Broken Flowers

I can't think of an actor better suited to play the expressionless chronic bachelor Don at the heart of Jim Jarmusch's newest movie than Bill Murray. His mournful hound-dog face, which hides any trace of what's going on inside the head on which it sits, stares blankly at the T.V., at other people, sometimes at nothing, betrays itself with the slightest movement of the mouth or twitch of the eyes. It's a characterization Murray has so down pat that I'm tempted to think he's not really acting all that much, but he's so perfectly cast that it doesn't much matter whether he's acting or not.

If you're not familiar with the movies of Jim Jarmusch, "Broken Flowers" is a nice introduction, as it's the most accessible Jarmusch film I've seen. I'm not a huge fan, but I liked this movie quite a lot. Don receives an anonymous letter one day from a past girlfriend, telling him he has a 19-year-old son who may come looking for him. Murray's friend, Winston (played amusingly by the chameleon Jeffrey Wright), convinces him to track down a handful of women who could have possibly been the mother and resolve the mystery. Don agrees to it, seemingly not so much because he has a need to know but because he has nothing better to do. What follows is a series of scenes with each past girlfriend, during which their interactions with Don tell us heaps about their relationship back when they were dating. Some are affectionate, some are distant, one is downright scarily angry, but all are played beautifully by a quartet of actresses: Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton.

This is Jarmusch, so there aren't necessarily any tidy answers, and I don't think I give anything away by saying that the mystery is never solved. Life is messy, and it doesn't always happily resolve itself just because we want it to. I liked how subtle the film was; Don doesn't make any huge ground-breaking discoveries about himself, but nevertheless you sense that he's a slightly different person after his journey than he was before it.

You'll have to be patient, as Jarmusch tells his story very slowly, and nearly all of Don's interaction with others is ponderously awkward. But the movie slowly begins to fascinate, and you find yourself watching the faces of the women he visits (and examining the visible details of their lives) much in the same way that Don is himself, looking for the slightest hint that she might be the one who sent that fateful letter.

A very fine film, poignant and sad in a rather obscure way, and one that stays in your mind for a while after seeing it.

Grade: A-

There are movies which are lots of action interrupted by occasional pauses. Those are the movies people tend to enjoy. Unfortunately Broken Flowers is a movie of pauses interrupted by occasional action. Director Jim Jarmusch lays out his story in excruciatingly slow fashion. It's a road trip story, Bill Murray playing Don Johnston, an aging man criss-crossing the country for reasons we'll get to in a bit. Don has a few important stops on his journey. Sadly Jarmusch wastes way too much time on the travel between those stops. The movie is a seemingly endless succession of shots of the countryside flying by outside Don's car window. There are only so many hills and houses you can see go by before you are screaming "Get on with it already!" at the screen. There is just way too much time in this movie where absolutely nothing is happening. What makes it worse is that it's the same nothing over and over again, all those scenic shots backed by the same repeated musical cues which frustratingly burrow deep inside your brain. When we met Don Johnston it was obvious he was a man who had pretty much checked out on life. He didn't care about anything. The way his story is presented here won't make you care either.

Don is a retired guy, living a quiet life which consists of pretty much nothing but sitting on his couch. He is pushed into action when he receives a mysterious letter from a woman saying he fathered a child with her about twenty years ago and that her son, his son, is now looking for him. The letter is not signed, no indication who it could be from. And apparently Don was quite the ladies' man back in the day because there are five possibilities as to who the mother could be. So now Don must leap off his couch and go find out who the mother is right? Well, no, not at all actually. Don doesn't care about the letter, has no interest in this hypothetical son with the mystery mother. But with some insistent prodding from an exceedingly enthusiastic, and annoying, neighbor, Don sets out on a journey to track down all these old flames and discover the truth. So Don gets on a plane, flies somewhere, gets into his rental car and the movie at this point grinds to a screeching halt.

