Broken Flowers

Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Written by Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch has always been a bit hit-or-miss for me. While he excels in making quirky character pieces that are really about nothing much more than themselves and their own characters(Mystery Train, Stranger Than Paradise, Night on Earth), his attempts to crowbar his wacky-fun characters into cohesive plots have left me, at best, utterly indifferent (Dead Man) and, at worst, horrified (Ghost Dog). And although Broken Flowers undoubtedly has a cohesive plot, the idea of an aging Don Juan bouncing around the country having quirky encounters with quirky loves lost smacked much more of the former than the latter. Plus, the advance word was excellent. Plus, cahmaaahhhn, Bill Murray.

The plot is certainly cute enough: Murray plays aging Don Juan Don Johnston (subtle), who is being left by his girlfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy), whom we know is just the latest in an endless string of them. He receives an unsigned letter, typewritten on pink stationery, from someone identifying themself as an old girlfriend, warning Don that he has a 19 year-old son who is possibly out looking for him. His neighbor, detective novel freak Winston (Jeffrey Wright) sees the letter and tells Don to make a list of possible "suspects". Don does so, reluctantly. Winston takes the information to Google, Mapquest, and Orbitz and plots out Don's whole itinerary, complete with plane tickets and car rental.

Don had five girlfriends 19 years ago: the slightly trashy Laura (Sharon Stone), the uptight reformed-hippy Dora (played by - who else? - Frances Conroy), the enigmatic pet-whisperer Carmen (Jessica Lange), the very trashy Penny (Tilda Swinton), and someone named Michelle Pepe, who we never meet because she's dead. Don visits each of them in turn, always bringing a gift of pink flowers to gauge their reactions, and always searching for clues as to who may have written the letter, although it is confusing to me why the person who had sent the letter to Don in the first place would now try to hide the fact.

As for these "clues", Don is instructed by Winston to look for a typewriter and "anything pink". At this point, Jarmusch gets cute and turns the film into a game of Spot the Pink Things (don't you love that game?) - there is pink everywhere: pants, bathrobes, pictures, wallpaper, curtains, try and find them all!

It is signficant that each of the encounters gets progressively worse, i.e. the longer that Don stays mired in the past. Each of the four women, in fact, seem to represent different ways that we look back on relationships (and break-ups). Laura accepts that the relationship was just a fling - pleasing, but meaningless. Dora: longing, and sadness. Carmen: embarrassment. Penny: abject bitterness. Where do you fall on the love/fear spectrum?

Maybe if we knew a bit more about how and why the relationships actually ended, or actually came to be. There may be a clue in why his present girlfriend, Sherry, is leaving him now: he doesn't know what he wants, won't make a commitment. If we are to assume that he has never changed, then perhaps the sadness (and disconnect) of his character is in his observations of how all these other people have changed, maybe even grown up, while he himself has not? Don't look to Murray for clues - he just looks bored. Tired and bored. Essentially the same character he played in Lost in Translation (which, incidentally, was probably my second favorite film of 2003 after American Splendor), without the arc.

Each of these four actresses give excellent performances, and we want nothing more than to see more of them. Unfortunately, the four (in particular Lange and Swinton) only have about ten minutes between them, tops.

The ending was unsatisfying. Not that I want everything to be explained away or tied up in a neat package - kudos to Jarmusch for giving us something ambiguous, something to actually talk about, discuss. That said, however, even the most ambiguous, sudden, and open-ended of endings still feel like endings, thematically or characterwise. We leave films not knowing what's going to happen, but satisfied that we have learned enough about the characters that we can picture them living on, and maybe even have some fun in thinking where they may be next week, in five years, in fifty. Bad endings are born of bad, or just plain careless, characterization, just sit there and do nothing. In Broken Flowers, Don doesn't really learn anything, nor does the audience learn anything about him.

The very last images of the film are supposed to have Don, and us, realizing that Don will never again look at the world in the same way again, that for the rest of his life he will look at the faces of every young man he encounters, and wonder. Seems to me that there was another scene quite a bit earlier on, at a car rental lot, where we pick up pretty much the exact same thing.

Broken Flowers is a film that desperately wants to be liked, and I really did want to like it, really did want to see the same film that all the critics had seen. But, in the words of Jayne Cobb, if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak.

Trailer watch:

Prime - ha, no.
Walk the Line - maybe, I doubt it.
The Constant Gardener - maybe, I doubt it.
Rent - I hated the show, and I hate Chris Columbus. So how is it possible that this movie actually looks pretty good?

