Customer Reviews

Broken Flowers

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(54)
3 star:		(44)
2 star:		(29)
1 star:		(42)

 

 

For filmgoers who are looking for a funny Bill Murray movie like Caddy Shack, you will be disappointed. But if you can watch this film just for the pure joy of watching the collision of the baggage of the past meeting the present and the fun that ensues, then you will really appreciate this wonderful film.

Jarmusch unravels the illusion of "Don Juan" as Don faces the fact that his past lovers are either uncomfortable with him or he's uncomfortable with them and none of them are forthcoming with any information as to whether he's left a trail of kids behind.

Until your middle aged and reflect on the past and realize the choices you've made are what molded your present situation, AND see that perhaps you could have made better choices, then this film won't make any sense to you. Jarmusch beautifully photographs (and scripts) the accident that is 21st century "middle age" for a man who's fought his way through a quagmire of womens lib, empowerment, equality, the pill, feminism and every other end of the 20th century battle of the sexes that has left the modern male alone, childless and confused.

Jarmusch's style is to just points his camera at the characters and let this reality unfold... subtly - and it's unpredictable, funny, sad, scary, absurd, awkward and beautiful all at the same time.
Like reality, don't expect a happy or easy ending. By the time the final scene rolls, neither the view nor Don knows if he really HAS a son or not, if he really WANTS to have a son or not, or if every time he turns around and sees a young man about 19 years old - is he going to wonder... is that kid mine?

For all around fun and unexpected surprises in human dynamics, Jim Jarmusch is a modern master. Plus he scores huge on three major cinematic points in all his movies:
1. his choice of actors with their dramatic and textured faces is always surprising.
2. his choice of soundtrack is always hip and cool
3. he films the US roadside like no one else

And like Jarmusch's other films, Broken Flowers doesn't disappoint.

Jarmusch's movie is startling and bold, in a somnolent sort of way. Jarmusch is all about symbolism, and Murray is perfect for the role of Don Johnston, a wealthy bachelor who lives through life, seemingly emotionless. His angst over losing girlfriend Julie Delpy at the film's beginning, is buried deeply, and shown only in the way he sleeps and wakes...a deadish man who makes a feeble attempt to talk Delpy into staying. As she leaves, the mail she leaves contains a letter from an old lover who doesn't identify herself, other than to say that Johnston has a son who is 19 years old.

Enter Don's neighbor, Winston (the very capable Jeffrey Wright). His life is 180 degrees away from his friend Don's. His house, bursting at the seams with his glowing wife and 5 children, is full of toys. Despite the fact that he has three jobs, he is writing a mystery novel. Don's mysterious letter (in a pink envelope) is a goldmine for Winston, and he determines that Don will pursue this mystery, and must provide a list of potential mothers - lovers from 20 years prior.

From the reluctantly prepared list Winston culls not only addresses, he mapquests the instructions to reach each house and books Don's flights and rental cars. Don is reluctant, but can't afford to turn down this slice of life that Winston offers. He embarks on the journey.

The movie breaks down a little for me here...the repetitive shots of Don flying in and out of airports get on one's nerves, particularly since Don never seems to go anywhere different. The five women are all located off the beaten path from each airport, and Jarmusch is careful not to identify the cities with landmarks. In truth, the scenery is so similar for each location (kind of an upstate NY-Jersey-PA small town trip) that you wonder if Jarmusch is making a statement about the fact that all of Don's loves have chosen similar scenery, or if perhaps the film just didn't have enough funding to make the womens' locations more diverse. A nagging point for me.

There's a running small gag about Don's rental cars and hotels...although he can afford much better, Winston has economized with different color Ford Taurus' and chain motels located off busy highways. The audience picks up on Don's silent notation of Winston's predicted clues; a woman who likes pink, signs of a young man in the house (in this case, the existence of a basketball hoop in each location).

Following Winston's plan, Johnston drops in on the four women from his past (Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton). In these scenarios, Jarmusch focuses on the color pink...they color of the flowers Johnston invariably brings to each of the women, following Winston's orders, and the increasing focus on the color he encounters from each visit. Each woman is more and more intense, and each vignette turns up the volume on the symbolism of the color. Johnston is greeted unfailingly with surprise, as though each of the women knew that, by his choice, he would never see them again (out of sight and out of mind; younger women are available!).

