Broken Flowers
by Jim Jarmusch
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bill Murray, Heather Simms, Jessica Lange, Julie Delpy, Sharon StoneDirector: Jim Jarmusch
Writer: Jim Jarmusch
Producer: Ann Ruark
Producer: Jon Kilik
Producer: Karen L. Thorson
Producer: Stacey E. Smith
Writer: Bill Raden
Writer: Sara Driver
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); French (Original Language)
Format: NTSC
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 106 minutes
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: ALL
Movie Reviews of Broken Flowers
Movie Review: Existentialist Dilemma or the New Odysseus
Summary: 3 Stars
After conquering the computer world, Don Johnston (Bill Murray) has lost any sense of what it is to be alive. That loss is punctuated right at the beginning with the departure of Sherry (Julie Delpy) who notes that there is no life in the house, unlike in that of his neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), literally overrun with children and the joyful chaos they create. Sherry asks Don about children, but Don is so demoralized that he is hapless to answer. In any case, the connection of life, children and really rebirth is set.
The search of Don for meaning in his life - actually seeking that which is said to be seeking him - involves a son who, unknown to him, is said to have been created about two decades before. At the instigation of Winston, Don sets out to find the son by re-connecting with the five women with whom he had had relations at that time. (Don was a very busy boy!) In his Odyssey, Don progresses from less to more emotionally profound connections, finally visiting the grave of his former lover (over whose grave he sheds a tear - the first display of emotion we see).
In a sense, Don is progressing, through these visitations, from less to more emotionally mature. His encounter with Laura(Sharon Stone) is nothing more than physical: her sensuous daughter, Lolita is a metaphor for the type of relationship that it was. His encounter with Penny (marvelous Tilda Swinton) was deep, passionate and emotionally very meaningful. The pain of the breakup is alive after 20 years. (Artfully, Jarmusch conveys this by engineering big gaps in our knowledge about why the relationship was so tempestuous.) Of course, Don is looking at the death of his youth when he visits the grave of his dead former lover.)
Don is looking for himself in his past and is trying to locate meaning in his son, someone - or something - he takes to be a reflection of himself. He forces the issue when, toward the movie's end, he (mistakenly?) tries to identify a drifting young man as his son. When Don makes the identification explicit, the boy speaks the last meaningful words of the movie: "You're f****d up." Don is. And we leave him alone surrounded by a hell of mediocrity, silence and unengagement. Don is the metaphor for modern isolation in Nowheresville, USA, emotional disconnection and dysfunction, and meaninglessness.
(BTW, Don's landscapes, though spatially distinct, are synonymous: he gets nowhere.)
The message is profound. How that message is conveyed is less than effective. The scenes are overshot: modern movie actors, Murray certainly, don't know how to act in overlong takes. The production would have benefitted greatly from editing. Again, the movie is too long. Poetry is best conveyed when most effectively communicated: even a poet must search for the best ways to convey her/his thoughts to her/his audience.
Summary of Broken Flowers
Universal, Studios, Region 2 PAL 2005 106 minsSimilar DVD Movies
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