2012 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Abigail Schott-Rosenfield
DOWN BY LAW: What Jack and Zack Don’t Have
by Abigail Schott-Rosenfield
Down By Law is not your conventional action-packed jailbreak film. The convicts’ getaway is understated: we have no idea even how, exactly, they escaped, because the film cuts from the moment the three emerge from their cell to their running full-tilt through some underground passageway. The movie centers not on the moment when the three convicts escape, but on the differences in the ways they live.
The film begins with a montage of New Orleans, backed by Waits’ music. Included in this montage are shots of Jack and Zack returning to their homes after a night out. The shots are strikingly similar. In each, the man walks into a bedroom to an apparently sleeping woman with her back to him. As the man sits down of the bed and begins to remove his clothes, the woman’s eyes flick open—she has been pretending. Roberto (Bob), the third character, is not included in this beginning, which serves to set up the fundamental similarity between Jack and Zack and the foreignness of Bob. Zack and Jack’s rhyming names emphasize their sameness, while Roberto is alien in name, speech, and what he’s in jail for (while Jack and Zack are both framed for crimes they didn’t commit, Bob confesses to having accidentally killed a man).
The first time we meet Bob, he appears seemingly out of nowhere, greeting an inebriated Zack cordially. Zack responds with a mumbled “Buzz off.” Roberto, ever willing to believe the best of everyone (and ever attempting to add new English words to his vocabulary) thinks this is a form of salutation he’s never heard, and, comically, disappears from the screen repeating it—ah, hello, buzz off, buzz off to you to—as if registering it in his internal dictionary.
This first impression of Bob’s humorous, good-natured, childlike cluelessness is the polar opposite of the first impressions of Zack and Jack. Within the first scenes, Jack completely ignores his prostitute’s lengthy monologue, while Zack refuses to respond as his girlfriend berates him for his irresponsibility, throwing various possessions around the room. Bob, on the other hand, walks up to a perfect stranger merely to say hello—and takes the opportunity to learn (so he thinks) to communicate more effectively. Bob has what his fellow escapees don’t: he takes joy in communication, the foundation of healthy relationships and of life.
The final, most striking expression of the difference between Zack and Jack’s and Bob’s ways of life comes in the scene in which Bob dances with his brand-new fiancé, Nicoletta. Within minutes of meeting this woman, he agrees to marry her, is willing to give his large heart to her entirely. As a classic romantic song plays, they are completely absorbed in their dance and in one another. Jack and Zack are excluded from the scene. They sit at the table, apart. They smile, but they are as foreign to the world of simple love as Roberto is to their commitment to being lone wolves, attached to no one.
We sense that they will never be able to enter Bob’s world. Though Bob has given them a second chance by showing them the escape route, befriending them, making sure they don’t tear each other to pieces on the way to freedom, they can never be like him. Roberto stays with the love of his life; Jack and Zack cross the border to Texas and whatever will befall them there. As the movie concludes and they stand at a crossroads, about to part, Zack holds out a hand for Jack. Jack reaches to take it, but Zack pulls away, grinning, at the last second. They laugh. Then they walk down the separate roads. They will probably never meet again. They are as alone as they were when the film began.