Broken Flowers

I failed to see this movie in theaters, but several people commented to me that its slow, laid-back, laconic style of storytelling was not for them. I expected a typical Jim Jarmusch movie - something like Down by Law or Dead Man - heady, existential, distant, indirect. But that's not Broken Flowers at all. Sure, main character Don Johnston isn't exactly what you'd consider a bubbly, animated guy, but this is the director's most accessible, easy to enjoy and warm film to date. It's a perceptive human comedy, one that maybe feels a little deeper than it actually is, because it staunchly refuses to reveal more than it has to.

What could have possibly filled him with such listlessness and fatigue? What are his hobbies, interests or passions? Who is Don Johnston, or more importantly in terms of this story, who was he? Jarmusch never bothers to give you this information, because for his purposes, it doesn't matter. "The past is gone," Johnston tells a young man near the film's close. "And the future is unknown, it hasn't happened yet. So, this is all there is. Just this."



Johnston is played by Bill Murray in yet another brilliant, subtle turn sure to be ignored come Oscar time. It's a performance that draws immediate parallels to Murray's work in Lost in Translation, another film where he played a depressed, out-of-it millionaire dealing with aging and ennui. Johnston is somewhat like Murray's fish-out-of-water celebrity in that film, but without the nattering wife at home to explain his life crisis.

As the film opens, a letter is delivered to Johnston. He's sitting in his house, alone, with the lights off, watching an old movie about Don Juan. We soon come to discover that it's appropriate viewing - in his younger days, Johnston was quite a ladies' man, and he continues to date a bevy of attractive women, including Sherry (Julie Delpy), who has just left him.

The letter is from an old flame who refuses to identify herself. She said that, 19 years earlier, she gave birth to Don's child, a child he knew nothing about. Now, the boy has gone missing, and she believes he's looking for his father. Don decides almost immediately to disregard the letter and go about his life (or lack thereof). But his enthusiastic, nosy amateur detective friend Winston (Jeffrey Wright, in one of the year's most charming performances) won't let the issue die. He sees it as a great mystery, perhaps the Great Mystery that will unlock the secret to Don's depression, and comes up with a plan to solve the riddle.

The plan will provide the film's structure: Don goes to visit all of his girlfriends from 20 years before, in a desperate search for clues as to the Mystery Mother of his Mystery Child. The rest of the film will play as more or less a series of vignettes, with Don showing up at a doorstep and rediscovering the fates of his various ex-loves.

But my favorite material was this opening half-hour. Wright and Murray are a fairly brilliant comic duo here. (Though I've admired him in films before, I've never just enjoyed watching Jeffrey Wright this much). Winston's Ethiopian, and he constantly makes Mix CD's for Don, and this terrific, bouncy Ethiopian jazz music fills the film's soundtrack. And the two stars just have chemistry together. The scene in which Winston lays out his scheme for Don in a coffee shop is one of the funniest this year.

Even after he embarks on his adventure, Don's attitude doesn't change much. He's pretty much an unmovable object, capable of turning on some charm to defuse a situation or get his way, but never displaying any sort of emotion or revealing anything much about himself. Jarmusch uses him sometimes as a straight-man, balancing out some of the more wild supporting performances. One sequence, in which Don reunites with a girlfriend who's now a wacky animal therapist (Jessica Lange), features just exquisite expressions and reaction shots from Murray. Just the smallest gesture from him, a batted eyelid or a wry upturned smirk, is enough to get the humor across.

On other sequences, he takes on an almost pathetic stature. One former love (Tilda Swinton) now lives with some bikers in a remote, mud-covered farmhouse, and reacts to Don by cursing him and heaving him beaten up. Another ex-girlfriend, Dora (Frances Conroy, known to me as Ruth from "Six Feet Under"), now ekes out her own pained existence, married to a real-estate blowhard (the always-excellent Christopher McDonald) in an obsessively-clean McMansion.

This sequence, with Conroy the real estate agent, does kind of bother me. In it, the husband finds an old photo of his wife dressed in 60's hippie gear, and brings it out for Don's amusement. "Didn't I take that photo," Don asks, and Dora nods. But wait...The movie's clearly set in the present, as it references the Internet repeatedly, and even online music downloading and CD burning. So, if Don's son is 19 and he dated these women 20 years ago, that would mean he and Dora were involved in...the mid 80's. Why would she be dressed as a hippie? That's 15 years too late.

Could that be intentional? I mean, there's a difference between refusing to provide your characters with a backstory, and providing them with nonsensical background details that don't quite add up. I spent a few minutes trying to figure that moment out - maybe he and Dora knew each other for years before dating? maybe she just dressed that way as a young person and I'm reading too much of it? maybe Don's meant to symbolize the "flower power" generation aging and taking stock of their lives? - but I didn't come up with anything to excuse such a lapse in logic. It's not enough to distract from the formidable pleasures of Broken Flowers as a film, and I still cared very much about Don's journey despite this moment, but it is kind of a bothersome little detail.

The women from Don's old life always recognize him immediately, they update him on their stories, and always seem to expect him to tell them his own saga. But he never does. Good or bad, they've all changed, had ups and downs, and lived lives of some sort. Don, on the other hand, has nothing much to report. He's had many girlfriends since he knew them, and he made some money "in computers," but all that is past now. As for this moment, well...there's just not that much to say...

By the film's conclusion, Jarmusch refuses to give his narrative a neat conclusion. Or, indeed, to explain himself at all. But he does hint at some of his film's subtext, beyond being a dryly funny lamentation for a lifelong lover and commitmentphobe. One potential mother from Don's past, Michelle Pepe, died a few years back, and as a final stop on his trek, he visits her grave. In that moment, with Don laying down the same pink flowers he has given all his ex-girlfriends during his trip in front of a tombstone, that Broken Flowers really comes together as a story.

Don isn't so much searching for his past as chasing a hopeful present, one he can see on the horizon but constantly fails to grasp. The prospect that he may have a son, something permanent to last beyond his shallow life, has given him a purpose for the first time in a long while. It's something to hold on to, something that might be known about the future, because all the other relationships in his life have evaporated. The movie isn't so much about regretting a life of casual sex, but about the fear of death, oblivion and non-existence. Don's life may be dull and may seem meaningless, but he comes to see it as something that may have value, if only he can play it just right.

Murray's no longer even thought of as exclusively a comedy actor, and that's appropriate given the range of his talents, but he's genuinely funny in this movie. Just not in a Peter Venkman-wisecracking kind of way. In a sardonic, dry kind of way. Jarmusch's films have always had something of a European sensibility (his Ghost Dog is a direct borrow from Melville's French classic Le Samourai, and his previous film, Coffee and Cigarettes shares a good deal of its aesthetic sensibility and language with the films of the French New Wave), and Broken Flowers plays a lot like a classic, sophisticated British social comedy, with Murray as the bemused man in a crisis facing a world of eccentrics and shenanigans. It's one of his best performances, one of the year's best performances, so it's sure to be ignored this awards season in favor of bad impressions of famous musicians or physical transformations into magical retards.