Postmodern Times
Murray on too tight a leash in Jarmusch's clever, unconvincing 'Broken Flowers'

What happens when the merry prankster of irony meets the poet of the post-modern vignette? Not enough in Broken Flowers, the second collaboration (after Coffee and Cigarettes) between veteran clown Bill Murray and maverick filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Frame by frame, the movie is never less than interesting, and there are flashes of insight in the tale of a man criss-crossing the country to visit his ex-lovers. But despite all the miles logged by the protagonist, the movie never really gets anywhere.

Since about Rushmore, Murray has been playing the flip-side to the irreverent hipster persona of his earlier films: disaffected men who, against all odds, have emerged into a late middle-age where irony is no longer enough. In Broken Flowers, Murray plays Don Johnston (that's "Johnston, with a 'T,'" he has to keep reminding everybody, not the hunky former TV star). The other connection Jarmusch wants us to make is to Don Juan, the legendary lover; in case we don't get it, the old Douglas Fairbanks movie plays incessantly on Don's TV.

A former computer tycoon and lifelong childless bachelor, Don has retired to Spartan, yet expensive luxury in a big house in an unnamed suburban city. On the day his current girlfriend (Julie Delpy) moves out, complaining of his other girlfriends and his commitment issues ("I'm like your mistress, but you're not even married!" she frets), Don finds an unsigned letter in his mail. The unidentified correspondent tells Don she's the mother of an 18-year-old son Don never knew about, who has hit the road to find his father.

Don shows the letter to his best friend and neighbor, Winston, (the excellent Jeffrey Wright), a Jamaican immigrant with "three jobs and five kids," who, in one of Jarmusch's many off-kilter details, somehow manages to live right next door to Don's swanky abode. Don would prefer to ignore the letter, or maybe burn it, but Winston eggs him on to compile a list of potential mothers, women Don slept with in the appropriate time frame. Don narrows it down to five, four still living, and Winston goes online to book Don's cross-country odyssey into his past to visit the four exes and try to solve the "mystery."

A reluctant traveler through a series of anonymous airport terminals, commuter flights, rental cars, and neighborhoods, Don encounters a cross-section of modern American midlife. Warm-hearted widow Laura (Sharon Stone), a closet-organizer, can't persuade her nubile teen daughter, Lolita (Alexis Dziena) to keep her clothes on. Former flower-child Dora (Frances Conroy) has become a wealthy realtor in a house of sterile ritziness presided over by an officiously genial husband (Christopher McDonald). Once-passionate lawyer Carmen (Jessica Lange), is a touchy-feely "animal communicator," with a girlfriend. And Penny (Tilda Swinton) is a tough cookie with a posse of bikers.

There's clever stuff here. A funny, deadpan cell phone conversation between Winston and Don continues even after they come face-to-face in Don's house. In a wistful coda, Don buys a sandwich for a kid on the road, another lost soul seeking "philosophical tips," to whom Don can only deliver the disappointing advice "All there is is this. The present."

That's certainly true of Jarmusch's narrative blackout style, disconnected fragments freighted with symbolic details (directionless Don lives on Circle Drive), that never quite build to an emotional or intellectual climax. It's not a question of solving the MacGuffin of a mystery, but the journey can only be more important than the destination if the journey provides some sort of catharsis, or evolution, either for the character, the story, or the viewer.

But at the end of Broken Flowers, Don is exactly the same as at the beginning: lost, empty, literally clueless, and nearly catatonic for reasons never explained. Coached to keep his puckish humor strictly under wraps, Murray's Don is unconvincing as a famous ladies' man. He's so disengaged, there's no spark of anything that might have ever drawn women to him in the first place. Maybe Jarmusch wanted to create in Don a tabula rasa on which all post-midlife men could project the exploits and regrets of their own misspent youth. It's an interesting concept, but it doesn't produce a movie to care much about.

BROKEN FLOWERS With Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, and Jessica Lange. Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. A Focus Features release. Rated R. 106 minutes. (**1/2)
Review published in Good Times, August 11, 2005