FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER Luminaries

Winner of the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, legendary indie auteur Jim Jarmusch’s newest work is a wry gem about the timeworn drift of familial intimacy. In this collection of three quietly humorous stories, families struggle to bridge or avoid the distance that has grown between them. Starring Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps and Charlotte Rampling, each episode concerns a different family in a different country — one in New Jersey, the others in Dublin and Paris — but connected through thematic and visual motifs. The awkward silences between the adult children and their aging but lively parents are wide enough to drive a tractor-trailer through, and in these moments of suppressed expression reside the failures of vulnerability. With guarded hush, the characters perform a ballet of emotional avoidance, slipping into falsehoods, half-truths and superficial niceties. Jarmusch finds the tension and the humor in these lacunae, as his characters attempt to hide themselves but can’t find the words for convincing cover. The final chapter turns many of these themes on their head and gives voice to the unspoken affinities animating family dynamics, in which enduring love and total comprehension need not be one and the same. –Travis Weedon