I missed the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers when it came out in 2005, finally saw it this past weekend. And it was OK but not his best. Mystery Train is still my second-best favorite. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for that peculiar mix of different cultural viewpoints―the Japanese couple wanting to experience the land of Elvis―and the mixture of genres―the mysterious gunfire repeating through the scenes, the layering of the quest for identity upon a murder mystery. But my favorite Jarmusch film is still Dead Man. And it’s not just Johnny Depp’s performance and the soundtrack by Neal Young . . . although both actor and musician are amazing. It’s that “vegetable soup” of the cultures: a man with William Blake’s name and a cynical Native American who is a member of the educated class, they running into a rough outlaw band that includes a cannibal. The film borders on farce, a farce of the profundity of the Western experience and Native American life. At the same time, the film really IS profound in its exploration of the randomness of human experience and the utter failure of stereotyping. Every character, right down to the monster played by Billy Bob Thorton, escapes the boundaries of the type depicted. The true individuality of the characters comes through.
This is true of the character Bill Murray plays in Broken Flowers. His sadness over a misspent life, his quest for a purpose in life, hoping to find out whether he is indeed a father, struggling with depression after his last of many girlfriends has left him, all of these add depth to the IDEA of the film. And the Jarmusch blackouts between scenes, hyperreal flashes of memory, and lack of soundtrack in most scenes are solid as usual. But the film didn’t deliver its idea fully. It was flat in the end, not drawing out the depths of the complex motives of the character, Don Johnston. The scene in the cemetery needed flashbacks, maybe even scenes of Johnston with the girl (or was it a woman?) he loved.
