also caught between irony and sincerity, gesture and life. It’s a clever conceit in theory, yet in practice it teeters into feeling like three drafts of one idea rather than three windows into it.

While certainly a return to form after 2019’s lackluster zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, Jarmusch’s latest isn’t quite Paterson, either. For a plotless film built entirely around character study and human connection, Father Mother Sister Brother rarely feels inhabited by actual humans. The dialogue sounds written rather than lived, the characters like sketches of archetypes rather than people. Jarmusch’s best films — Stranger Than Paradise, Paterson, Only Lovers Left Alive — achieve a delicate balance between detachment and empathy. But here, by the time the final story in this triptych tries to reach for emotion, it feels less like a culmination than the film briefly forgetting its own operating system. The craftsmanship, framing, pacing, and droll humor are admirable, and yet the film is never quite subtle enough to hit home the way it needs to.  

“Father,” the the first of three, holds the most audience appeal with its winking humor and dramatic irony, albeit occasionally to its own detriment. Tom Waits as the titular patriarch is an instantly magnetic presence, muttering and twitching his way through a shabby rural house that’s clearly only shabby by design — and not just Jarmusch’s design, but the character’s. He is visited by his two grown children, whose contrasting temperaments — one fretfully dutiful, the other icily skeptical — are promising, if not exactly original. What follows plays more like a sitcom than slow cinema. Jeff (a dryly anxious Adam Driver, playing perfectly off Waits) repeatedly offers to inspect the numerous structural failures he’s been “loaning” his father money to fix, while Waits stammers through a series of increasingly implausible excuses and Emily (an unfortunately wooden Mayim Bialik) raises a disbelieving brow. It’s the kind of broad farce that might land in a network comedy, but feels airless in Jarmusch’s restrained frame. The beats feel timed not to rhythm or mood but to audience response: laugh here, feel tenderness there. The result is the most lively and funniest of the three chapters, but also the most emotionally inert. Every gesture, every reversal, is hammered home. 

That’s perhaps the central problem of Father Mother Sister Brother: a film ostensibly about human opacity that insists on explaining itself. Its emotional cues are underlined, its themes annotated. Where Paterson let its characters simply exist within their small worlds, this one corrals them toward the same recurring motifs until those motifs start to feel like items on a checklist. The repetition isn’t enriching or resonant; it’s cosmetic. The most convincing entry of the three is “Mother,” the second segment, which seems to best approximate what Jarmusch may have intended for the whole. Here, Charlotte Rampling’s scene-stealing frostily exact matriarch hosts her two daughters (a buttoned-up Cate Blanchett and wild child Vicky Krieps) for tea in Dublin, in a home so immaculately arranged it seems allergic to touch. Jarmusch gives them room to linger in silence, to shift in their chairs, to let their embarrassment register. There’s a small, piercingly true moment when a bouquet provided by Blanchett’s character, placed in the center of the tea table, proves too tall, blocking everyone’s view. Their mother quietly swaps it for her own smaller arrangement, smiling tightly as she does. The scene lands not because of dialogue but because of the choreography of discomfort. For a brief stretch, the film achieves the observational tone it keeps reaching for: familial unease rendered through minor adjustments, social reflexes, and eyes that do the talking. A silent shot of Blanchett staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, practicing a light smile that doesn’t reach her eyes; the camera lingering on Rampling’s unreadable expression as she watches her daughters drive away.