Don meets up with four women, the fifth having died a few years earlier. These meetings have their entertaining moments. They also have plenty of awkward moments. At some stops Don is greeted warmly, at others not so much. The four women he meets have very different lives, each with life circumstances which are unusual in their own way. One with a teenage daughter who lives up to her name of Lolita, one who's a cat whisperer, one desperately sad, one curiously angry. Of the group Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange get the meatier, and quirkier, parts to play and do well with them. Murray is pretty much just left to react to whatever he is confronted with at each stop. He certainly portrays Don's world-weariness, and road-weariness, well. But the movie really leaves the audience feeling weary. There's just never enough going on. So much time is wasted. And as Don moves from woman to woman the whole thing becomes so repetitive. After the endless lulls when he meets the next woman on his list you desperately want the movie to perk up, for something big to happen. But the movie falls into the trap where it's basically just the same thing again and again. Nothing ever really happens. Don is searching for answers, searching for himself. But in this case it is the audience which never really finds what it is looking for.

Broken Flowers is a departure for Jim Jarmusch, and not an altogether successful one. This film is decidedly more mainstream than anything Jarmusch has directed before. He inserts product from mapquest.com, Sharp, and Ford Taurus; shoots in color; and writes a character being admonished for smoking for starters. This isn't as radical a shift to mainstream as George Lucas going from THX-1138 to Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. It's more like the Cohen brothers going from Blood Simple to Intolerable Cruelty.

Broken Flowers is highly structured and deliberately paced (i.e. slow), with an episodic format. Murray's character, Don Johnston, tries to reveal the identity of the woman who alerts him to the existence of his son, awkwardly reuniting with a succession of old flames. Murray's portrayal is fun to watch, and Sharon Stone is still magically delicious. The film has interesting things to say about the suburbs, the path not taken, bachelorhood, and the banality of travel. But it says little and hardly engages. It is the Odyssey with no reason to return home.

I just saw this at a press screening. It's very smart, well-made and entertaining, directed with sure-handed control, full of quirky, funny moments and superb acting. The film pretty much avoids clichés, although it does rely a bit on the familiar "Aren't Middle-Americans quirky?" idea for its humor. But Jarmusch never goes too far with this, his restraint keeping the film propelled from beginning to end.

The only weakness for me is rooted in the film's strength: I feel like there's not quite enough here.

Murray's character is beleaguered and despondent, Murray plays him with perfect subtlety. This is fun and fascinating to watch; I found myself hanging onto every little expression on Murray's face. But, the combination of his passive, muted performance and the spare storytelling left me wanting more. It just doesn't have as much impact as I feel it could have. So, yes, it's wonderful minimalism, but perhaps a bit too slight of a movie to have any lasting resonance.

Bill Murray has added another very good performance to his career, and Jim Jarmusch has made another compact little gem (unlike some of his more recent films). Unique and entertaining. Definitely worth seeing.

Broken Flowers, is about a lonely and quiet bachelor named Don Johnston, who lives in a big house and basically lies around all day. Don, recently breaks up with his girlfriend Sherry. Don, lives next door to an interesting man named Winston, who likes to look up information and investigate people on the internet. One day Don gets a letter in the mail from a woman (who does not sign the letter) and says that her son is Don's and that he is coming to visit Don, to see who his father really is. Don, shows the note to Winston, and Winston tells Don, to make a list of all the girls he has been with in the past. Don, makes a list of five people and Winston gets information on all of them including where they live and sets out a traveling course for Don, to go and see them to find out which one is the mother of his child. Don, goes on this journey and meets these women he has not seen in years to find out the truth about the letter and notices how much some of these women have changed since he last knew them. Broken Flowers, has good direction, a good script, good performances by the whole cast, good cinematography and good film editing. The film is written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, who has brought us such offbeat delights as Down By Law, Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai and Coffee And Cigarettes, and all of those I liked a lot. But, I was disappointed with Broken Flowers. It was not a bad film in any way but it is slow and it often tries to make witty and smart jokes and be funny but for the most part the jokes don't work and they are not funny. The film also lacks energy and it doesn't have as interesting characters or situations as past Jarmusch films who shows he can whip up some really good conversations like in Coffee And Cigarettes. I didn't really find any of the characters that interesting and at times it was hard to relate to characters in the film and wonder at the end what the point of the movie was. It was still mildly entertaining and I liked their performances and some of the creative scenes so for that I'am slightly recommending this but it doesn't work on a whole as well as past Jarmusch movies that were virtually ignored while this one is getting a lot of buzz.