Flashback: "Broken Flowers"

    I first met Wendy McKendrick in a roundabout way through my brother Tom. It was 1973, and I'd just gotten out of the Air Force. Tom was living in an old house on Rutledge Street in Madison, and I sublet a room there that summer for $30 a month. Tom and I had a housemate named Joan Heller, and Joan had this friend named Wendy, who lived an hour away in Wisconsin Dells and usually stayed at the house when she came to Mad City.

    Somehow Wendy and I hit it off and ended up spending a lot of the summer together. It was the kind of summer you tend to remember, but it ended and our lives moved on. We stayed in touch for a while, ran into each other off and on, wrote a few letters, drifted apart. I don't know where she'd be today. I wouldn't even know where to look.

    I thought about Wendy when I was watching the Jim Jarmusch movie "Broken Flowers". In the movie, Bill Murray plays a guy in his 50s who gets a mysterious letter and embarks on a personal odyssey to look up several old flames. It's a quest he approaches with ambivalence, and that's where the film strikes a chord.

    Anybody who's made it into late middle age (or beyond) has a gallery of ghosts, people we knew long ago and can't forget, who continue to haunt us long after the last moment of contact. Murray's character has four of them (or five), and as he works his way down the list, going from airport to airport and house to house, the reception he gets from these women turns increasingly cold and forbidding.

    "Broken Flowers" isn't everybody's kind of movie. Jarmusch and Murray are low-key extremists, and working together they take minimalism to a whole new realm. If the movie moved any slower, it'd stop. But watching Murray confronting his ghosts, you start to consider your own. You can understand his reluctance to make the journey. And you can understand what makes the trip hard to resist.

    I took a picture of Wendy in Madison the last time we got together. It's a simple black-and-white snapshot and she's smiling, looking straight into the camera, and you can tell it's summer, because she's wearing a tank top, with a pair of sunglasses pushed up on her head. She looks great. It was 1979.

    More than 30 years later, I still think about her sometimes. Wonder what she's up to, what she's thinking, what she looks like, who she's with. Like Bill Murray in "Broken Flowers", there's a part of me that can't help being curious. And another part, a bigger part, I guess, that doesn't want to know.

    Sometimes life leaves you hanging like that, just like in the movies.

    Sometimes it's better not to disturb the ghosts.

Broken English (2007)

BROKEN ENGLISH  (2007)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Zoe Cassavetes

    Parker Posey, Drea de Matteo, Melvil Poupaud,

    Justin Theroux, Tim Guinee, Gena Rowlands,

    Peter Bogdanovich, Roy Thinnes, Josh Hamilton

To buy into this movie starting out, you've got to believe (or pretend to believe) that in all of New York City, a woman who looks like Parker Posey wouldn't be able to find a decent date. It's a romantic comedy with Posey as a troubleshooter working for a boutique hotel, who, after a series of bad passes, meets her potential Mr. Right in the person of a Frenchman played by Melvil Poupaud. So she follows him to Paris, where she loses his address. That's about all the movie hangs on, but it's just enough, if you like watching Parker Posey, which some of us do. Her flat vocal delivery can be liability when the script bails out on her, but after more than 40 movies, most of them independents, she knows what to do with a close-up. There are some interesting parallels between this and Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation", but there's more of an edge to Posey's performance than there was to Scarlett Johansson's. Maybe that goes with being a little older. Or maybe she's just more adept at getting beneath the surface, to the face behind the ever-shifting mask.

Broken Blossoms (1919)

BROKEN BLOSSOMS  (1919)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: D.W. Griffith

    Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp

Probably one of the saddest movies ever made, a romantic tragedy starring Lillian Gish as a 15-year-old waif who escapes from her abusive father in London's squalid Limehouse District and finds temporary comfort and safety in the care of a Chinese shopkeeper who adores her. Donald Crisp as the girl's father is way over the top, but Gish and Richard Barthelmess, as the sympathetic "Yellow Man", play their roles with heartbreaking restraint. This is the film that established Gish's reputation as the silent era's finest actress, and her hunched body language speaks volumes, suggesting a cowering creature who's been beaten all her life and knows that, sooner rather than later, she's going to be beaten again. Two famous scenes stand out. In one, the girl's father orders her to smile, and she responds by using two fingers to push up the corners of her mouth. In the other, she hides in a closet, waiting for the old man, armed with a hatchet, to break the door down, a portrayal of emotional disintegration that prefigures "The Wind".

Broken Flowers (2005)

BROKEN FLOWERS  (2005)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jim Jarmusch

    Bill Murray, Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange,

    Julie Delpy, Frances Conroy, Tilda Swinton,

    Jeffrey Wright, Alexis Dziena, Christopher McDonald

The first time you see Bill Murray in this, he's moping out on the couch, watching Douglas Fairbanks in "The Private Life of Don Juan". Before the Fairbanks movie is over, Murray's girlfriend has left him and a letter has dropped through the door informing him of a 19-year-old son he never knew he had. The letter has no legible postmark, no signature and no return address. Roused from a state of terminal lethargy by his next-door neighbor, Murray hits the road, dropping in on each of the four women who might be the mystery kid's mother: another old Don Juan coming face-to-face with his past. Every Jim Jarmusch movie has its share of eccentric pleasures. In "Dead Man", Jarmusch referenced William Blake. Here he throws in a riff on "Lolita", with flirty, bare-assed Alexis Dziena as the kind of girl for whom the term "jailbait" was probably invented. But mostly the movie shuffles along the way Murray does, as if it's not really sure it wants to get anywhere, and leaving some of the screen's most interesting women with nothing very interesting to do. Both Jarmusch and Murray have honed their deadpan talents to a fine edge, but if either of them gets much more deadpan than this, they'll be dead.

