It Grows in the Garden...

Love is many a withered thing in "Broken Flowers."  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Bill Murray in top form.

The Downside: Easier to admire than love.

    Bill Murray has never been what you'd call a "kinetic" comedian- much of his charm has always shown through his understatement, the way he reacts to things by not reacting at all.  This is what has served him well; when others try to draw out laughs by getting loud, profane, or simply by running into doors, Murray has turned taking everything with a half-amused shrug into an art form.

    In Broken Flowers, Murray plays Don Johnston, a self-made millionaire who has made a fortune working in computers, but now refuses to allow one in his home.  Johnston's spacious, impeccably neat home sits right door to his friend Wilson, an Ethiopian immigrant who is raising five kids by working three jobs.  I liked a lot of the scenes that break between the two places, as director Jim Jarmusch lets the camera travel back and forth between a house that has to have a sticker price in the upwards of half-a-million dollars and the next one where screen doors are still considered the primary way in and out.  When we first see Johnston he sits on his couch, immobile, as his current girlfriend (Julie Delpy) packs her bags and leaves.  As she goes out the door Don makes a half-hearted attempt to talk her out of it.  Her exit is also without conviction, as if she wishes she were angrier than she is.  "I'm like your mistress," she tells Don, "except you're not even married."

    A letter arrives.  Pink stationary, written on a typewriter, it seems to be from an old flame (we're given the idea he's had enough of these to burn down a warehouse) who tells him that he has a nineteen-year-old son who might be looking for him.  The letter isn't signed and there is no return address.  Winston, the friend, is a student of mystery novels and is bowled over by the intrigue.  He compiles a list of possible "suspects," women from Don's past, and sets up an itinerary for Don to reconnect with each and every one of them and discover who possibly wrote the letter. 

    "Give them pink flowers," he tells Don.

      Don protests, but like everything else his dissatisfaction is more of a ploy to hide the fact that he feels nothing at all.  This is where Jarmusch's use of Murray (the director has said he wrote the film and the part specifically for Murray) comes through the strongest.  Don is a man who has lived his life with such a chronic case of tunnel vision he doesn't know if he has anything to show for it, much less does he know what he's supposed to do with the rest of it.  As he revisits these women from his past, as we see their varying reactions (one is welcoming- even to her bed, another punches him in the face) we feel that Don has been a womanizer and user whose cruelty did not lie through a mean-sprit, but through total obliviousness.  It's not easy to forget that Don has taken these trips for his own motives.  The reactions of others, past and present, don't tend to weigh heavily on him.  However, Murray provides a line towards the end of the film that I won't quote here, but probably best explains why a man stuck in neutral like Don would undertake such a quest.

    This is a lot of baggage to carry.  Murray moves Don around in a haze of crushing sadness.  That kind of low-key thunder that did well for him in comedies like Ghostbusters (where he was part of a comic troupe composed of nothing but straight men) and provided the same kind of humor-to-mask-the-pain depth in Lost in Translation lets his static demeanor become the end-result of a life spent not living at all.  In the hands of someone else this could seem tedious, like the actor was disconnected or bored with the character.  Murray understands Don.  It takes a lot of work to do so little.

   Broken Flowers is like an antique you admire more for its workmanship than how it makes you feel.  Everything I've described about Don has come from pure nuance and instinct, Jarmusch's screenplay never takes the cheap road of telling us what people are like or how we're supposed to feel.  It's a mature approach and well appreciated.  One of Don's old lovers, Carmen, is a lawyer turned pet communicator (not pet psychic, she corrects) and when Don visits her in his office, he asks her if her cat is saying anything.

    "That you have a hidden agenda," Carmen replies.  It is a testament to Jarmusch's craftsmanship that he doesn't try to elaborate on this.

    The difficulty with Broken Flowers is that it is easy to love how it is made, but it is not easy to love.  It's not easy to be in Don's world, where everything is carried out with an air of futility.  The film opens slow and with Jarmusch's penchant for using long, long still takes, you have to either appreciate his fondness for realism or you'll end up frustrated.  Most movies don't tolerate awkward moments in the conversation (as when Don accidentally brings up the sore spot in one woman's marriage) or uncomfortable silences, and Broken Flowers is loaded with them.  Like the movies of Alex Payne (Election, Sideways) there is a crisp and uncomfortable truth.  It ends on an ambiguous note, with Don standing on a street corner watching what might have been his past or his future walking away.  I couldn't figure out, and still haven't, if I had missed something.  Was there a hidden meaning I hadn't picked up on?  Then I realized that sorting it out was perfectly counter-intuitive- how can someone like Don sort out of a life he hasn't even begun to comprehend yet?  B

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