In “Broken Flowers,” the new film by director Jim Jarmusch, Don Johnston (Bill Murray) receives an anonymous letter from an old girlfriend who says that twenty years ago she had Don’s so—nd now his son is on a road trip looking for his father. Don’s friend Winston (Jeffrey Wright) convinces Don to go on his own kind of road trip and look for the mother of his son.
Bill Murray has become an American icon: the aging white man who is at once miserable and charming, pathetic and cool. He has been compared to Buster Keaton, who like Murray, had the ability to communicate with an audience without speaking a word. The back of Murray’s head as he sits motionless on a couch staring into nothing is one of the most expressive images of loneliness in American cinema today.
And it’s not just Bill Murray. Jim Jarmusch is the perfect director for such an actor. Jarmusch’s shots are like Edward Hopper paintings: simple, but loud in their understanding of what it feels like to be alive, not because you want to be alive, but because you were born and you don’t really have any other choice. Jarmusch captures a certain silence that, if you allow yourself to surrender to his pace, can offer you a different kind of film viewing experience, in the vein of Yasujiru Ozu.
Most films have characters that do something dramatic all the time. There is always a problem and the protagonist finds a way to solve it. Audiences tend to like these men who, unlike most of us, will get off their chair and win the big fight; men who, at the end of the movie, are happy. Jarmusch is not like that. He’s not interested in these clichéd stories. He’s interested in men in the “throwaway period of their day,” as Jarmusch himself said in an interview.
In the final scenes of “Coffee and Cigarettes,” another of Jarmusch’s films, two old men sit for several minutes (drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes) silently listening to the faint sound of music. “Can you hear it?” one of them finally asks. Similarly, in “Broken Flowers,” Jarmusch films Murray in a long take listening to a whole song (about 3 minutes). The greatness of these scenes (and I think “Coffee and Cigarettes” is more successful at achieving this) is in Jarmusch’s ability to capture one single moment and make you appreciate the present.
When was the last time you saw a film that did that? For an impatient audience these scenes can seem like torture, but for any Ozu fans out there, these scenes are perfection. In “Broken Flowers” a young man asks Johnston to offer him his philosophy on life. Johnston, in his unpretentious and non-condescending way, remarks that the important thing is to live in the moment, in the present. I believe this is Jarmusch’s philosophy as well.
When I left “Broken Flowers” I did not think that the movie in its entirety was great, but I was struck by specific moments in the film that were particularly meaningful to me. Not everyone can sit through a movie just for its moments, but why not try it? In a time when almost every movie in theaters is shaped to be a blockbuster, “Broken Flowers” presents an alternative to Hollywood, one in which the protagonist is no better than the person in front of the screen.
Note: If you liked “Broken Flowers” I would recommend “Wings of Desire” by Wim Wenders, any Yasujiro Ozu, and, of course, more Jarmusch.
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