If you’re looking for peak Bill Murray, 2005’s Broken Flowers is a strong contender. Murray himself recently said, “that was a perfect movie… it really did happen”, (while eating spicy chicken wings on a YouTube show called First We Feast, in case you want to check that out too).
It’s peak Murray because it’s a Jim Jarmusch movie, and Murray and Jarmusch are both masters of cool deadpan. But also because this is a Murray vehicle in a way even Groundhog Day cannot match. He is in every scene, the story is all about his character and though there’s obviously a gulf between the Murray we see on screen and the real one, what we get here is the sort of Bill Murray we’d like Bill Murray to be in real life. Drole and absolutely stonefaced.
Jarmusch opens the film with a scene giving us the movie in a nutshell, of Murray watching an old film on TV, face as devoid of emotion as a flatfish. It’s an old Douglas Fairbanks movie, made when he was getting jowly, and it’s called The Private Life of Don Juan. Murray’s character’s name is Don Johnston – nudge nudge – and while Fairbanks is doing his thing on the TV screen, ageing womaniser Don’s latest girlfriend, played by Julie Delpy, is wheeling her things out of the house and leaving him, pausing only to call him an “over the hill Don Juan” – more nudging – before vacating the house and the movie.
On her way out she notices a letter on the mat, undoubtedly from one of his girlfriends, she snarks, before exiting. She’s not wrong. The letter, unsigned and with an indistinct postmark, informs Don that he has a 19-year-old son, somewhere. And that’s it.
Don is propelled – if that’s the word for a man this shut down and laid back – onto a quest to discover which of the various girlfriends from two decades back bore him a son. Don is rich, having made money out of computers. But he doesn’t have one in his home (Murray is also a bit of a tech-refusenik) so calls on friend and neighbour Winston (Jeffrey Wright) to help him out. Within a couple of days Winston, a fan of crime fiction, has done the online trawling and narrowed down to five possible women. One of them has since died, so that’s four. Handing Don an itinerary, Winston sends him on his way.
Off Don sets, in a hire car, with a sheaf of printouts (life before the apps, eh) and armed with a CD Winston has burned for him, of Mulatu Astatke, the “father of Ethio-jazz” whose distinctive jaunty, wonky music is the soundtrack to this jaunty and wonky movie.
A road movie, then, divided up into chapters, Don visiting the various old flames and having an increasingly hard time. With Laura (Sharon Stone) there’s Lolita (Alexis Dziena), the jailbait daughter, to fend off. With Dora (Frances Conroy), there’s the unbearably chummy husband, Ron (Christopher McDonald). At the office of Carmen (Jessica Lange), who is now an animal whisperer, he has to get through her PA (Chloë Sevigny), who spots that Don is ogling her legs. And finally there’s Penny (Tilda Swinton), whose husband (Larry Fessenden) gives him something painful to remember.
Shooting in long takes, Jarmusch formats the film strictly. Between each ex girlfriend, shots of Don on the road, face to camera, shots of the freeway, shots of the country whizzing by, shots of Don on an airplane doing nothing in particular. Lots of Bill Murray doing not much more than being Bill Murray.
There’s an existential aspect to the quest – Don’s search not just for his son but for his missing mojo – and the stillness of Murray’s performance is contradicted by the activity in his eyes. Always on the move. Don’s search is internal as much as external.
Not much happens in this movie and things are left fairly unresolved, but it thrashes away beneath the surface the entire time. Maybe not “perfect” but not far off.
Broken Flowers – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
