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In Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, Bill Murray plays Don Juan. Or at least that’s who everyone compares him to in his womanizing ways..or maybe it's Don Johnson, “like on Miami Vice”, as everyone mistakes his name at first. The character’s actual name is Don Johnston, but those twin themes of serial seduction and uncertain identity define Johnston’s journey from the first frame to the last.
The film begins with an apathetic Bill Murray, finding himself dumped by his latest girlfriend (Julie Delpy), an event followed soon after by the arrival of an unsigned note from a former flame, warning him that the son he never knew about it is now looking for him. Enthusiastically spurred on by his friend, the aspiring mystery writer Winston (played by the incomparable Jeffrey Wright), Johnston narrows down a list of suspects from his past, and visits them in sequence while looking for inane clues suggested by Winston (e.g. a typewriter ribbon, the color pink).
The journey (apparently by airplane but always through locales resembling upstate New York) forces Johnston to confront his legacy, and provides Murray with a chance to give what may be the best performance of his renewed career. He shifts gears ably between laconic seducer and lost pilgrim as he encounters both young women amused by his charm and humor, and the mature women who have already seen how it ends with him. With that strange alchemy of deadpan desperation he has been perfecting ever since Rushmore, Murray seems convincingly baffled by the frequently nonplussed reception he receives from his exes.
This Don Juan, it turns out, left behind a lot of broken hearts, just like the legendary lech to whom he finds himself compared. Johnston’s ex-girlfriends greet his quest with reactions varying from bemusement, discomfort, to outright violence. Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton all offer strong and richly textured portrayals of people suddenly confronted with an unwelcome reminder of the past, struggling with how to respond to a visit that seems to them like a bizarre imposition.
Jarmusch has always displayed an interest in unstable identities, from Forest Whitaker’s black samurai in Ghost Dog to Gary Farmer’s William Blake-spouting Cayuga in Dead Man. Broken Flowers extends that theme to its conclusion, by asking not only how people constitute themselves through cultural appropriation, but examining how we transform our own lives and those of the people around us by the choices we make, and the people with whom we make them. Looking for his son, Don Johnston is following his own path back through those choices. Broken Flowers is a funny, moving masterpiece.
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