Broken Flowers

I saw Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers a couple nights ago and have been trying to figure out what I think about it since then. I had a vague idea of what to expect given the director, and while I generally prefer ambiguity and futility over certainty and happy endings, it was a bit maddening to watch an almost unbearably subdued Bill Murray throughout the entire film. He is sort of a fusion of his characters in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Lost in Translation at their lowest, most lifeless moments, but unlike those three films, in Broken Flowers we don't get anything to make his character come alive, to counteract the lifelessness -- something, anything for the audience to connect with. In the other films, we are given a lot more information; we understand why Murray's characters are beaten down. Only at the very end of Broken Flowers, in a scene with a kid he assumes to be (or desperately wants to be) his son, do we start to understand something about this character and what he's going through. It's a little hint, but it's not enough. And I actually like the final shot, the camera spinning around Murray standing in the middle of the street (after seeing something/someone, which I won't give away), but it sort of left me feeling empty because I felt like I didn't get enough information to know how to feel in that final moment.

Stephanie Zacharek (Salon film reviewer) is spot-on as usual in her review:

While Murray is great fun to watch -- he's such a sensitive actor that you can't help feeling something for his character -- you keep wishing Jarmusch (who also wrote the screenplay) would just give him a little bit more to work with. As Murray drifts from woman to woman, and from setting to setting (the locales he visits include generic but expensive housing developments and scary country outposts), we feel we should somehow be nudging closer to him, and yet we don't. Jarmusch allows his scenes to float, independent yet connected, like little island tableaux; his characters engage in conversations that hang limply in the air. Jarmusch doesn't exactly make fun of his characters -- even though he does give them dorky professions like "professional closet organizer" and "animal communicator" -- but he does float a little too cushily above them. "Broken Flowers" isn't wholly lacking in feeling, but it also seems to be trying desperately to make us feel something and not quite succeeding.

I would still recommend seeing it, and I did think about it off and on for a couple days after I saw it -- which is usually a good sign -- but I still think it was seriously lacking...something. Sharon Stone is great, but unfortunately, she doesn't get much screen time. None of the women in this film do, which is sort of the point as Murray spends the film visiting several past girlfriends. Jessica Lange, whom I usually like, is not so great, but maybe it was the writing, or the fact that I was trying to figure out what the hell she did to her face -- Botox?