Moriarty

Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

“Tito Puente’s gonna be dead, and you’re gonna say, ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years, and I think he’s fabulous.’”

When Bill Murray fully connects with a filmmaker or a piece of material, the results are special, and the last few years have been particularly good ones for Murray fans. RUSHMORE’s where this renaissance began, but Wes Anderson’s not the only one who gets it. Jim Jarmusch’s BROKEN FLOWERS, which he wrote and directed from an idea by Bill Raden and Sara Driver, is a sad, beautiful little film that manages to be the most accessible thing the director’s ever made, while still retaining every bit of his trademark low-key surreal wit. When Murray appeared in Jarmusch’s COFFEE & CIGARETTES, it was one of the best moments in the film. It was pure silliness, though, a chance encounter between the RZA and the GZA and “Billmuwway” over a whole lot of caffeine. It was like Jarmusch and Murray were flirting, trying to figure out if they really wanted to make a whole film together. When I spoke to Jarmusch about that film, he told me that there was another movie he wanted to make with Murray, something he actually wrote first, specifically for Bill, but that they weren’t quite ready yet. Glad they didn’t put it off for too long, because the result is the best film Jarmusch has made since DEAD MAN, a worthy addition to his overall filmography, a film that seems like a natural extension of what Jarmusch has always done rather than just an excuse to work with a movie star.

Ultimately, BROKEN FLOWERS is a film about unanswered questions, or even unanswerable ones. The film starts with one question and closes with another, while raising others along the way. Don Johnston (Murray) is a bachelor, a guy who drifts from girlfriend to girlfriend, forming no real connections along the way. As the film starts, his current live-in, Sherry (Julie Delpy), is on her way out the door. She’s not angry at him. She doesn’t hate him. She just can’t live with him anymore, and from Don’s reaction, it’s obvious that he’s been here before. He protests, but just a little, and as soon as she’s gone, he sinks back into himself, comfortable with it. Murray’s work here is all about minimalism. By maintaining that deadpan of his (the best in film since Buster Keaton’s), he sells the idea of a guy who is letting life move past him while engaging it as little as possible. He doesn’t appear to have a job. Anytime the subject of money comes up, it seems that he made a bunch of it doing something vaguely related to computers, but he doesn’t even own a computer now. He enjoys the occasional glimpse of family life without having to deal with all the messy complications of it thanks to Winston (the always-brilliant Jeffrey Wright), his next-door neighbor and best friend. Murray and Wright are as great a comedy team as Richard Edson and John Lurie in STRANGER THAN PARADISE or Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer in DEAD MAN. This is what Jarmusch does best, this sort of micro-comedy, small observational stuff, and I could watch an entire film of Winston and Don hanging out. Everything changes for Don when he gets a mysterious letter. Red ink on pink paper. One page. Short, but enough to rattle him. It’s from a woman from his past, telling him that she’s got a son who is almost 20 years old, Don’s son, and the boy is now on the road, looking for answers. The letter isn’t signed, though, and there’s no return address, so Don has no idea who sent it.

Winston’s intrigued. He loves mystery novels, and he sees this as a problem to solve. Don’s a lot less intrigued, though. This is a sudden loose end in his life, a question raised that he’s not even sure he wants an answer to. He likes his life the way it is, disappointments and all, and the more Winston pushes him, the more Don says he doesn’t want to know anything else about the letter. He’d rather withdraw even further, shut down even more. Winston won’t let it rest, though, and he gets Don to make a list of all the women who might have sent the note. Winston tracks the five women down, finds out where each of them are living, and puts together an itinerary. Don still doesn’t want to do it, but he realizes it’ll be easier to go than to argue with Winston about it for the rest of his life. When he does agree, we see the first cracks in the façade that Don projects, and we start to see just how lonely and unhappy he really is.

As he travels around the country, Don comes face to face with the relationships he failed at, the lives he might have led, and it begins to change him. The reactions of the women (played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and a nearly unrecognizable Tilda Swinton) are anything but predictable, and whatever answers Don is looking for, they don’t come easy. The danger with a film like this is that it could be disjointed or episodic, but Jarmusch avoids that trap by showing that each of these encounters illuminates some new facet of Don’s personality, some piece of himself that he left behind at some point. In a way, he’s gathering them up and making himself whole again, even if he doesn’t find the specific thing he thinks he’s looking for. This isn’t a movie about giant over-the-top dramatic fireworks, either. Everything’s kept at a simmer. The easy thing would be to make each stop all about the hurt that Don laid down in these lives before moving on, but it’s been 20 years. In a few cases, the women barely recognize Don. I’m not a fan of Sharon Stone’s work. I think she can be mannered and phony, and becoming a movie star did her no favors as an actor. Here, though, she’s luminous precisely because she’s not playing someone glamorous. She’s a single mother, still mourning the recent death of her husband, doing her best to raise her daughter Lolita (played by the alarmingly cute Alexis Dziena). The way they both respond to Don is both funny and heartbreaking at the same time, and Stone’s never been better or more genuine. Frances Conroy’s work on SIX FEET UNDER is pretty much all I know her from, and she does a good job of shaking that character off completely and vanishing into her role here. Jessica Lange is great as a slightly unhinged “animal communicator” who may also be a lesbian, even though all we have to base that on is a sort of low-grade hostility towards Don from Chloe Sevigny as Lange’s assistant.

