Written/Directed By: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Bill Murray as Don Johnston, Jeffrey Wright as Winston. Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy and Sharon Stone as Don’s ex-lovers.
Broken Flowers was released in 2005, only a little more than a year after Bill Murray’s critically-lauded role as Bob Harris in Sofia Coppola’s transcendent Lost in Translation, yet it shamelessly and artlessly steals much of what made that film work and awkwardly claims them as its own. If Jim Jarmusch had waited, say, another 60 years, or if he had any of Sofia Coppola’s instinctive storytelling smarts, I probably wouldn’t be getting all worked up. But this film, in concept and in presentation, is frequently a lackluster, tiresome attempt at recreating the magic of Lost in Translation, and its unoriginality is so blatant, so stark, that it is irrevocably insulting. Both Bob and Don are extremely wealthy men with no semblance of direction in life, both films are portraits of their loneliness and aimlessness, both films incorporate extended sequences of inaction and silence, both films bestow a certain tenderness and poignancy to Bill Murray’s improvised cynicism. But while Lost in Translation is a revelation disguised as meandering inaction, Broken Flowers is meandering inaction disguised as a revelation. Nothing much happens in Lost in Translation, that’s true, but the expansive script still manages to be a thoughtful meditation on celebrity culture, marital dysfunction, existential disillusionment, cultural displacement and alienation. Broken Flowers, on the other hand, explores aimlessness, only aimlessness, and does so with a resolute, obstinate aimlessness. It has absolutely nothing to say, and attempts to disguise this fact with Don’s quasi-cryptic, pseudo-intellectual revelation at the end of the film (“The past is gone, I know that. And the future isn’t here yet, whatever it’s going to be. So all there is, is this. The present.”), which incidentally is a vacuous declaration devoid of meaning or significance.
Like Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, which Broken Flowers steals liberally from, this film is about a man taking a road trip to visit his past lovers, and both incorporate torturously long sequences of the protagonist driving down ill-maintained roads and through expansive, rural landscapes. The former is too a film that solely explores aimlessness, and that has little to say about it, but at least the final payoff (Chloe Sevigny’s blowjob, the realization that Gallo’s character witnessed her being raped and did nothing) is arguably devastating enough to make the film’s inertia into a powerful emotional statement. This film, however, wanders aimlessly and concludes after nearly fucking 2 hours with deadpan indifference and frustrating opacity. Granted, films like Groundhog Day (Murray’s 2nd finest work) wander aimlessly too, but at least the journey is gorgeously decorated with jokes and fantastic bursts of pure hedonism. Broken Flowers, despite having Bill fucking Murray in the lead, is often quite humorless, and as a result is an extremely torturous and aimless watch.
Bill Murray mostly plays the same type of character: cynical, world-weary, self-aware, caustic. In Lost in Translation, Coppola even goes a step further to explore the bitterness and loneliness that presumably crafted this on-screen persona, and does so by juxtaposing Murray’s sardonic improv work with extended sequences of him staring blankly into space and raising his eyebrows defeatedly at the world around him. In Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch steals the latter idea, but Murray is given extraordinarily few moments to be sardonic or even opinionated about anything. Mostly, he repeats what other people say with a deadpan weariness, recites reluctantly from a standard script or stares blankly into space. In fact, so restricted is Murray by the god-awful script that he is almost painful to watch. He is too wooden, too weary, too nothing. By any stretch of the imagination, he remains fiercely, stubbornly impenetrable, and because Jim Jarmusch doesn’t even do what Nicholas Refn did for Ryan Gosling’s reticent character in Drive, there is no semblance of hidden depth, no air of mystery; only a bored old man waiting for meaning (and personality) to find him. To be fair, there are occasionally moments where Murray’s understated charisma suddenly eclipses the screen like a brilliant wave of light, but these moments are too few and too far between. Immediately, Don reminds me very much of Johnny Marco from Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere in his woodenness and his lack of personality. However, Somewhere is intelligent and self-aware enough to be littered with smug observations of Hollywood culture, to be grounded in the sweet, tender relationship between Marco and his angelic daughter Cleo, and to acknowledge Marco’s nothingness in its powerful, poignant ending. Broken Flowers finds no such redemption.
The film boasts an all-star cast. Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy, four of the most revered actresses in Hollywood, play Don’s ex-lovers — but only because their presence affords Broken Flowers the sort of artistic validity that would otherwise prove elusive. None of them are given substantial roles, and despite being outrageously talented, none of them are given the opportunity to bring anything particularly special or intriguing to their parts, because the script is much too wooden to afford them complex personalities, much too restrictive to allow them room for improv. None of them even appear for more than ten minutes. They wander aimlessly into the film, and without making any kind of impact and without doing anything, really, they leave. Tilda Swinton’s job consists of opening her door, saying “FUCK YOU DON” and storming back into her house. For artistic cred, even perennial indie queen Chloe Sevigny makes a presence here as a bespectacled secretary who is (apparently) fucking Jessica Lange. Thankfully, in a sea of missteps, Jarmusch almost redeems himself by having the smarts to cast chameleonic stage actor Jeffrey Wright of Angels in America fame to play Don’s annoying Ethiopian neighbour, who also incidentally is the most well-written character here. Winston’s insufferable enthusiasm serves as a convincing counterpoint to Don’s woodenness, even if he doesn’t have enough screentime, he serves to obviously as a plot device and his chemistry with Don isn’t particularly palpable. In any other movie, Bill Murray would invariably be stealing the show, but the huge disparity in writing quality turns the tides, and Wright effortlessly steals every scene he’s in. To be fair though, Wright is a magnificent actor; it’s just that Murray is, given a good script, even more so.
And like all inept arthouse filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch too litters Broken Flowerswith bizarre, hyperstylized sequences that don’t actually add anything at all to the film. Towards the end of the film, he takes various scenes from the film and re-edits them to make them all psychedelic and tinted, and while they are effectively dream-like and hipster-chic, they serve no purpose other than to create some awkward illusion of purpose.
This is a film so awful that it actually makes Bill Murray look bad. Given a better director, this could’ve been a much better film, but under Jim Jarmusch’s direction it comes across as a radically uninspired rehash of Antonioniesque conventions.
KevinScale Rating: 1/5
therein, Therin. 