Broken Flowers (2005) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

Jim Jarmusch, in his minimalist way, used to be one of the most culturally astute of American directors; by sitting still and paying attention, he made films that were like wandering through midnight radio stations, hearing the ghosts of a thousand sub-cultures. Today he’s listening strictly to what he wants to listen to. Coffee and Cigarettes, his last film, was an uneven hodgepodge, but it did mark a return to a lithe, experimental argot. Broken Flowers is beige and lazy. Which is not to say it’s negligible. It aims for the feel of a breezy tone poem about a guy who discovers how life and people change but some of us seem destined, in being slightly outside of things, to remain so, in a kind of emotional stasis. Jarmusch here works from a similar starting point to F Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal short story “Three Hours Between Planes”, one of those pieces we were taught in school as a model of short fiction and has given me a vague distaste for such models ever since. Like the Fitzgerald story, it’s about a middle-aged guy who goes searching for an ex-paramour – several, here – and finds memory and time play funny tricks. Except that Jarmusch avoids loud ironies and painful discoveries. It’s Murray’s trip that is important, his own sense of yearning, not the lives of the women he’s revisiting. They’ve all settled into divergent ways of growing old, whilst Don realises his own status as a man who finds himself a peculiar failure. The event that doesn’t change your life but offers a hint of new perspective, is the idea here. The film fails to achieve depth as a character study, and does not succeed, except in the gorgeous opening and closing credits set to a Greenhornes song, in capturing a dreamy grace-note. And yet neither is it a painful study in dramatic arm-twisting almost any other director would have made it. Bill Murray is once again a haiku of graceful alienation, Sharon Stone and Tilda Swinton offer briefly exact impressions. Jeffrey Wright, as Murray’s snoopy West Indian neighbour, is terrific, though Alexis Dziena comes close to beating him as a Lolita who’s a complete nature child.