Broken Flowers
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Reviewed by Marc Goldin
A man sits on an expensive looking leather couch, staring at a high-end flat screen tv, appearing rather catatonic. He retrieves his mail, which includes a pink envelope addressed to him but bearing no return address. He doesn’t seem to react to this nor does he react to much of anything, including his younger live-in girlfriend’s announcement that she’s leaving him in order to think about her life for awhile. There is no hostility – just a sense of detachment and world-weary ennui. He eventually opens the pink envelope, which is from an old yet anonymous ex-lover who tells him that 20 years ago, she had his son but chose to raise the kid on her own. The son has decided to undertake a road trip in which he plans to look for his real father, so the letter is to serve as a kind of advance notice.
This is how Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, ‘Broken Flowers’ opens. The main character, a middle-aged ladies’ man named Don Johnston, a reference to Don Juan, is played by Bill Murray in a very understated droll way. After reading this news, he shows the letter to his neighbour and friend, an enthusiastic Ethiopian man named Winston, played by Jeffery Wright (Basquiat, Angels in America). Winston, who’s a mystery fanatic, is immediately taken by this situation and asks Don to think back and list the women with whom he was involved some 20 years ago. Don does this and comes up with 5 names but would rather leave it at that. Winston digs up the rest of the information, such as current names and addresses of the potential mothers.
Don finds that one of the women has died, which narrows the suspect list to 4. Winston persuades the apathetic Don to undertake his own trip to visit each of these women, in hopes that might determine who could be the anonymous mother of his son, and even makes all of Don’s travel arrangements, down to providing him with maps to each of the women’s houses. Don sets out, dropping in unannounced at each woman’s place and it turns out to be a very strange trip.
He’s received differently at each place – the women’s responses ranging from very warm to downright frosty, leaving the viewer to wonder about the nature of the relationship and the parting. In a couple of these encounters, there are moments of silence or noticeable tensions, and in classic Jarmusch fashion, he lets these silences and tensions play out long past a usual cutoff point, well into a discomfort zone – scenes from his first film, ‘Stranger than Paradise’ come to mind. What begins to emerge is that you sense that it’s more about this particular journey for Don rather than an answer to the mystery of who might be the mother of his son. If in fact that’s the truth – you begin to wonder if this might not be a hoax. As Jarmusch points out, none of that is really important – it might be more about Don’s middle-aged ambivalence.
As always, Jarmusch’s films are well cast and this one, cast by Chicagoan, Ellen Lewis, is no exception. Bill Murray, the formerly zany comedic actor has evolved into a substantial semi-serious actor with a wonderfully droll humour. I first noticed this in the recent film, ‘Lost in Translation’, where he played a similar older/jaded role to great effect. The women are equally stellar - Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton, as the former lovers, are each strong in their respective vignettes and play beautifully off Murray, as does Jeffery Wright as his friend, Winston.
I’ll admit to a Jim Jarmusch bias – he is one of my favourite directors – and ‘Broken Flowers’ is another great one. In a recent interview, in the New York Times, Jarmusch said that he relishes his position as an outsider indie filmmaker – one who has never sold out to Hollywood (always arranges his own financing and distribution) and said whimsically, that if too many people liked his work, he’d wonder what he’d done wrong. He would probably be annoyed with me for saying that ‘Broken Flowers’ is more accessible than his earlier work but that does not mean that he has sold out in any way. Maybe it’s Bill Murray’s presence in the film, maybe Sharon Stone – both solid commercial actors. It’s still a Jarmusch film and, as an admirer, I want to see him do well and have the means to finance his work forever, but like he, if too many people liked his stuff, I’d wonder what we’d done wrong.