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Broken Flowers August 21, 2005 |
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There’s a hint of sadness in Bill Murray’s eyes in “Broken Flowers” that says so much about loneliness and aging one need not know the circumstances of the situation to read the expression as solitude and depression. This isn’t the first time Murray’s warm, rumpled, rugged face has been utilized for all it’s creaky sadness and inviting familiarity, we remember the same face from “Lost in Translation” a few years ago, and like the way Sofia Coppola caught the twilight of a broken career in the Tokyo lights bouncing off those worn down features, director Jim Jarmusch, a master of lingering irony and slow paced black comedy, captures the malaise of middle America, the symbolism of fleeting, wasted existence, of jilted ex-lovers and long forgotten friendships, in the close study of an actor’s simple stone face. Jarmusch’s vision is to send a solitary, aging individual on the road of self discovery, in turn hitting on the very fabric of the American societal structure, from top to bottom, transforming the typical road picture into a metaphorical examination of existence, regret, and economical diversity. If Murray’s search in “Broken Flowers” is on the level of a philosophical version of “The Dating Game” mixed with “This is Your Life”, as his Don Johnston searches for a son he may or may not have had years ago, than Jarmusch’s quest is more broader, more universal, and perhaps heavier than the light comedy would suggest; a quest for personal redemption and understanding, in a huge and varied country, as time speeds along at an unstoppable pace. There’s a mixture of the absurd and the realistic in the journey, and credit Bill Murray’s wonderful performance with never tipping the scales to which is which, keeping in tone the ambiguous relationship the two often have in a Jarmusch film. In the film, Murray plays a middle aged, wealthy computer programmer with a notorious history for womanizing that comes back to haunt him when an anonymous, type-written letter in a pink envelope arrives at his door informing him that he had a son 20 years ago, and the son is now on the road looking for him. The timing is bad; he has just been dumped by his most recent girlfriend (“I’m like your mistress,” says Julie Delpy as the woman, “and you’re not even married”), and would rather sit around watching old Don Juan movies (the comparison is easily obvious), than have to worry about the past. But his best friend, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), an amateur sleuth, is intrigued by the mystery of the note, and urges Don to put together a list of old flames who could have written the letter, which he does, naturally, setting up the road trip structure, and a canvas for Jarmusch to send his lonesome cowboy through the American heartland of economical stereotypes and personal evaluation. Clues come at every stop, but the story is less about finding who wrote the letter, as Don moves through the past, and more about his own realization that his life of womanizing, though possibly blessed with luck, has resulted in a string of broken women and a sad aging lothario, wasting away on a 5,000 dollar leather couch in modernist hell. The social structure of the four women (middle class widow Sharon Stone, upper-middle class ex-hippy Frances Conroy, down-to-earth pet psychologist Jessica Lange, and bitter white trash Tilda Swinton) dictates how Jarmusch and Murray handle the dialogue, with much sympathy in Stone’s widow, satire for Conroy’s pre-fabricated suburbia, and scorn in Swinton’s rustic farm life, as basketball hoops, in varying degrees of decay come to symbolize the universality of recreation, and/or banality, outside of monetary comparisons. “Broken Flowers” is typical of Jim Jarmusch in that it moves at a snails pace, looks at it’s various metaphors and symbols with a precision eye for framing and detail (something he apes from his hero, Yasujiro Ozu), and leaves it’s questions open for interpretation, in the way neo-realist dramas of the ‘40’s left the audience with more questions than resolutions. It’s pacing and sardonic wit may not be suitable for the less artistic minded, and it’s quirky characters may come off less realistic in the face of the seriousness of Murray’s journey, but the film could easily fit in with past Jarmusch works, like “Stranger than Paradise” and his best film, “Mystery Train”, as a study of human existence that doesn’t quite come a full 360 degrees, like the mesmerizing final shot of the film, but a maddening 180 degrees, with the rest left open for intense scrutiny, just the way Jarmusch intends, with a craftsman’s eye, a philosopher’s pen, and a hipster’s devastatingly dry wit. “Broken Flowers” is playing at the North Park Theater, Hertle Ave in Buffalo. by Adam Suraf
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