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Broken Flowers: Jim Jarmusch
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"Broken Flowers" could break Jarmusch out of the art house, but admirers may question the film's overly conventional approach. It skips merrily along the surface with its over-the-top vignettes but never seems to arrive at a destination. Nevertheless, the journey is more than half the fun as every actor attacks his role with relish. And sometimes a little mustard.
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All that business at the end about finding direction suggests that there's a destination to be reached in Broken Flowers, but anyone who's seen any of Jarmusch's earlier films knows that they're more about the journey itself. This, after all, is the man who alongside such outsider stalwarts as John Sayles and Robert Altman, propelled the independent film movement – when it was merely a technical distinction, not a marketing tool – into prominence by virtue of a genuinely unique approach to storytelling.
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If you're someone who likes a film to end with everything in its right place, 'Broken Flowers' isn't for you. Determined that the ifs, buts and maybes should remain exactly those, Jarmusch leaves plenty hanging here and, in some ways, that seems like the easier way out. Do people want to learn? Or are they happy with what they don't know or think they know?They're big questions and deserved better answers. Maybe this film's problem is that it wears its American Indie credentials too proudly, when drifting towards the mainstream would've reached and touched more people.
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Aug 5, 2005 | You can wish there were more filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and simultaneously wish there were fewer movies like "Broken Flowers." Even when his pictures are frustrating or annoying, his integrity is never in doubt. Jarmusch was an indie filmmaker long before you could buy T-shirts, coffee mugs and mouse pads professing your love of everything indie. His early pictures, things like "Stranger Than Paradise" and "Down by Law," could be both fun and maddening (their low-key quality often amounted to a kind of pretension), but if nothing else, when they arrived on the scene they announced that the movie landscape around us was changing.
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If the actual finale doesn't entirely work, neither does it damage the film, merely making Broken Flowers feel more art-house standard than really satisfying. All the same, Jarmusch's latest is so often so near greatness that it's a must-see for filmgoers with an eye for something more challenging than the standard multiplex fare. Rated R for language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use.
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Jim Jarmusch