Director Jim Jarmusch’s new film, Broken Flowers, is a lugubrious, lenient, sweetly acted comedy about male middle-age, and it has been his greatest box-office success so far. This is owing to a tremendous performance from Bill Murray.
He has a lightly ironised romantic identity and gets to have highly charged, if not always sexy, encounters with four beautiful ex-girlfriends, who are now in their 40s, and flirtatious scenes with two babes in their early 20s. And that doesn’t even count the scenes with his current girlfriend, played by Julie Delpy.
Murray plays Don, a retired software entrepreneur who still lives in his old neighbourhood, but has now banned computers from his antiseptic bachelor home and passes the time sitting catatonically on the couch. Occasionally, he hangs out with his buddy Winston — a lovely performance from Jeffrey Wright — a hardworking, blue collar guy whose family life Don envies.
After his live-in girlfriend Sherry (Delpy) walks out on him, Don receives an anonymous letter informing him that he has a 19-year-old son by one of his past conquests. But which one? Winston, a detective-story fan, insists that Don go on a road trip into his past, tracking down all his old flames to solve the mystery.
The resulting scenes of discomfiture and embarrassment are superbly contrived and Murray’s deadpan face is on full reactive form.
The first ex-girlfriend is Laura (Sharon Stone), a clothes consultant who now has a jailbait daughter she has outrageously named Lolita (Alexis Dziena). The second is Dora (Frances Conroy), a hippy in the days of her romance with Don, but now an ultra-straight real estate saleswoman. The third is Carmen (Jessica Lange), a former radical lawyer turned ”animal communicator” and pet therapist, and the last is Penny (Tilda Swinton), whose relationship with Don ended in unspecified rancour and who now lives in a shack in the middle of nowhere.
Some are pleased to see Don, some are not. But all have moved on with their lives and are uneasy at being reminded of selves they have long since discarded.
The succession of figures from the past is a clever device for disclosing character. These are the women who once found wisecracking Don attractive, but have outgrown him.
The most telling contribution is from Dora, whose husband insists on inviting Don to dinner. Conroy is on the brink of exchanging knowing giggles with him all the way through this tense meal — almost laughing at her husband, job and life choices. She primly checks herself and realises that his presence is highly damaging to the existence she has built for herself. Carmen is far more confident and politely candid about wanting Don to leave and return to the dustbin of history.
This is Jarmusch’s most enjoyable, accessible work for some time, perhaps his most emotionally generous film. He has made a bold venture into the mainstream with a movie that creates a gentle cloud of happiness. It is a lot more forgiving about ageing men than Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt or Sideways, but it is still a very attractive piece of filmmaking, bolstered by terrific performances from an all-star cast, spearheaded by the endlessly droll Murray. — Â