Jim Jarmusch’s highly praised new
movie, Broken Flowers, demonstrates
his gradual climb from a postion as one of the darlings of the art houses to
something approaching the status of a tolerated if not an entirely mainstream
filmmaker.
Just before the release of the film
the New York Times Magazine devoted
several pages to him in one of their familiar puff pieces, a rather slicker and
more elaborate form of advertising than appears on the entertainment pages. The
cast of the new flick, which includes a number of well known names, provides
perhaps the most telling proof of his ascent — a certain kind of artsy and
intellectual reputation often attracts highly paid Hollywood actors to
low-budget indies.
The action of Broken Flowers depends on the kind of artifice that propels
numerous narratives in literature and cinema, with the difference that the
writer-director mostly ignores the possibility of a strong plot, preferring
instead an accumulation of several oddly static episodes to structure the
action. Bill Murray plays Don Johnston, an aging Don Juan, as everyone points
out, whose latest girlfriend leaves him at the beginning of the movie, sinking
him into a state of lethargic melancholy, interrupted by a mysterious letter
from an anonymous lover of 20 years ago telling him that they have a child, a
young man now in search of his father.
Comically bullied by his neighbor
Winston (Jeffrey Wright), who fancies himself an amateur detective, Murray
somewhat reluctantly embarks on a series of trips to see four different women
to find out which of them bore his son. The picture then settles into a
generally comic series of meetings with those women, identified and located by
Winston, in which Murray looks for clues to the identity of his correspondent
and attempts to raise some discreet questions about birth and paternity. Given
the intervening years, both the women and Murray have changed a good deal, and
their situations make those questions tentative, difficult, and sometimes quite
funny.
The women, played by Sharon Stone,
Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton, naturally dwell in different
circumstances and receive his visits with a variety of reactions. The recently
widowed Stone and her precociously sexy daughter, too appropriately named
Lolita, provide the warmest and most generous welcome, which even includes a
night in bed with Stone.
Formerly an ethereal flower child,
Conroy now sells real estate with her Babbitt of a husband and appears vague
and tranquilized; Lange makes big bucks as an “animal communicator” and tells
him her cat believes he comes with his “own agenda.” Swinton, who lives in a
rural slum, attempts to attack him, a job finished off by her biker husband,
who knocks Murray unconscious.
Despite the differences in reactions
and circumstances and the progress of the journey itself, Broken Flowers devolves into a single static situation. No matter
the destination, all the plane rides, all the roads, all the motels look very
much alike, so that Murray’s attempt to seek out his old flames and find his
purported son becomes more an expedition into his own history, an interior
journey. His several dreams, which rehash the recent past, mixing memory and
desire, intensify the notion of a man standing still and gazing into himself
rather than traveling beyond his starting point.
The different women Murray encounters
enliven the repetitive action, but the star himself constitutes the biggest
single problem in Broken Flowers. For
inexplicable reasons, he started to build something of a serious reputation
with a completely perfunctory performance in the unspeakably wretched Rushmore, which somehow gave him the
license to continue his stylized and increasingly tiresome deadpan manner.
Nothing about him in Broken Flowers, including the background
references to opera and film, justifies the reiterated description of him as a
Don Juan. Neither handsome nor graceful nor charming, he turns in what must be
the most steadfastly dull and passive performance in recent film history. He
never changes his facial expression, he almost never injects a scintilla of
emotion into his words, he rarely even contributes the sort of offhand,
arrhythmic dialogue that make his previous, fully comic parts so entertaining.
His absolute disengagement from the
film and his complete lack of affect, however, may qualify him for the just the
sort of emotional distance that characterizes Jarmusch’s work — bad as he is,
perhaps Jarmusch finds him perfect.
Broken Flowers (R), written and
directed by Jim Jarmusch, is playing at Little Theatres and Pittsford Plaza
Cinema.
This article appears in Aug 24-30, 2005.
