Father Mother Sister Brother

The best Jim Jarmusch pictures are the ones where the least happens. This has been the case ever since his minimalist masterpiece Stranger Than Paradise came out in 1984. Some of his livelier movies have been good—like Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and Only Lovers Left Alive—but for the most part, the less that happens in a Jarmusch film, the better. I remember seeing The Limits of Control with a good buddy one Tuesday night in a near-empty arthouse multiplex and walking out of the theater feeling as if we'd just hung out with Elvis. The latest by the taciturn septuagenarian is a triptych of short stories about family connections.

In the first chapter, "Father," Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play the grown children of a widower played by Tom Waits. As the two kids, parents themselves, drive out to the father's rural New Jersey home to pay a visit to their reclusive pop, we get the sense that the two haven't been tight with the old man for a long time. They don't seem super close or communicative with each other, either. Have there ever been two actors from more disparate backgrounds who look more like brother and sister than Driver and Bialik? The casting of these three actors as close family members alone makes this film worth seeing.

The second chapter, "Mother," stars Charlotte Rampling as a successful English writer in her seventies or eighties who, long ago, devised a way to only have to see her adult children once a year, at a formal tea party she hosts for her two daughters, played by Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps. And the last story, "Sister Brother," stars Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat as twins who reunite after their parents die in a plane crash. They visit their parents' apartment and storage area in Paris and relive old memories as they look at the photos, furniture, and childhood drawings their folks kept.

This first story has the least amount of action or dialogue, so it's no surprise that it's the best of the three, but this is one of those rare anthology pictures where each chapter has an equal measure of intrigue and insight. We never find ourselves wishing we could move on from the current group of characters we're watching to either get on to the next bunch or go back to the people we met in an earlier chapter. The movie's themes, formalities of structure, and playful cinematic leitmotifs never feel profound, and shouldn't. What they capture are subtle truths about familial relationships that would sound hollow if expressed as words. Thank goodness film is an ideal medium for rumination on such matters. When a movie has as much silence as this one, the simple last line of summation can land with ten times as much power.