Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, 2005)
Bill Murray is probably my favourite actor, and I'm sooooo delighted with the movies he's been doing the past eight years or so. It's been an impressive run: Rushmore, Lost in Translation, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Cradle Will Rock, Coffee and Cigarettes, and now this. Of course, in that time there was also Garfield, Charlie's Angels, and other crap, but let's just look past that.
I think this film worked best as a look at the failures of the Baby Boomer generation. Maybe "failure" is too harsh. Perhaps something like "change for the worse," or "loss of principle" or something like that. In Murray's quest across the States for the possible mother of a possible son that he's never met, we see the changes that have over-taken not only Murray, but also his former girlfriends, all of which we can assume were a bit more wild and idealistic in youth. But now they are regular mothers with wild daughters or dreary house wives stuck in suburbia in loveless marriages or New Age phonies or have just fallen off the edges of society. And Bill Murray is left to contemplate time, lost opportunities, and the fact that the past is gone. Sure he's well-off, as are many Boomers, but what was lost along the way?
I loved the use of music in this film, how Murray kept popping in the same travel mix into his car stereo, and every time the CD would start with the same song. Nice touch. And how the past was marked with the faint sounds of the Allman Brothers, barely audible in another room as the characters talked in the present.
I think this film worked best as a look at the failures of the Baby Boomer generation. Maybe "failure" is too harsh. Perhaps something like "change for the worse," or "loss of principle" or something like that. In Murray's quest across the States for the possible mother of a possible son that he's never met, we see the changes that have over-taken not only Murray, but also his former girlfriends, all of which we can assume were a bit more wild and idealistic in youth. But now they are regular mothers with wild daughters or dreary house wives stuck in suburbia in loveless marriages or New Age phonies or have just fallen off the edges of society. And Bill Murray is left to contemplate time, lost opportunities, and the fact that the past is gone. Sure he's well-off, as are many Boomers, but what was lost along the way?
I loved the use of music in this film, how Murray kept popping in the same travel mix into his car stereo, and every time the CD would start with the same song. Nice touch. And how the past was marked with the faint sounds of the Allman Brothers, barely audible in another room as the characters talked in the present.