Ah yes, another find as I clean out my hard drives. This one was written for the Bay Weekly back when I was one of their occasional film reviewers. This review shares similar themes with the Bresson critique, but I think the language is better. You decide.
Broken Flowers by Jim Jarmusch
August 17, 2005
Broken Flowers stars Bill Murray as Don Johnston, a successful, retired computer entrepreneur and aging Don Juan who receives an anonymous letter claiming he has a 20-year-old son he’s never met. Coaxed by his sleuthing Ethiopian neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Johnston revisits five of his former flames on an extensive road trip to solicit clues and find the author of this mysterious letter.
Each of his five stops—to a widowed personal closet organizer (Sharon Stone), a married prefab luxury home salesperson (Frances Conroy), an animal communicator (Jessica Lange), the angry wife of a rough backwoods mechanic (an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton), and a gravesite—is lush with eccentric characters, period details, cultural juxtapositions and deadpan humor. Like his first feature, Stranger Than Paradise, director Jim Jarmusch finds humor as much in what’s said as what isn’t said, so that awkward silences and physical comedy carry the bulk of the laughs. He uses plot to intermingle his characters, then enriches them with personal idiosyncrasies, gestures, props and sets.
Unlike Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt, another comedy about being middle-aged and dissatisfied, the emptiness in the lives of these characters is presented empathetically. Dora, the luxury home salesperson, was a flower child when she met Johnston, but now lives in a treeless suburb and cooks precut frozen carrots for dinner. This may be humiliating for you or me, but she’s not desperate—life requires compromise, and she seems to appreciate her stability and the love of her schmaltzy, doting husband.
Even at a young 28, I see how freewill, perseverance and pulling myself up by my bootstraps still doesn’t cancel out fate and circumstance. Jarmusch seems to embrace this as a worldview and find solace in it—his characters in this film and Down By Law, for example, find love and joy in unanticipated, and often unseemly, situations. Laura, Sharon Stone’s character, did not ask to lose her husband in a fiery wreck on a racetrack, but she did. Ingmar Bergman would film her life as a tragedy. But she’s half asleep next to Don Johnston the day after his visit, affectionately and awkwardly pasting her hand on his nose and cheek. She’s warm and funny, and grateful for what she has. Jarmusch understands that. So should we.
Dead Man is more poetic and Ghost Dog is a tighter and more satisfying narrative, but Broken Flowers is still the work of a master filmmaker in his prime. If you’ve never seen a Jim Jarmusch film, what are you waiting for?
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