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Broken Flowers

10/16/2015

8 Comments

 

C+
2.17

An aging lothario attempts to determine which of his old flames sent him a letter about a son he didn't know about.

Directed by Jim Jarmusch
​
Starring Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, and Jessica Lange

Picture
  • It's an interesting enough tale, but the emotions are so low-key that I had a hard time hooking in - Jon
  • I felt like this movie suffered from some genre schizophrenia - Lane
  • I wanted to see more of the neighbor from the beginning - Cooker

Of the two Jim Jarmusch films I've seen (Ghost Dog, Only Lovers Left Alive), he's been locked in my estimation as a guy who knows how get whatever 'cool' is onscreen. Therefore, I was pretty surprised he started a film in a drab post office. Starring Bill Murray in sad, blase mode, Broken Flowers was not what I was expecting, but it is still an intriguing mystery.

Murray's Don Johnston is a lonely guy who can't sustain a relationship, idly living in his gray home until he gets a letter from a former girlfriend, saying that his son has run away, likely to find his father. Don didn't know he had a son in the first place, and spurred on by his nosy neighbor (Jeffrey Wright), he narrows the possibilities down to four women. Jarmusch follows Don as he travels from place to place, seeking to find the answer to this new question more out of curiosity and boredom than any paternal instinct. Each ex, well cast by middle-aged actresses like Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, and a near-unrecognizable Tilda Swinton, offers him little information and falls on the spectrum from accommodating to hateful. The value of Don's journey becomes less about answers and more about the act of doing anything at all. He goes from a character who doesn't give a shit in general to viewing every late-teenage boy as a what-if scenario.

It's an interesting-enough tale, but the emotions are so low-key that I had a hard time hooking in. I prefer Jarmusch when he's creating uber-mensch's, beings of myth that exist beyond normal human behavior. Don Johnston, an observer through and through, is in that ballpark, but without the indulgent camera work that accentuates the superhuman traits, it's just not as enthralling as urban ninjas or Moroccan vampires. 

​C+

8 Comments
Admin
10/16/2015 11:46:03 pm

Reserved for replies to initial review

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Bryan
10/18/2015 06:14:16 pm

The best two things about Broken Flowers were the script and I could leave the room, make a latte, come back, and it still be the same scene with nothing accomplished.

What was with the commercial break-esque black pauses between scenes?

I cared about what happened because it's a good mystery story with some odd duck co-stars, but Murray's performance fell flat. This was brutal. D+

Reply
Lane
10/20/2015 09:39:08 am

If I remember from my brief forays into film study and theory, those slow fades often represent gaps in memory or gaps in time, which are big themes here and in some other Jarmusch films too.

I also am maybe just making that up.

Reply
Cooker
10/19/2015 12:38:25 pm

A lackluster review on this one since I watched it earlier this year and didn’t take notes like I usually do. I gave it a C and I’ll probably stick with it. I thought Broken Flowers was meh. It had an interesting concept and interesting characters (although I didn’t really care about any of them). It got repetitive and stale. I’m trying to remember, but I feel like I wanted to see more of the neighbor from the beginning. Now that I think about it, I was probably multi-tasking while watching this since not much happened in long drawn-out scenes. C. Meh.

Reply
Lane
10/20/2015 09:37:13 am

While this wasn’t a great movie, I still kind of liked it. The only other Jarmusch film I’ve seen is “Dead Man,” a western starring Johnny Depp, and I watched it in college which means I don’t remember all that many of the details (about that, or anything else really). But I do remember, since I had to write a paper on it, that the themes were very similar – the passage and loss of time; boredom and waiting; travel through a changing or changed land. They’re all here in “Broken Flowers” too.

I felt like this movie suffered from some genre schizophrenia. Did it want to be hip noir? It was too mundane for that and the mystery didn’t really unfold in any compelling way. Was it a travelogue movie? It probably succeeded most on that front, but the landscapes and the situations were all so boring. Since it’s a late-career Bill Murray movie, was it supposed to be a character study? It might have succeeded there too, but still – the character was so purposefully boring and I just couldn’t quite go along with his motivations for this trip.

A few positives – Jarmusch’s direction was tight and focused. The cinematography probably would have been great too if there had been anything interesting to film. The whole Lolita scenes were pretty funny – I did laugh out loud at that, and the use of full frontal here was meant to shock the viewer out of those moments of tedious boredom and waiting, which it did.

The two best parts of the movie: the cast and the soundtrack. There really is an outstanding cast here from Murray to Jeffrey Wright to Jessica Lange to Sharon Stone and even Chloe Sevigny. All the cast did a fantastic job. And I really enjoyed the soundtrack as well, even if it was only two or three real theme songs – if there was anything hip noir about the film, the soundtrack made it happen.

Grade: B+

Reply
Bryan
10/20/2015 12:34:15 pm

So the soundtrack is a B+ or the whole movie? Has Shane been influencing your review style?

Reply
Lane
10/20/2015 02:53:13 pm

Sorry...whole movie is a B+. Shane influences me in so many other ways...review style, extracurricular sporting choices, the wearing of tank tops...

Bryan
10/20/2015 03:35:33 pm

... writing negative reviews with positive scores, ...




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