Broken Flowers

Bill Murray, a master when it comes depicting sadness in the heart of comedy, does a fine job in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers.

It hardly seems 21 years since Jim Jarmusch, the American indie master of the offbeat, weighed in with the full-length version of Stranger Than Paradise.

That film, in which a cool young New Yorker receives a surprise visit from his Hungarian cousin before both embark on a road trip, earned the director the Camera d'Or - the award for best first feature - at Cannes.

It was the birth of an unassuming legend whose output has been sparse - he's made only eight full-length dramatic features - but consistently interesting.

Broken Flowers was honoured at Cannes too, with the Grand Prix, an award that recognises originality.

That's a trifle ironic since Broken Flowers is Jarmusch's most commercial and accessible movie, though it remains rich in pleasures for longtime fans.

Like Paradise - like most Jarmusch, actually - it's an episodic movie. And it starts with an unannounced arrival too, of a letter, written on pink paper.

It's addressed to Don Johnston (Murray), a lifelong bachelor who has made a fortune in computers but now spends most of his time on the couch as gloomy middle-age steals over him.
The unsigned letter announces that he has fathered a son by a long-ago lover and that the boy, now a young man, is on the way to track him down.

The fact that it arrives just as his much younger live-in girlfriend, Sherry (Delpy), is leaving "an over-the-hill Don Juan" should add to its emotional weight, but it's not as if Don notices - he responds to Sherry's departure as he responds to life, with a tired indifference that looks indistinguishable from chronic depression.

He responds that way to the letter, too.

This infuriates his irrepressibly energetic neighbour, Winston (Wright), a detective by obsessive inclination, who narrows the field of suspects and devises a cross-country itinerary that will allow him to check out four past loves and their progeny.

To say more would be to give away too much about what he finds when he hooks up - in four discrete chapters - with the old flames (Stone, Conroy, Lange and Swinton) and to rob those sequences of their many incidental rewards. The only reason you recognise Narnia's White Witch Swinton, for example, is that all the other women have already been and gone.

Jarmusch litters the screen with tantalising hints in the form of pink objects that may be clues, but it takes a while for Don - and for us - to realise that he's looking in the wrong place or maybe for the wrong thing.

As conceived by Jarmusch, Don is something of an Everyman: he comes from a suitably anonymous Center City in a non-existent state (abbreviated in an address to NT). But as incarnated by Murray, he's entirely individual. The characterisation may recall his forlorn and fading film star Bob Harris in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, but that observation gets things the wrong way around.

Both Jarmusch and Coppola understand Murray's brilliant talent, which has seeped out of every character he's ever played. He's a modern clown who finds the sadness at the heart of comedy and the laughter that may be had once you accept how sad life is.

Broken Flowers is a wry, sly and utterly enchanting gem for people who know that all the best travelling is done internally.

It is also, perversely, one of the happiest films of my year.

CAST: Bill Murray, Sharon Stone, Julie Delpy, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Jeffrey Wright
DIRECTOR: Jim Jarmusch
RUNNING TIME: 107 minutes
RATING: M, offensive language and nudity
SCREENING: All cinemas