Oh boy. Enough with the artifice of minimalism. Murray’s latest bare-bones entry seems like a quick slide down to being a one-trick pan-faced pony. Lost in Translation was slick and novel for its time, even had some genuine cross-cultural humor thrown in. The Life Aquatic was quirky in bits if too sporadic for a general audience. But Broken Flowers’ strained effort at being a soulful existentialist pondering just got my dander up.
The theme, I admit, is intriguing. Don (Murray) is a middle aged man leading a pitifully listless life. One day he gets an anonymous pink letter saying he had fathered a kid twenty years ago. Egged on by his faux-detective Ethiopian friend, he sets off to interrogate all his ex girlfriends. The vivid assortment of these women -- Sharon Stone as an isolationist closet organizer, Jessica Lange as a flaky animal communicator, Tilda Swinton as a redneck biker woman, and Frances Conroy as a button-down prefab real estate agent -- gives the film its only promise of flavor in contrast to Don’s banal existence. I recall a couple of moments that I found amusing enough to blurt out laughing.
But in a stylish statement of keep-the-audience-guessing, everything goes unexplained, unexplored. Why does Don not own a computer despite having made his fortune in the computer business? Why had none of his relationships worked out?
The pace, slower than a barrel of tree slugs, seems moody at first. I began by enjoying the great economy with which Murray plays his part; we can almost see through his transparent countenance to figure what he is thinking. But it quickly gets tiresome. He spends endless minutes driving at what seems like 5 mph, or gawking at roadside walls, or sitting in awkward sullenness across the table from his counterparts. There is even a gratuitous faux-Lolita nudity moment thrown in, which, like much else, amounts to very little.
At the end of it all we are probably expected to tie all those loose strands into a conception that should make it all amusing and oh-so-thoughtful. ’’Live in the present’’ is the bankrupt philosophy that we are left to mull over, which seems rather apt, because beyond that disappointed moment in the theatre when the credits suddenly started rolling, this is an utterly forgettable, insipid exercise in Murrayism, built on the assumption that some newfangled Ethiopian jazz (which sounds like a Gotan Project recording on an African safari) will make up for the spice that the storytellers clearly forgot to bring to the table.
A largely boring film with a cavalcade of big name stars that should appeal to pedantic critics, or people looking for a good background for a comfortable afternoon nap. One hopes Murray’s upcoming vehicles will attempt to be a bit more upbeat than his recent capers.