In Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, Bill Murray delivers another master class in movie-acting minimalism — so much so that his earlier lessons on the subject (in Lost in Translation and the films of Wes Anderson) seem nearly flamboyant by comparison. As Don Johnston, a middle-aged bachelor resigned to the reliability of life’s disappointments, he’s a tragicomic Buddha, staring fixedly off into space, struggling to sort out that most cryptic of koans ­— the one that says money may buy you early retirement and a sleek modernist home on a cozy suburban street, but will bring you no closer to happiness. It’s a performance of sublime concentration, like Peter Sellers’ in Being There, with each droopy fold and weary line of Murray’s face like an etching on a lithographic plate: You need an ink roller to see their full expressive detail, and then, just as soon, they disappear again. Much the same can be said of Broken Flowers itself. It’s a romantic comedy in which both the romance and the comedy are turned to such muted levels that any lower would require closed captioning.
To read Dave Shulman's interview with
Broken Flowers' director Jim Jarmusch,
click here.
When the movie begins, Don has just been dumped by the latest (Julie Delpy) in
an endless string of girlfriends. Then a letter arrives — not a love letter per
se, though it does hail from an unknown woman. Typewritten on pink paper, its
author is one of Don’s erstwhile mistresses, belatedly informing him that, some
19 years earlier, they conceived a son together. And that son is now a young man,
recently embarked on a road trip, possibly as part of a plan to locate his long
lost dad. It’s news that would rattle most men, but which scarcely shakes Don
from his transcendental funk. Indeed, it’s only with the none-too-subtle prodding
of his mystery-obsessed neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), that Don finally agrees
to track down the letter’s anonymous author. There’s just one small hitch: No
fewer than five of Don’s former lady loves could fit the bill. Or make that four.
As fate would have it, one has died.
The remainder of Broken Flowers is taken up by Don’s sojourn from city
to city and one ex-flame to the next — a formula that, in lesser hands, would
doubtless lead to maudlin life lessons about how coming to terms with the past
imbues Don’s life with newfound purpose. Thankfully, Jarmusch never thinks in
terms of grand designs. His best films (including his first commercially released
feature, Stranger Than Paradise, and his astonishing existential Western,
Dead Man) are loose, ambling narratives, often built around quests of real
or mythic purpose and aware that more wisdom is gotten en route to a destination
than upon reaching it. Here, that approach leads to a quartet of comic set pieces,
each charting Don’s reunion with one of his exes, and each finding Jarmusch and
Murray at the height of their deadpan powers. Of them, my personal favorite has
that cauldron of repressed sexuality, Frances Conroy (Six Feet Under’s
Ruth Fisher), as a realtor of “preconstructed designer homes” — though I must
confess that the bit with Jessica Lange as a New Age “animal communicator” ranks
a close second. (The other prospective moms are played, respectively, by Sharon
Stone — whose nymphet daughter treats Murray to an unexpected and undesired striptease
— and a completely unrecognizable Tilda Swinton.)
In Cannes, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, some regarded Broken Flowers as a kind of compromise choice, Jarmusch’s most commercial film to date and an altogether nice, if not particularly innovative, movie able to unite the disparate factions battling over more contentious fare. Be that as it may, if Broken Flowers represents an artistic marking of time, then it is one of the sort more directors (especially those attempting screen comedy) should aspire to. For the peculiar genius of Jarmusch is that he can give us a ladies’ man named Don (as in Juan) and a teenage temptress called Lolita yet never strike us as glib or opportunistic, because the characters themselves aren’t in on the joke. He can cast Lange as a cross between Deepak Chopra and Doctor Doolittle yet never make us feel we’re being told when (or even if) to laugh. And he can leave us with some fatherly advice that, simple as it sounds, may be the movie-dialogue equivalent of one hand clapping: “The past is gone,” Don says as he nears the end of his journey. “The future isn’t here yet, whatever it’s going to be. So all there is is this — the present.”Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 is another movie about a prolific Lothario, his inventory of femmes both douces and fatales, and the random intersection of past, present and future. Few, though, are likely to mistake one for the other: Whereas Jarmusch is a Westerner who possesses an Eastern sense of art-making rigor and discipline, Wong is an Easterner whose movies explode with the mad stylistic fervor of Otto Preminger in his prime. Wong’s latest comes advertised as a sequel of sorts to In the Mood for Love (2000), his 1960s-era chronicle of a writer (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and a secretary (Maggie Cheung) who discover their respective spouses are having an affair and quickly fall in love themselves, amid a patina of luxuriant red and green decors, slow-motion raindrops cascading over streetlights and Nat King Cole singing endlessly in Spanish on the soundtrack. That movie was, to my mind, close to perfect — a rapturous study in eros made nearly unbearable by the characters’ self- and society-imposed resistance to actually touching one another, and featuring two movie stars who radiate a kind of high-wattage, Hollywood glamour almost unknown in Hollywood anymore.Mood closed on the end of that affair, with Leung’s character, Mr. Chow, heading off to Cambodia to empty his head (and perchance his heart) of Mrs. Chan’s haunting presence. 2046 picks the story back up several months later, in the fall of 1966, as Chow returns to Hong Kong and to the hotel that was once home to his illicit rendezvous. At first, he hopes to rent the very same room (2046), though he ends up settling for the one next door (2047). But it’s 2046 that will become the fabled destination in one of Mr. Chow’s science-fiction short stories — a place where one can travel in search of lost memories. It also happens to be the date when control of Hong Kong will fully revert back to mainland China. It all sounds dense and intriguing in Wong’s patented, meta-Proustian manner and,
of course, the movie has so much style to burn that those seated close to the
screen may wish for asbestos jackets. Yet as 2046 alternates between Chow’s
flings with beautiful women (Gong Li as a shadowy, black-gloved gambler; Zhang
Ziyi as a precocious young prostitute) and scenes from his 2046 story (in which
a Japanese man finds himself falling for an android stewardess), the result is
a film chilly and externalized in all the ways that Mood was bottled up
an d woozily dreamlike. To some extent, that seems intentional. The Chow character,
so mild-mannered, gentle and self-effacing in the first film, has here transformed
into a philandering rogue who makes no greater attachment to the women who share
his bed than he does to the morning newspaper. He seems to have lost, or at least
suppressed, the capacity to give of himself, forever scarred by the irretrievability
of his one true love. But we knew that already in the final scenes of Mood,
and so watching Chow work his way through a new series of inevitably doomed relationships
becomes a test case for the law of diminishing returns — a Nat King Cole record
stuck in a scratched groove, a madeleine cookie gone horribly stale.
BROKEN FLOWERS | Written and directed by JIM JARMUSCH | Produced by JON KILIK and STACEY SMITH | Released by Focus Features | At Laemmle Sunset 5, Laemmle Monica 4-Plex2046 | Written, directed and produced by WONG KAR-WAI | Released by Sony Pictures Classics | At the Nuart

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