On Jim Jarmusch’s 'Father Mother Sister Brother'

“Matters of great concern should be treated lightly,” intones the eponymous hero of Jim Jarmusch’s sublime Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, about a New York City hit man who has styled himself as a sort of time-warped expatriate of feudal Japan. He lives humbly among his pigeons and under the dual sign of the I Ching and the Wu-Tang, wielding katana and karma alike as precision instruments. Study Jim Jarmusch’s blade and you’ll find that he also likes to cut things fine, rhythmically and philosophically, to the point that his meticulously oscillating movies sometimes barely seem to penetrate his own consciousness, much less the spectator’s.