The man who shot Stranger Than Paradise went on to direct comedies about how miserable it is to make a film. As a cinematographer he taught the camera to wait; as a director he has spent thirty years on people who cannot.
Fi1m perspective
The shots in Stranger Than Paradise (1984) do not move and do not cut. Tom DiCillo's black-and-white frames sit still while the people in them fail to do anything much, and the film trusts us to find what matters without being pointed at it. We remember waiting for a cut that never came, and noticing after a while that we had stopped waiting and started looking. That is what the framing asks, and it is why a comedy built on long pauses and aimless company holds together at all.
He came to Jim Jarmusch out of NYU Film School and shot his early films, Stranger Than Paradise among them and Coffee and Cigarettes (1986) after it. Then he moved behind his own camera. Johnny Suede (1991) was the debut, with Brad Pitt and Catherine Keener in the leads. Living in Oblivion (1995) is the one most people mean when they say his name: a satire of a low-budget shoot in which everything that can go wrong does. Box of Moonlight (1996), The Real Blonde (1997), Double Whammy (2001) and Delirious (2006) followed, the last of them a comedy about paparazzi and the people they chase. Since then it has mostly been television, with episodes of the Law & Order series, Monk, Chicago Fire and The Good Wife, and a documentary on The Doors, When You're Strange (2009).
The features keep returning to the same ground. Somebody's career is in trouble, often a career in or near film, and the trouble is played for laughs with a surreal edge. Steve Buscemi has been his lead three times, and DiCillo writes parts with a particular actor in mind rather than casting after the fact, which is the sensible way round and rarer than it should be. Catherine Keener has come back twice. He has described making a film as "one of the most tedious, boring, painful experiences, and that's just when something goes right", and the films are made out of that sentence. The complaint that follows him is that the satire sometimes gets away from him, Delirious in particular, and ends up talking to a small room of people who already know the jokes.
We have not reviewed those features, so we will leave the verdicts to the pages that do. What we can say is that his one episode of The Good Wife did not draw our attention, and on a series that already knew exactly what it was, that is the correct result for a hired director. Start with Stranger Than Paradise, where his hand is easiest to see because it is the hand that refuses to move. Then Living in Oblivion, if you have ever stood on a set and wondered why anyone does this.
Biography
Tom DiCillo is an American film director, screenwriter, cinematographer and actor. Born on 14 August 1953 in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, he studied filmmaking at New York University.
He began his career working with Jim Jarmusch as cinematographer on Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), on which he also appeared as an airline agent. DiCillo made his directorial debut with Johnny Suede (1991) and is known for Living in Oblivion (1995), Box of Moonlight (1996) and the documentary When You're Strange (2009).
