Going for Broken
The contentedly independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has brought his restless energy to a series of surreal road movies that move nicely along on the strength of rare characters, quirky humor and a willing embrace of chance adventure. These quest stories for hipsters have transported Jarmusch’s fiercely loyal audience from New York to snowy Cleveland (Stranger Than Paradise), from a crappy New Orleans jail cell to the wilds of the bayou country (Down by Law) and, in a veritable orgy of one-night wanderlust, into the backseats of taxi cabs in Los Angeles, New York, Rome and Helsinki (Night on Earth). For someone who sits down to write his scripts in a rustic cabin in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, this director sure seems like a rolling stone who never unpacks his suitcase.
In his strangely affecting, uncharacteristically star-studded Broken Flowers, Jarmusch hits the road again. This time he’s in the company of a dour, aging ladies’ man (Bill Murray) on the hunt for the mother of his 19-year-old son, of whose existence he has just learned via a cryptic note typed on pink stationery. The fact that Murray pops in on four possible mothers in the course of his search posits four love affairs in one year of the Reagan administration, quite a body count even for a fellow whose name — Don Johnston — is an Americanized play on Don Juan.
As a movie actor, Murray has long since abandoned the playful cutup everybody loved on Saturday Night Live and taken up residence in a darker, more seasoned persona — part ironist, part tormented seeker. In Flowers, we see in Murray the same kind of poker-faced world-weariness he transmitted in Lost in Translation. Through the years, Don has made a tidy fortune in computer design, but his life doesn’t add up. He never married, and his latest girlfriend (Julie Delpy) has just left him for unspecified reasons; one of the first views Jarmusch gives us is that of a tired campaigner in the war between the sexes sitting alone in his darkened living room, half-watching old movies. Is this a sexual dynamo women still find irresistible? Not to look at him.
Our hero is shaken from his inertia by his energetic neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright). An exuberant family man with five kids and three jobs, Winston still finds time to indulge his taste for amateur detective work, and he convinces Don to ferret out the author of the pink letter.
Each of the far-flung women Don revisits in unnamed sectors of the country exhibits a Jarmuschian oddity. Luscious Laura (Sharon Stone), now the widow of a dead stock-car driver, lives in a trashy frame house with a curiously frank teenage daughter (Alexis Dziena) named Lolita. Neat, nervous Dora (Frances Conroy) and her grinning husband erect grim, prefab mansions in a brain-dead suburb. Dreamy ex-lawyer Carmen (Jessica Lange) has a new career communicating with animals (her cat rightly tells her that Don has a “hidden agenda”) and a new sexual lifestyle. Best of all, hard-edged Penny (Tilda Swinton) has turned into a rural biker chick. “What the fuck do you want, Donny?” she snarls at her uninvited guest.
What the fuck does he want? It’s clear that he doesn’t really know, and if his little roundup of the strays gives him any better sense of history or consequence, Jarmusch wisely lets us draw those conclusions on our own. Does the hero, with his impassive mug and his exhausted demeanor, discover who the mother of his child is? Don’t count on it — not in a Jarmusch film whose fetching existential ambiguities won it the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Is Don now a better man? Jarmusch doesn’t bother with that game, either. If you’re shopping for neatly tied bundles of plot and the rigid arcs of “character development” common to mainstream movies, look elsewhere. Whether he’s playing on the road or at home, Jarmusch always throws a lot of off-speed stuff, and that’s his glory.
