Nothing revelatory here. Jarmusch’s trademark minimalism without the visual flair his previous collaborator, Robby Muller (with an umlaut), brought to Dead Man, Ghost Dog, Down By Law and Mystery Train (as well as Until the End of the World, Barfly, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark) . Then again Flowers’s cinematographer, Frederick Elmes, shot Blue Velvet, The Hulk and Kinsey so the production team must have been working on a low, low budget as the film just doesn’t look good (perhaps it was the Landmark Cinema I visited). It has also been lauded about that Jarmusch wrote the screenplay in two weeks, but to me the film feels underdeveloped and tossed together (straining for poignancy without really achieving anything). Bill Murray has certainly been riding a fine wave over the last couple of years and he has lovely moments in this film, but if he keeps stripping away the artifice from the craft of screen acting he’s going to altogether disappear from view (perhaps that’s his plan). Broken Flowers, however, does come to life whenever a woman enters the frame. And what women: Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Francis Conroy, Tilda Swinton, Julie Delpy and Chloe Sevigny (who deserves special mention as she accomplishes the most with her character in the least amount of screen time). Not bad but nothing to drive out of your way to see.

This was an old favorite, a film that hit me when I saw it (at 10? 11?) as something strangely funny in some kind of adult way that I sort of comprehended, ‘though I could feel the whoosh overhead as innuendo flew by. And that’s something, ’cause the writing in this film is bone-dry, almost all the humor coming from some collision of the laconic manly cowboy-talk, iconic Western conventions, and irony thicker than a seed bull. I seriously loved the movie, saw it again in my teens, and tracked down other work by its writer, Tom McGuane, who subsequently became one of my favorite novelists. (Admittedly, however, his film work–the interesting Missouri Breaks, the pretty funny Tom Waits-including Cold Feet, and the execrable Ninety-Two in the Shade which was very poorly adapted by McGuane from his own excellent novel–is middling.)

Would it hold up? Mostly. (more…)