Movie Review: Broken Flowers
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What Parents Should Know
Parents should know that the protagonist is a devout
bachelor, now middle-aged, who has left behind many women.
Characters use curse words (mostly in conversation, and at the
end, during a fight), smoke, drink, and use drugs (as well as
slang for drugs, especially marijuana). Stereotypical bikers
briefly assault Don at the end, leaving him bloodied and
unconscious. The film includes sexual imagery (a post-sex
morning awakening, an adolescent girl nude [not explicit] and
in her underwear) and references (to past relationships).
Families who see this film can discuss the combination of regret and curiosity that motivates Don's effort to find his son. How does the film suggest that his self-understanding as a "Don Juan" is necessarily changing as he grows older? How does each woman reflect a different aspect of his personality and the variety of his desires? How do their fates suggest alternatives to his own? (In particular, how does the "animal communicator"'s desire to keep her dead dog with her in spirit a means to put off or deny death?) How does looking back on life provoke remorse or desire for change?
Common Sense Media Review
A sort of minimalist melodrama, Jim Jarmusch's BROKEN
FLOWERS follows aging lothario Don Johnston (Bill Murray) as he
comes to terms with his life and likely legacy. A technophobe
millionaire owing to some vague computer business, Don is more
a vacancy than an emotional center. He first appears seated on
his sofa, watching Douglas Fairbanks in
The Private Life of Don Juan, as his girlfriend Sherry
(Julie Delpy) leaves in a huff. But then he gets a letter, on
pink stationery, with no return address or signature, saying he
has a 19-year-old son who may or may not be coming to look for
him. This inspires Don to move.
He's prodded by his next-door neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), devotee of detective stories and the internet, who takes up the case as one to be solved. Based on a brief list of Don's old girlfriends' names and long-ago addresses, Winston arranges flights, motels, and rental cars, hands his friend an itinerary, and sends him forth to discover his progeny. "You need to treat this as a sign," urges Winston, "of the direction of your life at the present moment."
Following Winston's advice, Don visits four women, at each stop looking for indications that she likes the color pink (a fifth possibility turns out to be dead, and he visits her grave). Laura (Sharon Stone), a professional closet organizer, lives with daughter Lolita (Alexis Dziena) in a home filled with pink accessories and photos of her dead racecar driver husband. Once a radiant flower child, Dora (Frances Conroy) now hands out pink business cards in the suburban real estate business she shares with her overbearing husband. The serene Carmen (Jessica Lange) is a animal communicator with an office off in the woods, and Penny (Tilda Swinton) is a biker who has bad memories of Don; her tattooed friends slam him into unconsciousness and leave him in his rental car in a field.
Organized into a series of vignettes, the movie doesn't build a narrative so much as it deconstructs the idea of narrative, as well as the sense that a life leads to clear resolution. Don might be indifferent, pained, even remorseful about his serial abandonments, but it remains hard to tell. Gauged by the women he's known, Don's cipher and a convention, not nearly so mesmerizing as he imagines himself.
Families who enjoy this movie might also like another man-on-a-road-trip movie, Sullivan's Travels (1941), Murray's previous low-key, midlife crisis comedies, Rushmore and Lost in Translation, or Jarmusch's other films with offbeat protagonists, Dead Man and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing information to help parents make media and entertainment choices for their families.