These vignettes with the women shed some light on Johnston, but Jarmusch, I was led to believe, shot them with the focus on the women themselves, and not Johnston's reaction to them.

As Laura, Sharon Stone is lush and cheap- her daughter Lolita shows sexual significance and eroticism that the viewer believes she copies from her mother. Young Lolita shocks even the jaded Johnston. With only a daughter, clearly Laura did not send the letter. Laura's wantonness and availability lead Johnston to spend the night; a decision he clearly regrets in the morning. Stone is as "dead on" in her portrayal as an actress can be.

Frances Conroy, as Dora, shows rapid aging and deterioration found in women married to a control freak who successfully subjugates them without abuse or violence. Ron (Christopher McDonald, who has appeared in countless roles on TV), the monstrous husband, has her in a cookie cutter house and sneers at the picture of the young Dora in hippie garb and flowers, that she keeps to remind her of who she once was. It is unclear if Dora has a child...she responds that she has no children with Ron. Johnston is understandably uncomfortable in this house where violence simmers behind the carefully groomed shrubs and carefully groomed owners. He leaves after being forced to stay for dinner. Jarmusch again uses quiet symbolism in the food Johnston is served...it clearly reflects the life that Dora now leads.

Jessica Lange has always been a powerful actress, and hers is a rich role. An attorney when he knew her, Lange's Carmen is now in the field of veterinary medicine - but she doesn't treat the animals, she talks to them, and analyzes them emotionally. Unlike the former two women, the sense is that Johnston was deeply involved with Carmen, and that the regrets that they are no longer together are his, not hers. Carmen is an overachiever; she's bitter; she's removed herself from any emotion and she doesn't want to explain herself to Don. A malevolent force in Carmen's life is Chloe Sevigny, who plays her office assistant, and the guardian of Carmen's forbidding castle.

Swinton's cameo is almost gone before the cameras catch it, but in her desolate backwoods world, pink is startling and pouring out of nooks and crannies in the house and landscape. She's drawn by the site of Don immediately to anger and violence. The viewer is surprised, given her surroundings and her actions, when Don says..."you left me, Penny". Johnston is subjected to an attack by her friends, and finds himself broken and sad, finally expressing emotion, visiting the graveside of Michelle, the last of the women he identified for Winston. It's possible that the son in question may have come from the liaison with either Penny or Michelle.

There are a couple of dream sequences strewn in Don's journey, startling in that the viewer really doesn't understand what they mean or why they are filmed. As the journey proceeds, Don becomes more and more aware of young men in their late teens - the final sequences, which are frustrating for some(in that they provide no answer to the mystery), deal with his encounters with them, and his summary for Winston.


Murray plays his detached, nuanced character from "Lost in Translation", with perhaps a less effective script. Supporting performances are crystal clear and the players are visibly more engaged than is Murray's. Winston is a delight, and each one of the actresses must have yearned for the richness of the character they finally get to play on the screen in middle-aged cameos. Symbolism, as noted before, abounds. Sometimes it gives the viewer food for thought, and sometimes it just gets in the way.

At the end of the film (which has a subtle and fitting score), I was absorbed, involved, and vaguely unsure of why. I was also curious about why Murray's character gets so deeply involved in the quest for the young man; obviously, Jarmusch is conveying self-discovery, but there is no joy at all in the process, at least none on view for this filmgoer.

Jarmusch has created a successful film for small theater venues, and art houses, that is being picked up around the country as a feature film, given the success of "Lost in Translation". That's dangerous, because many will attend looking for Murray's comedy and grow angry at the "waste of film" and lack of action in what is really a superb small film. Thus, look for a lot of 1 and 2 star reviews for the movie, but if you are a serious follower of films that make you think, see "Broken Flowers".

4 stars.

I thought this was a pretty good movie. It is very understated as is Bill Murrays performance but I still enjoyed it and the subject matter. This is not a real feel good movie. It deals with regrets and past loves lost. It also deals with going back and confronting your past and what you left behind and really if you are not better off leaving the past in the past. Don is a sad character and time has past him by. He is what he is and suddenly he gets a letter that makes him question who he is, how he has lived his life and that he may have a grown child out there that he doesnt even know about.

