PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/5/05)


DVD Release Date: January 3, 2006

There’s an interesting phenomenon in the movie industry and the various media that cover it by which a movie can generate tremendous buzz and then inspire an almost equally furious backlash before the picture has even gotten into theaters. When Broken Flowers, an avidly awaited collaboration between (among others) uncompromising writer-director Jim Jarmusch, maestro of ironic melancholia Bill Murray, and four fierce female performers—Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy, and Sharon Stone—premiered at the Cannes film festival in May, the critical reaction was for the most part rapturous. (I only met up with one critic there—a writer I particularly venerate, as it happens—who expressed a negative view, and a violently negative one it was.) Visually astute, often laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly tender while remaining ultimately tough-minded—that’s what a lot of us thought it was.

And for a while—oh, all right, for a couple of weeks—it looked as if those who hadn’t seen Flowers were willing to follow us critical Pied Pipers. Now, though, I’m hearing grumblings from a number of my fellow professionals that the movie’s “slow,” that Jarmusch is too “hip,” and that they’re sick of Murray’s “catatonic” persona.

Before my mind completely curdles in churlish disdain for the vicissitudes of the critical tides, I’ll fess up. Yup, Broken Flowers is a Jim Jarmusch movie, and breathless narrative momentum has never been one of Jarmusch’s formal attributes. While not as laconic as his breakthrough feature Stranger Than Paradise, Flowers moves at a pace that lets its characters breathe. It doesn’t slam the viewer’s face against the wall with every cut. Some moviegoers might like having their faces slammed against a wall, I don’t know. This picture is not for those people.

Yes, Jarmusch is “hip.” And kind of citified as well—his caricature of an upper-middle-class suburban housing development in one of this film’s scenes is simultaneously droll and broad. His taste in soundtrack music tends to the obscure, but by the same token, the Ethiopian variant on Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” that plays throughout Flowers has thematic significance. The film is about Murray’s rootless character, Don Johnston, learning in the wake of a broken love affair that he might have sired a son 20 years before, and seeking out four former girlfriends in search of the author of an unsigned letter informing him of his parental status. Some—including the venerable critic I mentioned earlier—find Jarmusch’s presentation of outside-the-mainstream culture kind of ostentatious, betokening an irritating self-satisfaction. Others resentfully figure that Jarmusch is just trying to show up us plebes by refusing to sit down and eat his Ashlee Simpson like a normal, average citizen. Again, if you feel you might be in this camp, Flowers is not the movie for you.

Though I’m trying hard here not to be a scold (what? you couldn’t tell?), I have to say that anyone who believes that all Murray’s doing here is a “catatonic” carbon copy of his Lost in Translation performance is just not paying attention. Don Johnston has a weird rigidity that’s unique to Murray’s body of work, and that rigidity casts whatever other signature moves Murray uses in a new and startling context. His character in Lost was a guy desperate for some kind of human touch; Flowers’ Johnston is a guy who has coasted through life without making any meaningful connections, and suddenly comes to the almost desperate realization that he may need one. Murray fully understands and beautifully conveys the difference. This is not a perfect picture, but it’s a soulful one that offers a lot of pleasure and even a kind of wisdom.—Glenn Kenny