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Broken Flowers: Bill Murray
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With Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch has apparently graduated from making independent art-house films (like his anthology Coffee and Cigarettes) and has chosen to concentrate on a more mainstream approach with an exceptional actor. However, without Bill Murray as the lead (a role that Jarmusch wrote exclusively for him), it is hard to say what Broken Flowers would be. While Flowers is a solid script and a tightly-focused character study, it doesn’t accomplish too much of anything in the long run. Furthermore, the film unexpectedly leaves a bland, rather than an exceedingly saccharine, aftertaste. Perhaps this is precisely what Jim Jarmusch intended, but considering the story closes without a much-needed release or revelation, Broken Flowers comes off as more literary than cinematic.
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If you're able to appreciate comedy delivered with the least amount of gestures, ''Broken Flowers" is ... very, very funny. Murray atones for the overindulgent ''The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" with a supremely watchful performance that earns laughs by letting us imagine what Don is thinking (that's how well we know Murray by now); seeing Wright bounce off the star like a Jack Russell terrier off the side of a Great Dane is a particular joy. Murray's comic timing is so adroit that he can deepen it into sorrow without strain, as in a suddenly moving late-inning encounter with a flower-shop employee (played by a young actress named Pell James, whose incandescence is the point).
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Their just-released follow-up Broken Flowers, which won the Jury prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, further extends this Murray-Jarmusch tete-a-tete, and to an equally unconventional but richly satisfying effect. In the film, Murray plays Don Johnston – "with a 'T'," he observes more than once – a lothario and longtime bachelor who learns in an anonymous letter that twenty years ago one of his ex-girlfriends had his child and never told him. Spurred on by his amateur detective next door neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), not to mention the recent departure of his current girl Sherry (Julie Delpy), Don reluctantly agrees to seek out a cross section of former flames, attempt to uncover the mother's identity, and just maybe, find the sense of purpose and direction he desperately needs but never knew to seek.
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A good, almost great, movie, Broken Flowers suffers from two problems: Jim Jarmusch's apparent need to be terminally hip and calculatedly quirky, and the belief that shots of Bill Murray staring blankly are endlessly profound. Problem is that Jarmusch probably is hip and quirky, and he would seem even more so if his films didn't too often feel like he was trying too hard to be sure you noticed. And while Murray's trademark deadpan stare is one of his most effective tools as an actor, it works better when used more sparingly than it is here.
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In "Broken Flowers," writer-director Jim Jarmusch sends the hero, played with his usual deadpan aplomb by Bill Murray, on a road trip through his life -- a four-city package tour in which he must encounter his former lovers. The journey is quite comical, in turns outrageous, unsettling and even a little surreal.
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Of the 137 reviews of Broken Flowers posted at the Rotten Tomatoes Web site, an overwhelming 88 percent are positive, with an average rating a 7.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. The pairing of ultra cool indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and low-key actor Bill Murray has been called inspired. Overall, the quirky comedy is one of the best-received movies so far this year.
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