review
Broken Flowers (review)
Bill Murray has perfected the art of the reactionless
reaction shot scene, and there's even more of this in
Broken Flowers than
in last year's Lost in Translation.
If this approach annoys or bores you, this is not the movie for you, but if
you like playing the game of guessing at what's going on from stingily doled out
clues, this film will give up its rewards to a sympathetic viewing.
The central scene is the one between Murray's character
Don and his former lover Carmen (played by Jessica Lange) who has a bustling
practice as an animal communicator. He asks whether she reads the minds of people's
pets, and she tells him that no, she just has an ability to hear what they
say, when they want to be heard. As we watch this film with its long silent
stretches focussing on Don's expressionless face, we try to work out what he's
thinking and feeling, but all we can obtain is what the character reveals through
his words, gestures, and actions.
I liked how the white bandage on Don's face in the
last act of the movie worked as a visible sign of some of the soul-scars that
were becoming apparent to him and to us by this time. Also, there were
the broken flowers of the title wilting in a shambles in his living room, which
for me exemplified the fleetingness of the moment, the "now" that Don
hung his philosophy on when asked by The Kid.
Bill Murray's lined face and thinning hairline was reminding
me of someone else for a long while until it finally clicked for me: I was
thinking about Jack Nicholson in
Something's Gotta Give, who
played an aging roué. It must have been a surface resemblance, since the two
performances are quite different and the two movies are even more unlike. This
is especially apparent in the endings, which span the range between pat and
un-pat. One of the other audience members in the little theater audibly
gasped when the screen went dark just before the credits. Maybe she was thinking
that the producer/director Jim Jarmusch was actually going to tie up the central
question that propelled the plot.