Review

Review Date: 7-August-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Broken Flowers (2005)

This is kind of a backhanded compliment: my appreciation of "Broken Flowers" bloomed not in watching it, but in thinking about it afterward. There were times at the beginning of Jim Jarmusch's latest when I was downright bored, wondering how he expected me to believe that his greying protagonist, Don Johnston (Bill Murray), had been a lifelong ladies' man. When the movie opens Don appears to have no occupation other than lying on the couch staring into space or napping. Granted, his latest girlfriend just walked out so he has reason to be depressed, but he shows no evidence of the charisma or energy needed to keep a steady stream of ladies at his door. (We hear that his money hasn't always been around, so that can't be the main attraction.) The only overtly interesting thing about Don is his sweetly dysfunctional friendship with next-door neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), a hardworking father of five who's as sprightly as Don is dull.

The plot begins to gain momentum after Don receives an unsigned letter from a lover of 20 years back, who claims that they had a son and that the boy might be coming to find him. Almost entirely at Winston's provocation, he makes a list of possible candidates and hits the road to investigate which one could be the mother of his child. The story is improved by the mounting intrigue of what will happen next, so although Don remains indolent to the last, his trip becomes a thought-provoking odyssey.

Throughout the movie, Jarmusch uses the image of flowers to trace the course of Don's experience. As he travels with bouquet in hand from one old flame to another (in order: Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton), the women's receptions grow frostier and their lives increasingly bizarre. (The most haunting segment is Conroy's, which deals with the pitfalls of selling out and growing stale in our prepackaged society.) The appearance and fate of his bouquets becomes progressively more wretched as well, culminating in that most sad and fruitless of offerings, the grave marker. Why, exactly, are they "broken?" This is the answer that Don really needs to find.

After a final encounter with an enigmatic youth, the credits begin to roll and one's mind begins to put the pieces together. I was reminded at the end of Richard Ford's book Independence Day, which instantly increased my liking of the film. Here too is a man of a certain age ostensibly trying to connect with a son but really struggling to come to grips with his past. The flowers reflect the ties he made and destroyed along the way, which, as his visit to the cemetery makes clear, can never be forged again. Jarmusch closes the tale with the mystery still in the dark, but Don's parenthood has ceased to be the issue. The point — slowly, carefully, and artfully illustrated — is that in order to live you must cultivate the present, tending to the relationships that make it worthwhile before they fade and wither into nothing.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.