Broken Flowers

I saw my first Jim Jar­musch film, Stranger Than Par­adise, my 2nd junior year at Bay­lor in 1993. I was a film major at the time, and the stark cin­e­matog­ra­phy and edit­ing (the cam­era never moves in a scene and each scene is played from begin­ning to end with no cuts) was cool. I had always been a fan of those unsung actors, those, “Hey, it’s that guy that was in fill-in-the-blank” movies, and I orig­i­nally watched it because it had Richard Edson (if you saw him, you’d prob­a­bly rec­og­nize him), but the film drew me in, kind of like A Clock­work Orange. It was hyp­notic and auteur cool. After that, nat­u­rally, I wanted to see more Jar­musch films.

Up to a point. Yes, I tried to see all of his films. Down by Law, Mys­tery Train, etc. Then came Night on Earth, what with its 5 cab­bies dri­ving around the world on one night and what hap­pens to them, and I just plain lost inter­est. Maybe it was Winona Ryder and her “it girl” sta­tus at the time. Maybe I just didn’t care. Pulp Fic­tion had just come out, cin­ema was chang­ing and more excit­ing, and the Euro­peanesque­ness (is that a word?) of Jarmusch’s ethos just kinda bored me at that point in my filmic development.

It only got worse later. I didn’t care about see­ing Dead Man, even though it paired the amaz­ing Crispin Glover and ver­i­fi­able screen leg­end Robert Mitchum, or Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samu­rai or any of those Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes films he’s been doing for almost 20 years. I was bored with Jimmy’s work. I didn’t care for his way of doing The Busi­ness anymore.

Star­ring:
Bill Mur­ray, Jef­frey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Con­roy, Tilda Swin­ton, Julie Delpy, Chloe Sevi­gny, Jes­sica Lange
Directed By:
Jim Jar­musch
Release Date:
August 5th, 2005
MPAA Rat­ing:
R for lan­guage, some graphic nudity, and brief drug use.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Focus Fea­tures
2 Stars

Bill Mur­ray, on the other hand, had and has never fol­lowed the auteur path. He started out as an overt comic on “Sat­ur­day Night Live”, moved on to Meat­balls, Cad­dyshack, Stripes and Ghost­busters. Then out of the blue came The Razor’s Edge and it hit peo­ple like a brick wall at the time : How could Bill Mur­ray do drama? Is that even pos­si­ble?

He was slammed for it and quickly got back into com­edy. It was sort of down­hill for him from there. Ghost­busters II, Quick Change, Larger Than Life, The Man Who Knew Too Lit­tle. He inter­spersed small gems, and some out­right clas­sics, in between these fes­ter­ing steam­ing turds of cel­lu­loid — Ground­hog Day, Mad Dog and Glory, and the fab­u­lous Ed Wood, but the ver­dict was in on Mur­ray by 1997, and his career was DOA.

Then out of the blue Wes Ander­son wanted Mur­ray for the part of Her­man Blume in his lit­tle film Rush­more, and the rest is his­tory. Murray’s career since that touch­stone has been one of highs (The Royal Tenen­baums, Lost in Trans­la­tion) and lows (Osmo­sis Jones, Garfield) but he is now at the point in his act­ing career that he’s widely respected as an excel­lent and depend­able char­ac­ter actor.

Put the two pre­vi­ously talked about peo­ple together, though, and it’s like watch­ing water evap­o­rate off of the sidewalk.

Mur­ray, usu­ally kinetic to a fault, plays Don John­ston, aged wom­an­izer who made a killing in com­put­ers and now lives in retire­ment doing noth­ing but watch TV and have his ex-girlfriends walk out on him. On the same day that his cur­rent flame (Julie Delpy) is leav­ing him, he receives a let­ter typed on pink sta­tion­ary let­ting him know that he and an unnamed ex-flame had a son 20 years pre­vi­ous and that the boy may be look­ing for Don. Enter Win­ston (Jef­frey Wright), Don’s neigh­bor and an ama­teur sleuth who takes up the quest to find the letter’s sender with a zealot’s zeal. “You have a son out there. Don’t you want to know who he is?” Don’s ini­tial answer? No. Prob­a­bly in in his mind it would be Hell No. Unde­terred, Win­ston plunges in, demand­ing a list of women Don would have known in the Bib­li­cal sense roughly 20 years hence. Win­ston pro­duces an itin­er­ary, dri­ving direc­tions and hotel reser­va­tions for Don.

Tired of bore­dom, or I would hope, out of curios­ity, Don takes off to unnamed locales across the US of A search­ing for his past and, as you can prob­a­bly guess, some­thing about him­self that shows him that he mat­ters in this world. Along the way he gets to see what hap­pened to these women that he knew inti­mately and how they turned out, and pos­si­bly what might hap­pened to him­self in a par­al­lel uni­verse. They range from bizarre (Jes­sica Lange) to funny (Sharon Stone) to pathetic (Tilda Swin­ton). His­tory comes back to bite Don again and again, but he con­tin­ues on his quest for rea­sons, through Jar­muschian logic, that are his alone.

Really, Bro­ken Flow­ers is not a bad movie, it just isn’t ful­fill­ing. I under­stand the Jar­muschian logic that the out­come means less than the jour­ney (Movie Trailer Guy Voice — “One Man…Alone…A Quest…of Par­ent­hood.…”), but after invest­ing 2 hours of your life, and a hard-earned $16, you might be want­ing a lit­tle more than is given to you. I won’t give away the end of the film, since I hate peo­ple who do that, but yes, you will prob­a­bly be dis­ap­pointed unless you’re one of those peo­ple that likes to go to a late night cof­fee shop in the Beat­nik part of town after see­ing your film and be snarky about what you’ve just wit­nessed ad nau­se­aum until late into the night. Bill Mur­ray is really good in his min­i­mal­ist way here, and I don’t fault him at all for my belief that the film fails. It’s just that I should have looked back to what inter­ested that 21-year-old boy at Bay­lor and see if that was applic­a­ble to my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. Matu­rity should guide us in our choices, so here is a mes­sage to you, Glenn Vance, “What would Don John­ston have done here? Would he have gone along with Win­ston to see a Bergmanesque film about a man search­ing for his son? Don’s ini­tial answer? No. Prob­a­bly in his mind it would be Hell No.