Diabolique (1996)

DIABOLIQUE  (1996)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Jeremiah Chechik

    Sharon Stone, Isabelle Adjani, Chazz Palminteri,

    Kathy Bates, Shirley Knight, Spalding Gray

A persuasive argument against remaking classic movies, in which Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 thriller about a murder in a boys' boarding school gets transplanted from France to Pennsylvania, dropping its subtitles and all of its subtlety in between. Bates as a cagy, down-to-earth police detective almost saves it in the last half hour, but it's a case of too little too late. If you were one of those unlucky students whose seventh-grade math teacher did not look and act like a B-movie streetwalker, Stone's performance could make up for that.

Bridge To Terabithia (2007)

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA  (2007)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gabor Csupo

    Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Zooey Deschanel,

    Robert Patrick, Bailee Madison, Kate Butler

Okay, I caught this on a night flight between Seattle and Denver with the sound off and I was reading a book at the time, but here's what I think was going on. It's somewhere in the Midwest and there are these kids who live out in the country and ride the school bus to school. The two main kids are this boy and girl, and she kind of teases him at first, but then they end up liking each other, and because this is the world according to Disney, they're, like, really cute. The boy has a sketchbook he likes to draw in and one day this guitar-playing, foxy-looking teacher sees it and takes him to the Art Institute of Chicago. And there's this CGI fantasyland that the girl and the boy escape to by crossing a creek on a rope swing with a giant tree monster and weird flying batlike monkey creatures and stuff. Then I think the girl dies, or maybe she doesn't, I missed that part, and it looks like the rest of the movie is about how the boy deals with the loss. Finally, he builds a bridge across the creek and he and his kid sister walk across it into the fantasyland where they're crowned king and queen or something. You know, like in "The Chronicles or Narnia", but not quite. The end.

Them! (1954)

THEM!  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gordon Douglas

    James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn,

    Joan Weldon, James Arness

During the 1950s, a whole series of monster movies came out of Hollywood, in which radiation from the atom bomb caused various kinds of creatures to mutate and grow real big. In the case of "Them!", it's ants. James Arness, who played the monster himself in "The Thing From Another World", plays a gung-ho FBI agent in this one, and he sure looks like he's having fun machine-gunning those ants. If the ants were smart, they'd just stay away from James Arness.

James Arness

(1923-2011)

Australia (2008)

AUSTRALIA  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Baz Luhrmann

    Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Brandon Walters,

    David Wenham, David Gulpilil, Bryan Brown,

    Jack Thompson, Bill Hunter, Bruce Spence

Baz Luhrmann's dazzling, romantic, go-for-broke epic starts out in 1939. Nicole Kidman plays an Englishwoman who travels Down Under to sell a ranch she owns there, and instead finds herself going native (in a ladylike way, of course), embarking on a cattle drive and falling for a cowboy played by Hugh Jackman. There are bad guys (David Wenham and Bryan Brown), and the Japanese are getting ready to bomb Darwin, and it's all told through the eyes and voiceover narration of a half-caste boy whose grandfather (David Gulpilil) materializes and vanishes seemingly at will, an outback apparition, watching, beckoning and sometimes showing the way. Luhrmann's most conspicuous references (no accident) are "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz". He loves the romance and artifice of old movies, and he knows the conventions and cliches well enough to take narrative shortcuts more conservative (or less shameless) filmmakers wouldn't attempt. There might not be much depth to it, or maybe there is. (Keep an eye on Gulpilil as the old Aborigine King George, and see what you think.) And it seems fair to ask why the boy's mother has to be killed off for the rich white woman to show how much she loves this brown-skinned child. There's a giddy transparency to Luhrmann's movies that leaves you with a choice going in. You either surrender to them or you don't. One thing's for sure. He doesn't leave anything at home. Whatever he knows how to do with film, it all ends up on the screen. Better surrender, I'd say.

Bill Hunter

(1940-2011)

Paint Your Wagon (1969)

PAINT YOUR WAGON  (1969)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Joshua Logan

    Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Jean Seberg,

    Harve Presnell, Ray Walston, William O'Connell

A big, long, boisterous musical with Eastwood and Marvin as partners during the California Gold Rush, and Jean Seberg as the woman they share. There's nothing very subtle about this, but the people who made it don't seem to care, and probably neither should you. Clint talks to the trees, Harve Presnell calls the wind Maria, and Seberg imagines a life behind closed doors, but the unlikely musical highlight is Marvin, trudging through the wind and rain singing "Wand'rin' Star". You could skip the rest of the movie if you had to, but that's the part you don't want to miss. The songs are by Lerner and Loewe.

The Tillman Story (2010)

THE TILLMAN STORY  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Amir Bar-Lev

There's that old saying that the first casualty in war is always the truth. Case in point: Cpl. Pat Tillman, whose friendly-fire death in Afghanistan in 2004 was being covered up and lied about within moments after it occurred. The lies continued for years and went all the way to the top, and that's what this documentary ends up being about. As a famously hard-hitting defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals, Tillman was the most widely recognized enlisted man in the war. His death gave the Army a chance to rally public support with a tale of battlefield heroism that, like the reported exploits of Jessica Lynch, had little or nothing to do with reality. What the Army didn't count on was the tenacious resolve of Tillman's family, especially his mother Mary, to find out what really happened. What they found out wasn't the fiction the Pentagon wanted people to hear, and the spectacle of Donald Rumsfeld and the top brass citing collective amnesia and wiggling off the hook before a congressional committee with the family in the room just a few feet away is revolting. You'd like to see them all in jail. But more than anything, like the Tillmans, you just wish they'd finally tell the truth.