Broken Flowers

BROKEN FLOWERS   ***1/2

Jim Jarmusch

2005

IDEA:  The aptly named Don Johnston, an aging and taciturn former ladies' man, receives an anonymous letter in the mail informing him he's the father of a 19-year-old son. Spurred on by his enthusiastic neighbor, he travels the country, visiting the four past girlfriends who may have sent that letter.

BLURB:  The only certainty in Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch’s marvelously droll study of late-life arrest, is that nothing is certain. Bill Murray’s Don Johnston figures this out in the director’s characteristically laconic fashion: amongst coolly curated spaces and inscrutable past flames, he partakes in a domestic odyssey that only curves, elliptically, to reveal question marks proceeded by telling silences. The answers are always out of reach, the guarantees stymied by the possibility, however farfetched, of yet more possibilities. Everything adds up to nothing, which is also, maybe, something. The film’s brand of nihilism is enlivened by humor and pathos, Jarmusch’s observations on ponderous notions – of impossible communication, of cosmic indifference, of chaos theory and karma – filtered through a pithy awareness of how simultaneously terrifying and archly funny those concepts can be. Where he looks, we look, and where he teases the suggestion of something important, we are inclined to go along with it, forming connections in our head that may or may not actually be there. Who can’t relate? Broken Flowers is about the perpetual questioning of probabilities, of seeing things and wondering if, how, or when they may pertain to you. That we might never know for sure is certain.

The Long Day Closes

THE LONG DAY CLOSES   ****

Terence Davies

1992

IDEA:  Bud, a lonely young boy growing up in Liverpool, seeks solace in family, daydreams, and, most importantly, the movies.

BLURB:  The Long Day Closes is a movie of memories, which is also to say it is a memory of movies, of life and time wedded inextricably to the hypnotic movement of film. Forgoing narrative for a mélange of exquisite, almost unspeakably beatific impressions, Davies crafts a vision of his childhood in mid-1950s Liverpool that breathes with the cinema’s uniquely oneiric language. Images billow and float and seep into one another; mellifluous tracking shots and painterly tableaux are synced in rhapsody with music and dialogue; everything appears to be recounted as much by a human mind as by the ethereal flickering of a movie projector. Most filmmakers might have mounted this film-drunk picture as pastiche, but Davies has something infinitely more profound in mind: less a quoting of classic cinema and song than a full-bodied absorption of them, an integration so seamless their entire histories seem to have been ingrained in the film’s fiber. The result is a movie of near celestial stature, one that manages to align and conflate the processes of cinema, memory, and dream to such a degree they feel divinely enmeshed. But Davies never lets us forget the transience of those processes, and by the time the last frames fade away from the screen, it feels as if a sacred experience has been inevitably curtailed. Somehow, that’s what makes it all the more miraculous.