This movie is kind of a downer but is worth a look.

If I had to name one actor who best embodied the qualities of a Robert Bresson film, Bill Murray would be it. Bresson, in case you're unfamiliar with the name, was one of the directors who helped to inspire the French New Wave of the 50's and 60's. His credits include such classics as Pickpocket, A Man Escaped and Au Hasard Balthazar. I mention this not because he's the director of Murray latest star vehicle (that would be indie icon Jim Jarmusch) or because I want to name-drop some of my all-time favorite films (okay, maybe a little of the latter), but because in recent years Murray's taken on a persona that could be described as positively Bressonian.

In fact, this goes all the way back to his first dramatic turn in The Razor's Edge. What he does, and what directors like Bresson and Carl Dreyer always advocated, is he wipes all expression from his face, thus leaving it to the audience to project their own emotions onto the character. I expect this will probably be terribly frustrating for audiences expecting another Caddyshack or Stripes, but if you're not inclined to check your brain at the concession stands (and there are fewer and fewer of us these days), you're in for one of the best performances and one of the best movies of 2005. In other words, don't expect to get more out of this film than you're willing to put into it.

Murray, in a role sure to draw comparisons to his Oscar-nominated performance in Lost in Translation, stars Don Johnston, as an aging womanizer who receives an anonymous letter informing him that he has an illegitimate son who may be trying to find him. Egged on by his best friend and neighbor (the always great Jeffrey Wright) to revisit four of his ex-flames and find out which is the mother of his son, Don is understandably reluctant at first. Reluctant, because not all of these relationships ended well, as we soon find out.

But eventually, having nothing better to do (we're told he made his money in computers), he allows himself to be persuaded and sets out on his journey. Along the way we're introduced to four very distinct personalities (played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton), all of whom shine in relative small roles, hopefully reminding Hollywood of how many great 40-something actresses there are who are still deserving of choice parts.

Which brings me to the ending. What struck me most about it was the way in which the young man Don suspects of being his son reacts when confronted with the possibility. At first, this seemed to me the appropriate response to being told by a perfect stranger that he may be your father. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that he overreacted, as if he was expecting what was coming and had his response planned out in advance. Am I reading too much into this? Possibly. But it's also interesting to note that the 'Kid in Car,' as he's billed in the closing credits, is Murray's actual son, Homer.

Is there a code to deciphering the film's enigmatic finale? In the end, it doesn't really matter, because the movie is less interested in the destination than in the journey it took to get there. And rightly so. It's refreshing in this day of cookie cutter movie-making to find a director more intent on posing serious questions than in providing pat questions, especially when the questions offered up are more interesting when left to us to answer for ourselves.

But, of course, Jim Jarmusch has always been anything but conventional. Starting with 1980's Permanent Vacation, he's amassed one of the most idiosyncratic resumes of any film-maker I can think of. And in Murray, like Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola before him, he may have found his muse, the actor capable of taking his deadpan humor and pathos, which have been hallmarks of his films for the last twenty years, and making them feel almost transcendent. This is certainly his most accessible movie to date, but it also may be his best.

A sad and funny film, Broken Flowers features Bill Murray as Don Johnston, a disaffected, lonely playboy who, with the encouragement of his neighbor Winston, goes on a quest to find four ex-lovers who might tell him about an alleged son that Don fathered nineteen years earlier. Confronting his past, he realizes his limitations and shortcomings as a man who, too scared and selfish to love, is afflicted with an aching hole in his heart.

The film's plot device is amazingly simple. Once he agrees to search for the mother of his alleged son, the film is broken down into four episodes, each visit to a former girlfriend more painful than the previous one. And we see our Don Juan crushed with a sense of a life wasted on caprices and selfish, adolescent passion.

The film is hilarious if you are fond, like I am, of Bill Murray's priceless expressions of disgruntled cynicism and irony. There is nothing forced or contrived in the film--its plot, its pacing, its themes. The film is assured and confident in what it has to say and as such has nothing in common with the predictable films that try to overwhelm you every second.

