August 4-10, 2005
movies
on the couch: Don (Bill Murray) contemplates his life.  |
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A lethargic lothario goes on a slow-moving quest to right his wrongs.
Broken Flowers
Just when you think you've had enough: more minimalist Bill Murray. As aging lothario Don Johnston, he's got the stuck-on-the-sofa look down. Even as his about-to-be-ex-girlfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy) is headed for the door, Don can't even look away from the TV screen — he's watching Douglas Fairbanks in The Private Life of Don Juan — let alone rise from his seat. She tells him, "I just don't think I want to be with an over-the-hill Don Juan anymore. It's like I'm your mistress but you're not even married." And then she's gone.
Don's lifelong incapacity to commit is about to bite him back big-time. In the day's mail he finds a pink, typewritten letter, no return address or signature, announcing that he has a 19-year-old son who may or may not want to know him. While he's getting used to this idea, he runs it past his best/only friend and next-door neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), he of the house crowded with children and a lovely wife who makes excellent Ethiopian coffee. A devotee of detective stories and the Internet, Winston takes up the case: Based on a list of old girlfriends' names and long-ago addresses, he arranges flights, motels and rental cars, hands Don an itinerary, and sends him forth to discover his progeny. "You need to treat this as a sign of the direction of your life at the present moment," Winston urges.
The rest of Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers follows that direction as Don tracks down four erstwhile lovers to see if any is the mysterious pink-letter writer (a fifth possibility turns out to be dead). Organized into vignettes that recall the evocative, abstract segments of Stranger Than Paradise, the film explores disconnection as survival strategy. A technophobe millionaire owing to some vague computer business, Don is more a vacancy than a center. It's difficult to read his responses — he might be indifferent, pained, even remorseful about his serial abandonments — as the encounters overtly reveal less about his life changes than those experienced by each woman.
Like other Jarmusch movies, this one affects an ironic, not to say cynical, tone. As Don sits fixed to his sofa one evening before his departure, Winston comes to visit; while their deadpan conversation by cell phone during Winston's entrance and exit is cute and funny, it's also arch, in a you-know-they-know-you-know sort of way. The scene develops character, but more specifically, it situates you: No matter the potential melodramatic wrenching of this middle-aged self-measuring plot, you watch from a safe, odd remove.
Don finds his former lady loves, each meeting bracketed by a bit of jet takeoff and highway driving, but his awkward efforts to discover who wrote his mystery letter peter out. Every woman shows pink inclinations: still-sexy Laura (Sharon Stone), now a professional organizer, lives with daughter Lolita (Alexis Dziena) in a trailer filled with memorabilia of her dead race-car-driver husband, as well as pink accessories. Dora (Frances Conroy), once a radiant flower child, hands out pink business cards in the suburban real estate business she shares with her dull, creepily overbearing husband Ron (Christopher McDonald). Their exquisitely arranged model home is only the latest stop in their ongoing moneymaking venture; their straining for humor makes them seem too close to their own surfaces, brittle.
His next two stops further undermine the possibility of knowing. Carmen (Jessica Lange) is now a fluttery "animal communicator," her office located off in the woods, her sessions full of chirps and purrs. Her protective receptionist (Chloë Sevigny) ensures that Don's time with the doctor is succinct and strange. Scooting from that visit to his last, with Penny (Tilda Swinton), a biker whose memories of Don are not sweet, Don notes her motorcycle's pink gas tank and a typewriter tossed in the unmowed grass, but there's no chance for questions. She leaves him to the mercy of a couple of tattooed mechanics, who slam him into unconsciousness and leave him in his rental car in a field.
All these images, many cast by director of photography Frederick Elmes in still or barely mobile frames, reinforce the contradictions of the road-movie structure: no matter where Don goes, he's stuck with his sofa-self: resilient, self-protective, in-turned. As much as this episodic tale reveals his history of loss and longing, Don's own understanding remains elusive through film's end. While the lack of resolution deconstructs the genre, much as Jarmusch undid the Western with Dead Man or the martial arts/gangsta movie with Ghost Dog, it also opens it out. Gauged by the women he's known, Don's a cipher and a convention, not as mesmerizing as he imagines.
Broken Flowers Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch A Focus Features release Opens Friday at Ritz Five
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