I stumbled across Jim Jarmusch late one night during one of those helpful IFC retrospectives. Little did I know that I had already been primed for films like Stranger Than Paradise or Mystery Train. Well-steeped in the ad hoc personalizations of the Band of Outsiders era Godard, I caught on to Jarmusch’s game with minimal effort. In his earlier films one has the sense that Jarmusch had more of a knack for aiming his camera at the right spot in a somewhat unscripted scene than he did for the tight, controlled sort of directing that characterized American independent filmmaking of his predecessors. This is excepting Cassevetes of course, from whom Jarmusch learned how to be such an actor driven director. And here also is where Jarmusch and Godard part ways. Godard’s films develop around ideas, but Jarmusch’s films develop more around people who occasionally have ideas.


Jarmusch once said in an interview that he starts the filmmaking process simply by sketching the contours of a character (even with a specific actor in mind) and then “the plot kind of suggests itself around the character.” And sure enough, one can still see this principle at work in his later films. Dead Man emerges around a series of well-rounded characters penciled into the frame by a black and white Blakian naturalism. Ghost Dog follows an unexpectedly sensitive figure through what could be a script as referentially vapid as Pulp Fiction. (Coffee and Cigarettes just does its own thing.) And now Broken Flowers adds to this catalogue of character studies masquerading as thoughtful fictions.


Jarmusch had to have Bill Murray in mind as he developed this character. Not only is he the logical end of the last few characters played by Murray (the aging absent dad of Lost in Translation or the same, though funnier, in The Life Aquatic), but things he does are the sorts of things I have always imagined Bill Murray doing on his days off. He sits around in snazzy tracksuits listening to Marvin Gaye and ruminating about days gone by, saying something dryly ironic every now and then to the waitress at the diner he frequents. In Broken Flowers he plays Don Johnston, retired computer entrepreneur and inveterate womanizer. After his latest girlfriend leaves him, Don gets a distinctly pink letter in the mail informing him that a son he fathered twenty years ago is now out trying to track down his birth father.


Other reviews cover the plot line well enough. Aided by his interestingly Ethiopian neighbor, Winston, Don tracks down the five possible mothers of such a child and visits them in turn. The last, having died years before, provides a surprisingly mortal moment in a rain swept cemetery. Along the way there are plenty of the Jarmusch brand of giggles, so much so that after a while the comedy begins to become pat, a little overbearing. But I think Jarmusch does this on purpose. There is a scene in which one ex talks about her dog named "Winston." Don winces a bit, as if this has all gotten too hokey for him. Up until that point the film had been a bit blase, predictable, and uncreative in its dialogue. In this scene though it all starts to pivot as both Don and the audience realize at the same time: Yeah...this is a bit corny. A bit too corny. But the paternity crisis he is in isn't corny at all. Don has just been treating it at a charming and comedic distance, which is what has gotten him into all this emotional trouble in the first place.


This comedy is also moderated by frequent stretches of silence, Don pilots his rental car down the highway to the jazzy hum of Winston’s specially crafted soundtrack. Directors like Tarkovsky or Bresson used the same sort of blocks of space and sound to create a sense of pacing and transcendence, but Jarmusch just creates vacancies. The hotel room at the end of Stranger than Paradise is as stifling as it is bare and vacuous, one actually gets anxious while trying to endure the minimalism of that scene. The end of Broken Flowers is the same species of startling vacancy. Don stands in the middle of the street not having found any of the answers he went looking for, and realizing in the process just how important the question was to begin with. He finds he wants a son, he does want something grounding like that in his life. But he stands in the middle of the street without one, every passing twenty-year-old male a vision of what could have been.


Further notes on humor and irony in the film:


Much of the scripted comedy strikes some viewers as a bit trite and shallow, certainly beneath the subtlety of Jarmusch's other work. Which is true. We get tired of Johnston's shtick after a while, but so does he, right in the scene before the cemetary. When he finds out that his ex's dog is also named Winston (like his friendly neighbor), he grimaces as if it is all too much for him. It has gotten too cute, too sophmoric, which is a complete offense to the situation he has created for himself. Thus Johnston's character arc is from self-indulgent under-realization to a discovery that this dull comic monotone is actually the way he has chosen to deal with the emotional fallout of being a gigolo. That is why the end is so vacuous, he simply has no response because he never made the effort to learn one. All he can feel is some sort of frantic fear that he missed out on life and now can't really do anything about it.


The cemetary scene in most other contexts would be so cheesy, so pat. But here it effectively signals Johnston's breaking point. And what makes this ironic is that he is broken in the context a scene as conventional (in a cemetary, it is even raining, yada yada yada) as the preceding film; it has taken a lot of very subtle footwork for Jarmusch to make this actually work. Johnston isn't "above all this" as if his posing provides enough of a buffer from reality, he has just been pretending that it does. And the shallowness of the film's comedy serves to expose the Johnston's viral superficiality. The film really is about Johnston's "coming of age" in this respect.


The Marvin Gaye scene is a great example of this. Flat-out cheesy, but so broadly overdrawn that it sets the tone for how we are to perceive Johnston within the film. Think of that scene as a bit of foreshadowing.


Furthermore, it isn't Johnston in the film it who is deadpan, it is actually Jarmusch. Murray is fantastic at "under-realization" in the film, but Jarmusch is a master at providing space for actors to respond to his scripts this way. I hate to pull out the word, but as an auteur, I think Jarmusch needs to be read in light of his entire body of work. In that context Broken Flowers is an unassuming masterpiece by anyone's standards.