There are movies which are lots of action interrupted by occasional pauses. Those are the movies people tend to enjoy. Unfortunately Broken Flowers is a movie of pauses interrupted by occasional action. Director Jim Jarmusch lays out his story in excruciatingly slow fashion. It's a road trip story, Bill Murray playing Don Johnston, an aging man criss-crossing the country for reasons we'll get to in a bit. Don has a few important stops on his journey. Sadly Jarmusch wastes way too much time on the travel between those stops. The movie is a seemingly endless succession of shots of the countryside flying by outside Don's car window. There are only so many hills and houses you can see go by before you are screaming "Get on with it already!" at the screen. There is just way too much time in this movie where absolutely nothing is happening. What makes it worse is that it's the same nothing over and over again, all those scenic shots backed by the same repeated musical cues which frustratingly burrow deep inside your brain. When we met Don Johnston it was obvious he was a man who had pretty much checked out on life. He didn't care about anything. The way his story is presented here won't make you care either.
Don is a retired guy, living a quiet life which consists of pretty much nothing but sitting on his couch. He is pushed into action when he receives a mysterious letter from a woman saying he fathered a child with her about twenty years ago and that her son, his son, is now looking for him. The letter is not signed, no indication who it could be from. And apparently Don was quite the ladies' man back in the day because there are five possibilities as to who the mother could be. So now Don must leap off his couch and go find out who the mother is right? Well, no, not at all actually. Don doesn't care about the letter, has no interest in this hypothetical son with the mystery mother. But with some insistent prodding from an exceedingly enthusiastic, and annoying, neighbor, Don sets out on a journey to track down all these old flames and discover the truth. So Don gets on a plane, flies somewhere, gets into his rental car and the movie at this point grinds to a screeching halt.
Don meets up with four women, the fifth having died a few years earlier. These meetings have their entertaining moments. They also have plenty of awkward moments. At some stops Don is greeted warmly, at others not so much. The four women he meets have very different lives, each with life circumstances which are unusual in their own way. One with a teenage daughter who lives up to her name of Lolita, one who's a cat whisperer, one desperately sad, one curiously angry. Of the group Sharon Stone and Jessica Lange get the meatier, and quirkier, parts to play and do well with them. Murray is pretty much just left to react to whatever he is confronted with at each stop. He certainly portrays Don's world-weariness, and road-weariness, well. But the movie really leaves the audience feeling weary. There's just never enough going on. So much time is wasted. And as Don moves from woman to woman the whole thing becomes so repetitive. After the endless lulls when he meets the next woman on his list you desperately want the movie to perk up, for something big to happen. But the movie falls into the trap where it's basically just the same thing again and again. Nothing ever really happens. Don is searching for answers, searching for himself. But in this case it is the audience which never really finds what it is looking for.
