Broken Flowers
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

           A few days after screening Broken Flowers, the pensive new film from Jim Jarmusch, I was in the MOMA staring at a photograph of a typewriter for a very long time, much longer than you would stare at something not bearing some coincidental or otherwise relative significance to your life. The picture is Roy Arden’s Terminal City (#14) and it so closely resembles a shot from the film that I became stunned, contemplating at first the meaning behind such a sign. Did it mean I should buy a typewriter? Did it mean a typewriter would fall on my head? Then I remembered the whole point of Broken Flowers is that the human brain makes such abstract connections all the time.
           The tale of Don Johnston (Bill Murray) and his plan to revisit five old girlfriends is fairly simple. There are some details in the trip’s episodes, but each sojourn is left open; the lack of back-stories and generalization of the former flames gives the audience an opportunity to ponder their history with Don. Meanwhile Murray keeps a constant stone-face as his bachelor character surely wonders how life would be different had he stayed with one woman or another.
           An anonymous typewritten letter triggers the tour by alerting the playboy of his unknown son. Don’s friend Winston, comically inhabited by the chameleonic actor Jeffrey Wright, assists with research and arrangements, his enthusiasm for sleuthing an encouragement to go and be perceptive. Incidentals such as pink stationary, a typewriter and family photographs are key in the investigation, though correlates fall into play as Don’s mind enters free association and all observations become an inkless Rorschach test.
         On the surface Broken Flowers might feel like a complement to David O. Russell’s manic orphan-odyssey Flirting with Disaster, and it is not lacking in odd circumstantial humor, but the deeper themes contrastingly link it to films about the interconnectedness of the universe (i.e. any movie that mentions “the butterfly effect”). Not that the film is a discouragement from conjunctive reasoning. The audience participation and resulting streams of consciousness that follow the movie, like my experience at the museum, are intended as rewards to those who may appreciate them. More than just another resonating parade of ideas, though, this is rare cinema that really makes you think rather than just think about.
         Additionally Jarmusch points to the delusive foundations of faith without dismissing its importance. As the characters mull through the potentials and possibilities of life, they remain hopefully regretless and open to chance. To Don, it is a curiosity to think about the could-have-been, not a yearning. His present, on the other hand, is filled with a healthy search for meaning, only becoming futile when it possesses himself excessively.
          It is being said that Broken Flowers is Jarmusch’s most accessible film in his twenty years as one of America’s finest voices. Bill Murray’s attachment should definitely make it an easier sell, but there have been more linear and more hilarious offerings from the filmmaker. Much of his career has always worked on entertaining and cogitative levels, both, and this isn’t that different except for being also remittently introspective. Working as a reversal of Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, which is analytically overbearing, Broken Flowers should have you while it is playing and then have you again when you least expect it.

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