Second Thoughts

Go see Billy Murrary in Broken Flowers. Jim Jarmusch’s new film is gloriously awkward, better so than Coffee and Cigarettes, which was merely awkward and only glorious at the very end. While Coffee and Cigarettes was interesting in its variety, the strange pauses and fumbled words did not accumulate into lasting place in the narrative, to expand and become comfortable. What I loved about Broken Flowers was that the lack of grace in the interactions between Bill Murray’s character and the rest of the world passed, until one could inhabit the movie and find freedom in the disconnectedness that Murray’s character felt. It allowed one to turn off, or perhaps to live a vicarious life in which social normality wasn’t important. In this sense the film felt approximately real. Jarmusch’s film style is rather painstaking, and I was glad for the large coffee I bought right before the show. Yet there is something to be experienced at the breaking point of an attention span, which is where Jarmusch forces you.

I suppose Murray’s ability to mine the depths of the “past his prime” character--see Rushmore, Lost in Translation, The Life Aquatic--plays well into the slow-to-the-point-of-lethargic style of filmmaking that Jarmusch uses. In that way they are suited well to one another, actor and director. I’m inclined to say that Lost in Translation was the peak, with Rushmore being an essential primer and The Life Aquatic the point when it became old, but I was surprised by his performance this time. There was something more genuine to it, a level of subtlety that seemed impossible, and if the performances of those other three movies swayed close to the inherent self-parody (certainly The Life Aquatic), Murray moved past that in Broken Flowers. Suspended in Jarmusch’s otherwordly dimension, I think that Murray felt undeniably more human.