*Junebug

Directed by Phil Morrison
Written by Angus MacLachlan

I suspect that people who complain that there aren't any good movies out there because they can't find any at the local multiplex are the same people who complain that there aren't any good books out there because they can't find any at the Duane Reade (that's Sav-On for all you westies out there), or complain that there isn't any good music anymore because they can't find it on the radio. There's nothing wrong with the books that they sell at the drugstore, or the music that they play on the radio - they have their purpose, and I suppose they pretty much serve it, and their respective audiences are more or less satisfied, I guess, but if you need something a little more substantial than sappy beach reading or happy rolling music, you kind of have to look for it.

Friday night I go up to Lincoln Square to check out Broken Flowers, and of course it's sold out (have I ever once gone to Lincoln Square to see something in its opening weekend without buying tickets in advance online?). After calling my friend Tim to tell him that he needn't bother coming out (I found out later that this pissed him off), and spending a good five or ten minutes standing around like an idiot, wondering if I should just go home and watch videos, I sort of circuitously wandered down the street and found myself in front of Lincoln Plaza, toying the idea of watching 2046 even though I HATE WONG KAR WAI (don't even get me started), but the next two shows of that were already sold out as well. After once again wondering if I should just go home, I decided instead to buy a ticket for Junebug, a movie about which I knew nothing other than that it was supposed to be pretty good.

The tagline for the poster reads something like "Where the Red States meet the Blue States", which pisses me off because politics has nothing whatever to do with the movie (religion, definitely, but not politics). That and the weird pre-credits yodelling sequence really sets you up for a far different film than you wind up getting.

Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a Chicago art dealer, has to go down to North Carolina to seal an important deal with a reclusive "outsider" artist (Frank Hoyt Taylor), and sort of as an afterthought decides to take along her new husband George (Alessandro Nivola) so that she can meet her new in-laws, who live nearby. George is the absolute golden boy of his family, and they are not so much curious about who he has married as they are disappointed that he's left home. Of course, Madeleine's English accent and kiss-kiss big city airs immediately alienates everyone - everyone but Ashley (Amy Adams), the extremely pregnant wife of George's broody brother Johnny (Benjamin MacKenzie), who seems boundlessly fascinated by her.

At this point, you're thinking you know exactly what kind of movie this is going to be right? But this is no movie about crazy citygirl vs. the wacky countryfolk. Not by a longshot. What it is is a great film about family, about people, more specifically about all the quiet spaces in between people, if I may say so without getting shot.

Observe how much of the film takes place to shots of empty rooms and lawns, to conversations, arguments, and laughter overheard more than directly addressed. Listen to what (and how much) is being "said" after people stop speaking.

Excellent cast, including Alessandro Nivola, completely unrecognizable from his smarmy turns in pretty much anything else I can remember seeing him in - Jurassic Park 3, Time Code, Laurel Canyon. With his nice shirts, schoolboy haircut, and generally quiet demeanor, in fact, he reminded more of Christian Bale in Laurel Canyon than anything else. Benjamin MacKenzie, who according to the people sitting behind me is on some show on the WB or something, plays a young man so tightly coiled in his frustration and disappointment that he is beyond hating himself - half the time he doesn't even seem to recognize himself. Look at their faces when one of them throws a wrench at the other near the end of the film - the look on one of their faces is of complete horror, the look on the other conveying that the moment was long, long overdue.

If Amy Adams does not get an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting, it's only because the voters did not see the movie. At first she seems mere comic relief - that one person in every movie (and in everyone's life) who just a bit too chipper, too hummingbird, too puppydog, too loveable and loving - though by the end she reveals herself to be far smarter, and far sadder, than she would ever want anyone to believe.

Unthinkable that such rich depth of character is mined with such subtlety by two (basically) first-timers - Phil Morrison and Angus MacLachlan had previously collaborated on one short film, and Morrison had previously directed a few music videos and segments of Comedy Central's Upright Citizen's Brigade. To illustrate, there is one scene involving a video cassette that reveals more about the characters involved than most other writers and directors could reveal in an entire feature.

The more we learn about these characters, the more we realize that yes, this is a fish-out-of-water story, though by the end we're asking ourselves, which is the fish, and what exactly is the water?

What I liked best about Junebug is that we are never forced or manipulated into liking, or disliking, anybody. Morrisson and MacLachlan shows us these people as they are, develops them far fuller than one would expect in a 100-minute span, then wisely leaves it to us to make up our own minds about how we are supposed to feel about them, whether we like them or dislike them or are simply annoyed at or frustrated with them. Nobody gets off easy, and nobody gets out unscathed. Good choice, on their part - good, lovely, unassuming, unpretentious, unsentimental, melancholy, mysterious, bittersweet, wonderful choice. In my experience, most of the "issues" that we have with people, especially family, cannot even be put into words in 100 minutes, let alone examined, discussed, debated, and resolved. These characters will stay with you long after you leave the theater. Many of them may even be living in your home.

