That is the beauty of Jarmusch’s humor: Even when he seems like he’s being extremely obvious, he’s not. Broken Flowers is filled with cliché symbols, all of which signify everything and nothing at the same time: flowers, the color pink, even a recurring track suit could be the key to everything in the film or just meaningless signifiers meant to send symbol seekers on a wild goose chase. More so than most films, Broken Flowers is exactly what you make of it.

The star of the film is Bill Murray, who has become a critical darling in recent years after his canny work with Wes Anderson and his beautifully moving turn in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). His performance in Broken Flowers is similar to Coppola’s film; in both he plays an aging man who is on the verge of throwing in the towel. As Don Johnston, Murray buries himself deep within the recesses of a man who we can imagine was once lively and vivacious, but has now settled into a kind of post-middle-age ennui where he is perfectly comfortable sitting on the leather couch in front of his flat-screen television, barely even able to muster the energy to get up as his latest girlfriend (Julie Delpy) walks out the door.

The story is set in motion when a pink, unsigned letter arrives one day from one of Don’s former flames. The letter informs him that he has a son who is now 19 and may be looking for him. Laconic as he is, Don is perfectly willing to let it drop, writing it off in his own mind as a prank, but his next-door neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), a family man with a gaggle of kids who likes to play detective, insists that he find out who the mother is. This requires Don to make a list of all the girls he bedded two decades earlier and then seek them out. He comes up with a list of five women, but since one of them is dead, he only has to visit four.

Thus, the majority of the film follows Don as he slowly traverses the country in airplanes and recent Ford Taurses, showing up unannounced on the doorsteps of his former girlfriends with a bundle of pink flowers and no utterable reason for being there. The women range from a widow (Sharon Stone) with a sexually vivacious teenage daughter with the all-too-appropriate name of Lolita (Alexis Dziena), to a former hippie turned button-down real estate agent (Frances Conroy), to a pet communicator (Jessica Lange). Each woman is completely different from the one before, and it’s up to us to decide whether that reflects Don’s varied tastes or the ways in which we all change as we grow older.

Broken Flowers is told in Jarmusch’s singular style, which relies largely on long takes, awkward silences, and frequent fades to black. Like his symbolism, the story itself is either a deeply significant look at the past bursting forth onto the present or a completely inconsequential detour in the life of a selfish man. Jarmusch admittedly wrote the story with Bill Murray in mind for the lead, and in many ways they are perfect for each other; both thrive on a kind of droll, ironic humor that constantly catches you off-guard, but is never as devoid of warmth and humanity as it first appears. They both work off a specifically offbeat timing and attention to minute detail. There is an economy to their work, but not at the expense of surprise.

Yet, in some ways Murray’s casting feels wrong. One could imagine that the part might have had a deeper and more amusing resonance had it been played by an actor who two decades ago was a genuine Don Juan and not a former Saturday Night Live comedian played a stoned groundskeeper in Caddyshack. Murray has developed into a great actor, but watching him in Broken Flowers, it’s hard to imagine him as a former womanizer, even one who was left by women as many times as he left them.

Copyright ©2005 James Kendrick

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