One of the major themes of this film is the fear of attachment and as such I would compare it favorably to two other films--You Can Count On Me and The Station Agent.

I saw this beautiful sleeper of a movie back to back with "A History of Violence". "Broken Flowers' was a perfect antidote to a cynical re-hashed Western about a 'gunslinger' revisited by trouble.

The sad thing is that so many people thought that "Violence" had very deep things to say about America. I think that Jim Jarmusch knows more about America than David Cronenberg, and I'm grateful.

"Broken Flowers", as others have remarked, has the character of a waking dream. Bill Murray's shipwrecked Don Juan emerges in the beginning of the film from a cave-like bachelor's lair and walks into the sunshine of real life, looking (as always) rumpled and frowsy and not entirely awake. Through a sequence of gorgeous days, he pursues the chimaera of an unknown son that he may have sired twenty years earlier. He makes a tour of old acquaintances, and realizes some bittersweet lessons about life, such as, "be careful what you wish for... that son who's looking for you may not be the idealized version of yourself that you would like him to be...(if he indeed does exist)."

The places that Murray visits seem like classic slices of Americana, archetypes that exist in our collective unconscious: the little yellow house with junk in the yard, the huge tomb-like McMansion where Murray finds himself being served a 'happy meal'.

I loved this movie! It's a movie populated with actresses and actors who are allowed to 'act their age'. It's got a great score, and a great look. It will make you feel good about life...life with its inevitable disappointments, still beautiful and still worth living.

I have to say that I am a fan of Bill Murray's acting (over and beyond his comedic work), and I think that Rushmore and Lost in Translation were efforts that should secure him in the canon of great actors, but this film felt very misguided and took an awful turn at some point. Murray's soulful, silent stare was way too overused here, cheapening the times he used it quite well in other movies, and after he parts from his neighbor, who is a wonderful character and helped balance out Murray's doleful depression, the film just seems to bottom out and never seems to rise again.

Jarmusch has had much success in the past in following very quiet, interior characters (_Dead Man_, _Ghost Dog_), but here he either overplayed his hand or forgot that what really made those other films work was counterbalance. Nobody and the French ice cream man are excellent counterweights in the other films to keep things from getting too dragged down, but in this movie, the counterweight is cut away from way too early, and this film suffers for that mistake.

"Broken Flowers" is just the kind of film I love: It's equal parts funny and sad, intelligently written, beautifully shot, and directed by someone smart enough to get out of the way and let the outstanding actors shine. And shine they do. Once again Bill Murray, as Don Johnston, is understated, and once again it works, allowing the rest of the cast to flesh out their richly idiosyncratic characters. The journey is Don's, but the film really belongs to the actresses who play his former lovers. Don sees himself, and the world, differently through the eyes of each of these four women. The beauty lies in the subtleties: the glimpse of nudity that Laura's (Sharon Stone) daughter un-self-consciously allows Don, the desperate looks Dora (Francis Conroy) shoots to Don over dinner with her obnoxious, soulless husband, the hostility that seethes under the surface of Carmen (Jessica Lange), or Don's strangely unsurprised reaction when he's attacked by Penney's (Tilda Swinton) backwoods companions. Rich, dreamy, and bittersweet, "Broken" never looked so good.

After being dumped by yet another girlfriend, Don Johnston(Bill Murray)receives a mysterious envelope with news that he has a son and that his son is looking for him. He, along with a friend, plans a trip that will devolve into his past and will examine his relationships with his old flames long after they have ended.

Jim Jarmusch is notoriously known to have films that are slowly done. People say that his films move at the pace of a snail. Well, in this movie, his style really finds a niche here. The film is slow and really detailed when it comes to the shots and the pacing. I have had no problem with that. His films, Down By The Law and Dead Man, were impressive. Jarsmuch's writing skills are solid too, although there is not all that much dialogue in the film.

Bill Murray's performance was sluggish, brooding, and depressing yet brilliant in a way. He takes a role that is extremely complex and lonely and makes it his own. He literally amazes us and makes us locked to the screen with his performance. He was fantastic.

