Broken Flowers

The latest effort by master director Jim Jarmusch.

Bill Murray once made a living by chewing the scenery on Saturday Night Live and in screwball comedies such as Meatballs, Caddyshack, and Stripes, then took on comedy roles of more complexity and intelligence in movies like Groundhog Day, Rushmore, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Somewhere in there, Murray started handling roles that could actually be called serious, such as when he played Polonius in the recent reworking of Hamlet or when he played Ed Harris, the emotionally lost cynical movie actor revitalized by a chance (and totally chaste) encounter with a 20-ish girl (Scarlett Johansson) in the sublime Lost In Translation.

In my own pantheon of movies, Lost In Translation is so high up on the list that I can't help but compare Broken Flowers with it. Looked at that way, it is a disappointment. Both movies leave you with questions at the end, but somehow this technique works far better in Lost In Translation. When the ending comes to Broken Flowers, I saw moviegoers looking at each other wondering if perhaps the last reel had been forgotten...but no...the credits are rolling, aren't they?

This is not to say it's a bad movie. It's far better than many of the movies showing in moviehouses concurrently. And it does have one scene which will cause a lot of buzz and will likely give one of the supporting characters a huge career boost. More on that later.

The story is about a man we are told is a wealthy computer entrepreneur. Presumably, he sold his business and made a lot of money. So...why does he live in a decidedly middle-class neighborhood. His house is no mansion and the interior bespeaks a man of tacky taste.

It starts with his current girlfriend (Julie Delpy who is on the screen for not much more than two minutes) leaving him. At the same time, she hands him the mail which has a mysterious pink letter envelope in it. After she leaves, he opens the letter which informs him that the anonymous writer, one of his former girlfriends, had a boy by him who is now 19 and may be looking for him. According to the writer, she has not given out any specific info about him to her son, but she says he's a bright and resourceful boy and there is some chance he'll figure out where our protagonist (named Don Johnston, which has him correcting people who call him "Don Johnson" several times in a repetition joke).

Since "John" equates to "Juan" in Spanish, his name bears a certain similarity to "Don Juan" as well, and we are led to believe that Don has been a ladies man and womanizer, although there's very little evidence of this charm in the movie (one of its several flaws).

His neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), is intrigued by the situation and becomes a junior gumshoe doing basic research to track down Don's girlfriends. Eventually, he cajoles Don to go on a Quest to discover which of the women in his life made him a father, and thereby to track down his son.

His first visit is to Laura (Sharon Stone) who isn't home when he arrives. He is invited into their living room by her aptly named daughter, Lolita (Alexis Dziena), where probably the single most memorable scene occurs as she later walks into the living room to answer her cell phone, surprising Don by being dressed in her birthday suit. This is full frontal nudity lasting several seconds that will probably boost sales of the eventual DVD by several percentage points. Ms. Dziena is a very well formed female with really nice tan lines. While maybe not a star-making moment, I'm sure important people have been writing down her name and the she is suddenly being considered for quite a few roles that were out-of-reach before. A very smart move on her part and on the part of director Jarmusch.

I won't describe the other visits except to tell you what you'll almost certainly hear as a complaint from anyone else who's also seen the movie, which is that his search is fruitless. This isn't really much of a spoiler, since this isn't where the movie ends and the quest for the boy is a classic Maguffin (aka McGuffin) anyway. (A Maguffin is something a story is built around but which has no real relevance to the plot.) In the end, the movie isn't about the quest for the boy, it's a character study of a man forced to confront the debris left in the wake of his bachelorhood.

On his return, he sees a boy first in the airport and then near a cafe in town. This may be his son and I'll leave the story there, though as I said earlier, this is not a movie with pat answers to that question, and this is not really what the movie is about anyway.

While this is neither Murray's nor Jarmusch's best effort, it's still a rather good film. As far as Jim Jarmusch goes, I'd recommend you see some of his better efforts: Down By Law, Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train, Night On Earth, and Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai come to mind.