Broken Flowers: the review

Since I have seen it displayed on a blog as if it might be good, let me put you right:


"Is this shitty movie over yet?"

Broken Flowers

Writer/Director: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Julie Delpy.

Jarmusch is showing his age - and not in a good way. From the sleazy, lingering close-ups of teenage legs and gratuitous nudity into geriatric dialogue that treats the internet as "computers" we see perhaps what over-rated writer/directors such as Kubrik can descend into when they aspire to reach the inner recesses of their own arseholes. It's not a pretty look.

Murray plays a wealthy retiree who receives a pink letter claiming to be from an ex-girlfriend who says she had his child - who is 18 - and is now in search of him. She doesn't leave a name and his neighbour sets up an itinerary for a road trip to search for her: and thus the plot excuse for a series of cameos by aging, ex-A list female actors.

To Murray's audibly inaudible indifference the road trip commences. The cameos are unremarkable - in contrast to the clunky pink theme motif which is thrashed beyond death to the point it becomes almost a pantomime as Murray would discover a pink rose or pink whatever at each location. Yawn. Half the film is Bill Murray staring mutely with a blank expression - reflecting the rapidly building disconnection and increasing ambivalence at audience level.

If Jarmusch put this film into black and white, sped it up a bit, turned the sound off and used static boards of text like it was 1905 - the genre for which this film seemed to have been written - then it would still be only slightly less of a shit movie.

Like all terrible stories the sense that it is almost over prompts that horrible, uneasy feeling that the screen is just going to go black and the credits roll despite leaving us neither caring or able to recall if the whole purpose of the road trip had been resolved. And that is, of course, exactly what happens. Yawn. 106 minutes of your life gone and for which there is no legal recourse for compensation.

2 out of 5 stars - and that's being overly generous.