I have been a big fan of Jim Jarmusch after I watched Dead Man late one night in my room, with no light on. I felt for the characters in every films that he has made. His slow style won't suit anyone. In fact, some people probably won't have the patience to watch a Jarmusch film. In my opinion, Jarmusch probably originated the long shots, no dialogue and Gus Van Stant just borrowed off of him. Jarmusch shows that he is a great filmmaker and this film is proof why we need more films from this man.

Jim Jarmusch's latest self-consciously independent effort won the Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. All I can really say in response to that is...why? Of the '05 films I haven't liked I'm perhaps most frustrated with "Broken Flowers." I don't see the innovation, the skill behind it: I really don't see anything (besides a relatively strong cast).

"Broken Flowers" tells the story of Don Johnston (Bill Murray), an "over-the-hill Don Juan" (which wins the award for the most obvious pun of the year) whose latest fling breaks up with him and storms out in a fit of rage. The next day, Don wakes to see a pile of letters including a pink envelope, which he ignores till he arrives at his friend Winston's (Jeffrey Wright) house. Eventually, they read the anonymous letter which informs Don of a son who may or may not be looking for him. Don's friend is intrigued and organizes an entire trip through memory lane so Don can revisit four women from twenty years ago, one of whom may be the mother of the alleged child.

Throughout the film, Jarmusch keeps his distance from the audience with intentional awkwardness. Often times Bill Murray is seen sitting in a room, staring at random objects that could mean something, but after staring for five minutes you realize they are simply objects. There came a point in the film where this "silence is golden" technique became hard to take. What's understandable is Jarumsch's desire to have the film's distance represent Don's emotional detachment from the world that surrounds him, but even the characteristic itself makes it hard to believe his most recent love interest would have ever taken an interest in him in the first place. There is a problem when the film's protagonist isn't convincing in the context of the plot; no, the entire basis of the film.

For "Broken Flowers" to work we are to believe that at some point in time, Don Johnston was a compelling, interesting, and alive human being. Unfortunately, though a case can be made that the four relationships Don explores were old sparks from long ago, it's a bit difficult to see this empty man loving anyone, enticing anyone. And why, exactly, is this man empty? Is it because his frequent relationships, he now realizes, have no meaning? Or is it because Bill Murray is in the central role and that's what he does nowadays, that nothingness he wears on his face as if it were interesting? I still believe Murray's Bob in Lost in Translation is the only three-dimensional version of Deadpan Bill. At least in "Translation" he was funny, and often adorable around Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), his "accomplace;" he was charming in a subtle, understandable sense. I could see a girl like Charlotte falling for him; he was plausible, and the overall work is probably Murray's best. Since then, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and now "Broken Flowers" seem like no more than a couple of directors looking for a chance to take advantage of Murray's critical success and, as a result, a credibility boost.

Coming into only my second Jarmusch film after the intensely boring "Coffee and Cigarettes," I was expecting to see something subtle, calculated, inventive, yet slowly paced so that one can process the emotions that had been laid out on the screen in previous sequences. I guess I misheard much of Jarmusch's praise, because instead of subtle I saw over-obviousness (ie the Lolita jokes, the personality quirks/vocations of the four women that were as rediculous as they were meaningless, the underscoring that screams "look at how outside of the mainstream I am!", the color pink as a motif which amounts to absolutely nothing), useless calculation (in scenes that needed to be observed, such as the moment which may have been Johnston's emotional turning point, the editing was swift to revert to sequences of an eery quiet where nothing is said or seen or felt), nothing new (if anything is said in "Broken Flowers" it's been said before, and better), and the slow pacing was painstakingly lethargic.

Though "Broken Flowers" may not be the worst release of 2005 I will end up remembering it as a most gargantuan disappoinment. Its cast was promising (Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Julie Delpy, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Chloe Sevigny, and Tilda Swinton) and its director famed, but even the conclusion (my last hope) which declared "I have meaning despite saying nothing" felt forced, and thus I walked away with nothing, absolutely nothing. I've looked hard, I've thought extensively, yet..nothing. I may never be capable of understanding the encomium over "Broken Flowers." This movie literally is Don Johnston: unalluring, overdone, and striving for something which simply does not exist and may not even be present; and in it there is little emotion, and when feeling arrives, it is distant, fleeting.