Film review

Broken Flowers is a tale of human existence, at turns slow and boring, at others strikingly emotional. Don Johnston (Bill Murray) is a lonely older man with a vaguely acquired fortune, a magical ability to procure beautiful women and what seems to be a healthy dose of depression. When he receives an anonymous letter proclaiming him father of a child nearing adulthood, it sends him for a bit of a loop. Egged on by his neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Don sets out on a journey to discover the letter-writing lover and son he had left behind. There are four possibilities, as outlined by Don and Jeffrey, and each visit leaves Don in various states of emotional chaos. The women (Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Tilda Swinton and Jessica Lange) are not necessarily excited to see old Don, and gradually it is clear that his life has been somewhat of a glorious failure—that of the playboy type that teenagers dream about before they realize its vapidity. Flowers is the latest from Jim Jarmusch, an accomplished director whose films (Dead Man, Ghost Dog) are inhabited by a droll, sardonic humor and display an ease of cultural observation. Flowers is not particularly different, poking fun at a wide variety of human idiosyncrasies. In one particularly funny scene, Don is eating dinner with Dora (Conroy) and her husband. “I think in the near future water will be worth more than oil,” claims Dora, and her husband adds: “You can’t take a swig of oil.” With an expression that belies marked relief. Don fires back “Boy, you are certainly right about that.” It’s a moment that plays both funny and expansively important, a tribute to Mr. Jarmusch’s steady direction and easy-flowing style of dialogue. But the film really belongs to Bill Murray. And what’s really phenomenal here is how Murray can fill up a frame sitting still, saying nothing, showing nearly no signs of life. Instead, he plays the role of human camera—he looks, we see what he’s looking at, and we form the emotions Don should feel—the Kuleshev effect of early Russian experimental filmmaking. What makes Murray’s acting here so magnificent is that no matter what emotion we find ourselves longing to find in Don, be it hatred, desire or pity—that very same emotion is suddenly so clearly and strikingly there in his face. And yet in reality, those very emotions that have seemed to appear out of nowhere have been there the entire time, remarkably masked by Mr. Murray’s own clownish deadpan. Over halfway through the film, a character by the name of Sun Green—the same girl from Neil Young’s concept album Greendale—is introduced. Tending a flower shop, Sun sells Don a bouquet of pink roses and mends a battle scar that drips blood down his face. Behind the counter, Sun is nothing more than a spinster with a penchant for floral arrangements that would make even Martha Stewart proud. But when we see Sun’s face for the first time in close-up, her blue eyes drilling into Murray’s scar, mining it for more than its superficial disfigurement, the character becomes important. She signifies both the love that is still a possibility for Don and the beauty that Don has taken for granted. This moment also symbolizes the connection between quality pieces of art like Young’s and Jarmusch’s, where characters belong not to one story, one movie or one album, but to our own life experiences, as if we could turn the corner one morning and run into our very own Sun Green, finding her at the precise moment when we needed to see those marvelous blue eyes the most.