Broken Flowers
March 2006 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Like fresh oysters or steak tartar, Jim Jarmusch films are an acquired taste. They seem uncooked, not quite ready for the table. Stuffed with indie technique and laced with allusions to literature and film history, they're consumed by the elite among filmgoers. Broken Flowers, for example, introduces Bill Murray's character, Don Johnston, as he sits motionless on his couch watching Douglas Fairbanks on TV in The Private Life of Don Juan. Then Johnston's live-in Girlfriend, Sherry (Julie Delpy), appears with her suitcase, about to leave him because he's a "has-been Don Juan." Don Johnston equals Don Juan. Just then, his postman slides in a pink letter that sets the plot in motion.

That plot is foreshadowed by the black-and-white Don Juan on Johnston's TV. In 1934 when the movie was made, Fairbanks was 51, his career declining, his marriage to Mary Pickford ending. The movie, Fairbanks' last, has the star poke fun at himself, the once-swashbuckling womanizer. He says, "There comes a time in a man's life when he needs rest, and I'm going to have it!" That might be Don Johnston's line too, as he seems so content sitting quietly on the couch. His inactivity is exaggerated throughout by Jarmusch's long-held stationary shots. The pink letter, anonymous, is from a girlfriend of 20 years ago telling him he has a 19-year-old son who is on the road to find him. If there really is such a son, this womanizer hasn't enough swashbuckle left even to care. But through the instigation of his neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Johnston sets off to discover which of four former girlfriends is the mother of his son -- a Jarmusch variant of the Hollywood road trip.

First, he drops in unannounced on Sharon Stone, gorgeous as Laura, the "professional closet organizer," a NASCAR widow living with her nympho-nymphet daughter, Lolita. Frances Conroy is the chillingly repressed wife in a real-estate couple selling "quality prefabs." Jessica Lange as Dr. Carmen Markowski is terrific as a professional "animal communicator." Tilda Swinton is Penny, whose rough-cut motorcycle boyfriend beats Johnston up and dumps him into his rental Taurus.

Reviews have made much of how subtly Murray can play a quiet, solitary character after years as a comic. It's seen best after Johnston returns, the mystery unsolved, and a lonely young man about 19 appears in town (Mark Webber), lugging a backpack. Johnston reaches out to him, but frightens him off. End of plot!

What does it all mean? There is a hint in one of the featurettes, a jerky bunch of out-takes called "Farmhouse." The crackly voice-over is by Jarmusch. What his film "means," he says, isn't his job. The audience's interpretation is "much more valuable than my own." What interests him are random happenings ("These things guide our lives") and the yearning in us for something we're missing but can't define.

The other two extra features are also out-takes, too trivial to detail. The audio and video are just fine. It's a slow, languid film that will astonish you and at the end make you wonder about your own life. When another Jarmusch film comes along, I am going to dig right in.

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