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?