Review: Broken Flowers

You know you didn't enjoy a movie much when the best thing about your evening was the fact that the theater used real butter on the popcorn instead of "buttery topping". Actually, there were a few (very few) things I did like about Broken Flowers - or maybe it's more that I didn't hate them, than that I liked them, per se. Kinda like the weird, paste-eating kid your mom always made you be nice to just because she played bridge with his mom - you didn't want to flush his head down the toilet, because you're a nice person and all, but you didn't necessarily want to spend your Saturday night hanging out with him, either.

Broken Flowers was just incredibly disappointing. I am a great lover of indie films. I like quirky, weird, movies, most of the time, but I'm getting really fed up with these festival films getting all this critical acclaim and very little honest critique. It reminds me a lot of being in junior high, when the popular kids would suddenly decide some stupid fashion trend (Anyone remember leg warmers? How about knickers!) was really cool, and everyone would just follow along, never quite having the guts to say they think leg warmers or knickers are really stupid looking.

This happened recently with another Cannes winner, Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I liked better than Broken Flowers but still didn't find deserving of the unmitigated prasie lavished on it by critics. People - just because a jury at Cannes thinks a film is the bees knees, doesn't mean you can't find fault with it, critique it for its weaknesses, and bemoan that it wasn't better. I saw many, many films at the Seattle International Film Festival that were very much better than Broken Flowers.

I was that built up for this film; I loved Bill Murray in both Rushmore and Lost in Translation, he's really found his niche of late, and I enjoy him as an actor. Broken Flowers has some other actors I like a lot as well - Sharon Stone, who I think has always been vastly underrated, turns in a remarkable performance in this film. But ultimately, a few strong performances just couldn't make up for the overall lack of a cohesive story line and interesting characters. I didn't care about any of these people, least of all Johnston. Actually, I found some of his past loves somewhat interesting, but unfortunately we learn so little about any of them that there's no real pay off. 

I suppose, if you are hugely turned on by director Jim Jarmusch's fragmented directorial style, you might not be as bugged by Broken Flowers as I was. I'm a big fan of little things like narrative arc and interesting character development in the films I watch, and this film didn't have either. The film played like a series of loosely connected pieces, but the end result was like trying to put a puzzle together when the pieces don't quite fit, and you're missing about half the pieces you need to make a complete picture at the end.

Here's the basic story: Murray plays a character named Don Johnston. Isn't that clever? See, it's kind of a double entendre - a play on Don Johnson, Ladies Man, and Don Juan, Ladies Man. So, see, his name is supposed to make us buy that he is (or once was) a real ladykiller, even if everything about him makes you think he couldn't maintain a relationship with anyone who wasn't being paid to be there. Johnston is a lonely guy. Yeah, we get that. He lives in a lonely house, sleeps on his lonely couch, in his lonely warm-up suit, with his lonely big TV. He's lonely.

Johnston's girlfriend, Sherry (Julie Delpy who, like most of the other talented actresses in this film, is vastly underused), walks out on him at the beginning of the film, telling him that being with him is like being his mistress - expect he's not married. In the mail that day, Johnston gets a mysterious letter on pink stationery, telling him that he has a 19-year-old son he never knew about, who might be trying to find him. The letter is unsigned.

Johnston shows the letter to his pal Winston (Jeffrey Wright), who tracks down Johnston's past loves and sends Johnston on a road trip to speak to each of them, to see if he can figure out which one sent the letter. He does this all in this terribly beat-around-the-bush sort of way. Why wouldn't you just go to each of them and say, "Look, I got this unsigned letter saying I have a son I never knew about. Was it you?" Instead, Jarmusch has him getting into these convoluted, not terribly interesting or revealing conversations that don't do much to progress the story or the character.

If it doesn't move the story along, or reveal something we didn't know, why is it there? According to Internet Movie Database, Jarmusch wrote the screenplay for this film in just 2 1/2 weeks. I believe it. If some random film student turned this script into to a screenwriting class, they would get ripped to shreds.

Murray does the "lonely guy" thing very well, and other movies have done the weird, hermit-y loner guy much better than this film. Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, for instance. Or Murray himself in both Rushmore and Lost in Translation. In fact, Murray's character in Lost in Translation, while similar in some respects to his Broken Flowers role,  was much more interesting - perhaps because Sofia Coppola invested more energy into helping us know the character than in how many cool camera angles she could get or how long she could drag out a pause before the audience gets tired of the whole extended pause gimmick. It worked really well the first time. The fourth and fifth and sixth times? It was just increasingly annoying.

What particularly irritated me about this film were the characters I wanted to know more about, but didn't get to. I wanted each of Johnston's interactions with his past loves to reveal more about his character and his past; why is he a cold, miserable, depressed, loner? He "used to be" in computers and obviously he did well financially. Why did he quit? Why doesn't this man, who made his fortune in computers, even own one himself? Why has he shut himself off from the world, with the exception of Winston and his family - and why does he let them in? What happened to turn the dashing Don Juan he was in his youth into this miserable shell of a man we meet in the 135 minutes of this film? And why should we care?

Instead of revealing more about Johnston (or any of the characters, really), his interactions with others pretty much tread water. Sure, you're keeping yourself afloat and not drowning, but you're not getting any closer to shore, either. And treading water is only interesting for so long. I wanted to see Johnston move through a more interesting arc; instead, all he really does is move from indifference about whether he might or might not have a son, and who the boy's mother is, to being intrigued about whether a particular young man really is his son, and attempting, clumsily, to reach out to him. The ending of the film left me with nothing feeling resolved, and this hollow feeling of being had; I faithfully watched every minute of this film, waiting for the moment of clarity that would tie it all together and make me go, "Aha!", but that longed for "Aha!" moment never came.

Jarmusch connects the pieces of his story with little chunks of road trip; over time, you almost get the sense that he filmed one road trip sequence and edited it in four times, because it never really changes. These chunks don't serve much of a purpose other than to make sure we know he's traveling from one past love to another. Oh, look, an airplane flying. He's going somewhere. Okay, we get it. Thanks.

Wright does an able enough job as Winston, but the element of making him interested in deconstructing mysteries felt gratuitous. Why wouldn't he care enough about his friend to want to help him out, without needing to add that element to give him a motivation to do so? It's almost as if someone said, "Look, this Johnston character is really unlikeable. Why would his friend even want to help him? We'd better give him a reason to be interested in solving the mystery of the pink letter."

I never read other reviews of films I'm critiquing until after I've published my own, so as not to be swayed by what others say, but there has been such good buzz about this film, that I just had to peek at the Rotten Tomato meter to see where it was coming out. 87%?! Are you kidding me? I just find it flabbergasting that 87% of the RT critics felt that strongly about this film. Maybe they got the numbers reversed, and 87% of them really hated it, which would make a lot more sense to me.

This film won the Grand Prix at Cannes, which, now that I've seen the film, is just shocking. I don't think I was entirely out of line in going to this film with high expectations. I thought I would love it. I thought I would be writing a very different review. Instead, I sat through most of the movie thinking, "Dammit! I really wish I was seeing 2046 right now instead of this!"

I expected to like this film, I really wanted to like this film, I wanted this to be a case where I felt the film deserved the nearly universal praise being lavished on it. Unfortunately, in the end, Broken Flowers just didn't touch me at all, didn't connect with me, didn't make me care about it. That's too bad, because this was interesting material, and in another director's hands it might have taken a different path and been more compelling. The actors in this film, especially Murray and the quartet of excellent actresses (Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton) playing the ex-loves, deserved far more than what they ended up with.