FilmFemme

Is there anything better than a SearchingOutOldGirlfriends movie?  Well, maybe a Jean-Claude Van Damme double feature, but besides that.

In an instance similar to more recent efforts like The Wrestler, Jim Jarmusch‘s 2005 mid-life drama Broken Flowers  never could have worked without the sensibilities of its star, in this case Bill Murray.  Murray plays Don Johnston, a bachelor successful in life (a vague job having to do with ‘computers’) and unsuccessful in love.  One fateful day, the same day his girlfriend Sherri (Julie Delpy) leaves him, he gets an anonymous letter from an old flame saying that he has a son who is coming to find him.  On the advice of his neighbor, a charmingly enthusiastic Jeffrey Wright, he decides to track down the women he was with in the year this son would have been conceived.  An amateur sleuth, Winston (Wright) promises to piece together the clues and figure out who bore Don’s child.  So he embarks on one of those journeys of self-discovery and visits these women — all of whom are lovely and slightly fucked-up.  Sharon Stone has a hyper-sexualized daughter named Lolita.  When Murray learns this he balks in his unduplicated deadpan and it’s painfully funny.  Down the list is a buttoned up Frances Conroy, who is now married to Shooter McGavin, a timelessly beautiful Jessica Lange who is an animal communicator and employs the cruelly sexy Chloe Sevigny as an assistant and an unrecognizably youthful and brunette Tilda Swinton, the only woman who seems slighted when Don shows up at her doorstep.

Poignant but not schmaltzy, Broken Flowers showcases Murray’s talents in the same way that Wes Anderson plumbed them in Rushmore.  His sad energy is palpable and the wall that he places between himself and the women he encounters fills up the screen.  The movie itself may travel a weathered road, but it goes at the right pace with the right people.

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