One of the five women didn’t make it, though, and the moment where Don stops by the grave of Michelle Pepe is incredibly quiet, but for me, it was the biggest scene in the film. All that melancholy that Murray just barely keeps in check comes spilling out of him, and the sight of one of our greatest screen comics sitting in the rain, his own tears wetting his cheeks alongside the raindrops, is wrenching. That’s when that quote that I started this review with came popping to mind.

Let me explain. I’ve been a Bill Murray fan since I was eight years old, when I used to watch him on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. That was the year MEATBALLS came out, and I watched the way he played off of Chris Makepeace as “Rudy the Rabbit” and wanted to know someone like that, someone who was part older brother, part bad influence, part role model. He seemed impossibly cool, and part of it was the fact that he is, hands-down, one of the most unlikely looking movie stars I’ve ever seen. The bad skin, the lumpy Midwestern thing... he’s a mutt, like he says in STRIPES. He’s not the guy you expect to see end up with the girl at the end of the film. I was always puzzled growing up at the way my parents seemed to dislike Murray and his sense of humor, but looking back on those early films now, it doesn’t surprise me at all. He’s abrasive and has little or no use for authority. He skates through every situation on the force of his wit, and somehow, he ends up coming out on top in every film, even when he shouldn’t. There was a period where Murray seemed to become less caustic, in films like the excellent GROUNDHOG DAY or the sporadically funny WHAT ABOUT BOB?, as if he were trying to smooth off some of those rough edges. But that seemed to dead-end in a series of forgettable films like THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO LITTLE and LARGER THAN LIFE, and now, he’s embraced that dour world view that has always been part of his best work. There’s a huge difference between a young man with that attitude and the Murray we see in BROKEN FLOWERS. There’s a world-weary thing going on now that is quite affecting, and for the first time, he looks genuinely old to me. It made me realize that we’re at the other end of Murray’s career. He’s notoriously picky about what he will or won’t do, often choosing to appear in films based on a whim, and there’s no way of knowing how many more movies he’ll choose to make. It’s not like there are endless stacks of scripts written for guys in their 50s and 60s, especially not great ones. That’s why a film like this should be treasured. One of these days, sooner than I like, Murray’s going to be gone, and all we’ll be able to do is look back and say, “Oh, I’ve been watching him for years, and I think he’s fabulous.” Thank god a filmmaker as great as Jarmusch agrees.

The film is beautifully photographed by Frederick Elmes, who really does have one of the best bodies of work of any working cinematographer right now. His work on Bill Condon’s KINSEY last year was strong, and he’s also worked on pictures as big as THE HULK and as personal as ERASERHEAD. There’s something painterly about the way he shoots his films, even the big commercial ones, and the way he shoots all of the actresses in this film is brave. He never lights them for glamour. Instead, he lets you see exactly what age has done to them, and in a way, it makes them all even more beautiful. It makes them real. It’s the same thing with Murray. He gets in close and makes sure you can see every line, every wrinkle, every pockmark scar on his face, and it’s almost like you’re seeing inside Murray, like you’re getting a peek at his heart. Jay Rabinowitz is as good an editor as you could hope for, having cut films like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and CLEAN, SHAVEN. He’s also worked with Jarmusch a number of times, and he has an innate sense of how to make the director’s peculiar rhythms work.

For anyone who feels like 2005 has been a let-down at the movies, or who is tired of predictable blockbuster fare, or who simply wants to see what happens when you trust actors and make a film about the spaces between people and the simple truth of what yearning does to us, BROKEN FLOWERS will seem like some sort of a miracle, and I have no doubt that it will stand as one of the very best films of the year by the time all is said and done. Focus Films has a real winner here, and you’ll get a chance to see it on August 5th when they release it. If you’re in LA, I think they’re screening it as part of the LA Film Festival this coming weekend. Whenever and however you see it, I hope it affects you the same way it did me. The ending offers no resolution, but by doing so, it opens up a world of possibilities. It may be the most generous film Jarmusch has ever made, emotionally speaking. It’s certainly not something I’ll shake easily.