BROKEN FLOWERS
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange
Genre: Undrama
2005
Watson Scale rating (0 being worst and 6 being perfect): 2

Reviewed by Vance Aandahl

Those who teach story writing are fond of telling their classes that a story must move. Unfortunately, this principle can be misunderstood. Hoping to impress the teacher, a student will begin his story with a detailed description of a character walking down a corridor, descending an elevator, hurrying along the sidewalk for three blocks, hopping on a bus, riding the bus across town, hopping off the bus, darting across the street during a break in traffic, running up five flights of stairs, and knocking briskly on the door to room 509. Patiently the teacher explains: “You’ve confused physical motion with narrative movement. Your character’s moving along, but your story’s standing still.”

Jim Jarmusch could have used this advice when he wrote and directed BROKEN FLOWERS. The movie begins with a letter. We see it get dropped into a mailbox. We see it taken from the mailbox. We see it transported by truck, we see it postmarked, sorted, carried along conveyer belts, loaded into a bin with other letters, transported by plane, etc., etc., until at last we see it carried at a leisurely pace across several lawns by a mailman who finally relieves our mounting boredom by dropping it through the mail slot in the front door of someone’s house.

Someone’s house? Whose house? Bill Murray’s house, of course! Bill Murray began his movie career working for the big studios as a deadpan funnyman in such comic romps as STRIPES and GHOSTBUSTERS, but these days he’s a deadpan sad man and the absolute darling of some of America’s foremost indie auteurs, including Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and now Jarmusch. These slyboots have figured out that the middle-aged Murray has an ineffable something that sweetens the dispositions of movie reviewers and charms the pants off arthouse bluehairs. Murray’s “ineffable something” is only a gimmick, and an effortless one at that. He just stands there, looking tired and mildly depressed and slightly withdrawn, staring blankly off into the middle distance. How hard is that? It’s what I see every morning when I look in the mirror. But listen to Roger Ebert gush: “Murray has the uncanny ability to invite us into his performance, into his stillness and sadness... the eyes, enigmatic comments, yes, those would be easy, but how does he suggest the low tones of crashing chaotic uncertainty?” The low tones of crashing chaotic uncertainty?  Sorry, Roger – I’m not buying it.  

If like Roger you get your rocks off searching for low tones in Murray’s sadsack mug, then BROKEN FLOWERS is the movie for you. For long stretches of time you’ll get to see Murray’s character, an aging lothario named Don Johnston, sitting on the couch gazing at the TV or standing at the window looking outside, but he also travels around, just like that letter at the start of the film. The movie lasts 105 minutes, and at least half of those minutes are devoted to showing Johnston boarding airplanes, riding airplanes, disembarking from airplanes, getting into rental cars, driving rental cars, parking rental cars, walking slowly up to houses, walking slowly away from houses, his face expressionless and impassive all the while.  

Johnston is traveling around visiting ex-lovers in hopes of discovering which one of them wrote the letter. To play the women in Johnston’s life, Jarmusch enlisted an impressive lineup of actresses – Julie Delpy, Sharon Stone, Alexis Dziena, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Chloe Sevigny, and Tilda Swinton – but unfortunately Delpy and Swinton come and go in a flash, and none of the others is on-screen for more than a few minutes. BROKEN FLOWERS belongs to Bill Murray and Bill Murray alone. It’s a solo act, and he underplays it with a solemn poker face from start to finish.

In their brief moments, the ex-lovers come across as satirical caricatures rather than real people, and so does Johnston’s energetic neighbor Winston, an amateur detective who badgers our hero into trying to hunt down the author of the anonymous letter.  Because the letter is typed in red ink on pink stationery, Winston instructs Johnston to take pink flowers as a gift and to search each ex-lover’s home for typewriters and pink objects. This is silly stuff, worthy of P.G. Wodehouse. Indeed, both the comically implausible plot of BROKEN FLOWERS and the cartoonish minor characters cry out for the same kind of goofy, wacked-out, surreal, high-energy, satirical direction that Jarmusch invested in his masterpieces DEAD MAN and GHOST DOG, but sadly, his treatment of Johnston’s journey is as subdued and flat as Murray’s acting performance. I had to fight with myself to keep from dozing off.