The Reel Critic

Author: JUSTINE KATZENBACH

Imagine waking up one morning to find your current lover's bags packed and ready for departure, while simultaneously opening a mysterious letter enclosed in a pink envelope revealing not only that 19 years earlier you and an anonymous woman had a son, but also that this young man is on the prowl, not stopping until he finds you.

Such are the conditions for poor Don Johnston (Bill Murray), a middle-aged retiree from the computer industry, who, undeniably depressed, confronts this life-altering information with a response of indifference. While sitting in his metallic suburban home, filled to the brim with objects: a large flat screen tv, leather couches, a stereo system equipped for "The Beatles" - there still remains a haunting sensation of utter emptiness.

So, convinced by his dear friend Winston (Jeffery Wright), Don commences a trip that will lead him from one ex-girlfriend to another in an effort to find the mother of his child, encountering bizarre and ironic occurrences at every corner. Traveling from one woman to the next, he searches desperately for hints that she is the one.

The film captures the journey beautifully. While this story encapsulates the literal voyage, Don also undergoes an emotional and psychological passage that holds far greater importance. His images of each woman are destroyed - one ex-protesting hippie now lives in a quintessential McMansion and sells real estate with her husband, while another once determined student has realized that she'd rather live with her female partner and work as an animal-human liaison, translating barks and purrs into verbalized emotions and opinions.

Throughout it all, Don is constantly urged to question the past. If everyone he remembers a certain way has transformed into something else, then what has happened to him?

With some beautiful shots and imagery that director Jim Jarmusch clearly spent hours of concentration on, visually speaking, the film has some truly enjoyable moments. Jarmusch works with Murray in order to capture his humor not only through his actions, but also by the way in which his actions are filmed. Long, pensive shots focus on Murray's incredibly detailed and stoic face while he creates his particular comic effect propelled by a simple smirk of the lips or a lift of his right eyebrow.

Although Murray's performance is conducive to his character (sullen, bored, ineffective), I can't help but feel discouraged by his consistency. Within the first minute of the film, the tone of the movie was set in that most unsurprising of manners. His performance was exactly how I had imagined it to be: quietly humorous and slightly depressing, not unlike his past character Bob Harris in "Lost in Translation," or even Phil Connors in "Groundhog Day." This is not to say that Murray's seeming lack of broad range is a default. It simply means that for individual film-goers he is a very predictable character, and therefore the genre of film that he enacts is often just as predictable.

"Broken Flowers," which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes International Film Festival, is refreshing in the sense that it departs from the conventional Hollywood movie definition. However, I still felt a sense of disappointment created by the lack of originality. I wonder if the new independent film craze has, in effect, become just as generic for displaying emotionally dysfunctional "ordinary" human beings who stand as a commentary on modern America, as Hollywood films have become generic for car chases, uninventive love triangles and explosions.