Broken Flowers is a loose collection of long, nearly motionless takes, awkward silences, deadpan dialogue, a great soundtrack and no resolution. I liked it, but I like director Jim Jarmusch’s style. He’s not for everyone.
The film stars Bill Murray, still in his ruminative, sad-sack phase, taking a road-trip he’s goaded into by his friend and next-door neighbor, Jeffrey Wright. Murray aims to glean whether one of his four ex-flames could have written him an anonymous letter on pink stationary that alludes to a son he was responsible for producing a few decades back. He looks for clues during his visits but mainly learns how the women, and by extension, himself, have grown into their lives over the years.
A mesmerizing extra on the DVD is a stitched-together mini-movie consisting of a second of footage of the slate getting clapped for every shot in the movie. Not every scene, every shot. It’s like a flipbook version of the whole film.