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.