Musical score by Yo La Tengo, which went completely unnoticed by me, which means they did their job.

The Girl From Monday

Directed by Hal Hartley
Written by Hal Hartley

Another video rental, this one the new film from Hal Hartley.

Hal Hartley.

Damn.

The writer and director of a handful of THE best movies of the '90s (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and I would even put Flirt in here, though I'm the only one I know who liked it) continues his steep (and embarrassing) dive into irrelevance with his latest piece of cinema diarrhea, The Girl From Monday.

Hal Fucking Hartley.

Hartley used to make great, small epics about human beings and all the dumb shit we put ourselves and each other through, and how every day we have to fight and struggle our way out of the messes that we ourselves have created, and how it's in all that fighting and struggling that we reach enlightenment, or relevance, or meaning, or at the very least contentment.

And then he made a movie called Henry Fool and suddenly everything went to utter crap. Hartley stopped making movies about the world, about people, about you and me, and started instead trying to making movies about The World, about People, about You and Me. I think he started listening too hard to his detractors, who accused him of making films that were too small. Hartley needed to grow up. Hartley needed to start taking on the Big Issues. Hartley needed to be taken seriously. Hartley needed to get universal.

Ironically, by making such incisive "small" films about "small" people, he WAS being universal, and by making them so well, a lot of people DID take him seriously. Doubly ironically, by taking on such Big Issues is such a clumsy and pretentious manner (think of a college sophomore at his first non-Starbucks trying to impress his friend's girlfriend by talking very loudly about Capitalism, or The Media, or why The Motorcycle Diaries is THE best movie EVER made), now NOBODY takes him seriously, and the louder he tries to "grow up", the more sophomoric he comes off.

Case in point: The Girl From Monday takes place in a near-future totalitarian society, only the dictator is not some government or military figure, but is sort of a cooperative dictatorship run by you and me (that is, You and Me). The consumer is now king, and every aspect of the individual's personal life, from his or her sex appeal to their career cache, is publicy traded like stocks and bonds at open market. Interesting set-up, right? Possibly, had he given us any real characters to care about or anything interesting for them to do, say, or think.

Sure, there's a stab at a plot, involving a secret revolution against the system and the burgeoning illegal romance between ad exec and secret revolutionary Jack (Bill Sage, who sadly is not aging well) and a co-worker Cecile (Sabrina Lloyd) - hey, wasn't this "illegal future romance" plot from some horrible Tim Robbins movie a year or two ago? And then there's a girl (Tatiana Abraco)who's dropped into the ocean from outer space, from the constellation called Monday (the girl from Monday, get it?), who is searching for a friend who arrived on Earth years before, who is now in some sort of trouble.

Get all these people in a room together, and what do they do? They proselytize. A lot. About The World, about People, about You and Me, and what's wrong with Everything. The trademark halting and poetic Hartley dialogue which is cute when talking about friendship and loyalty and brotherhood (and what were his earlier films if not stories of children in adult bodies trying to grow up), but just sounds like the aforementioned college-sophomore-at-the-coffeehouse when he's trying to say something Deep and Important about The World, about People, and You and Me.

Like I said, it's a mess. Emotionless and lacking a coherent plot or interesting characters or dialogue. It's a film about Big Ideas...which go nowhere and do nothing besides sit in a pile emitting the same abstract platitudes about Consumerism and Media Manipulation as Hartley's his last two films, No Such Thing and Henry Fool.

Plus now he's shooting exclusively on HD, which is usually bad enough, except he's using this weird, choppy, smeary, slow-speed HD, which is unwatchable. It's like Pixelvision, without the charm.

I'm not angry. Hartley is an artist, and an artist's responsibility is only to his or her own vision, and has nothing to do with whether or not I like or even accept it. It's just that I used to connect with Hartley's work on such deep emotional and spiritual levels that it's a little bit...sad? disappointing?...that he's gone to such the opposite end of the spectrum for me in such a short period of time. Maybe just surprising. Still. After eight years. Only Hartley knows if he's satisfied with his last few films. He seems to be. I'm going to miss him.

Hartley's next project listed on imdb is called Fay Grim, which is presumably a sequel to Henry Fool. I wonder if Parker Posey will be reprising her role? Someone else is going to have to tell me, as I don't really plan on seeing it myself.

P.S. Hey, while we're still on the home video tip (do the kids still say "tip"?), imagine my immense surprise when I learned that both JSA and Memories of Murder, two of the best Korean movies of the last decade, are now widely, readily, and non-Hong-Kong-bootleggedly available domestically on DVD! Go rent one or both of these movies. Now.