Broken Flowers

Broken Flowers
Opens Fri., Aug. 5, at Harvard Exit

Since Stripes recently found its way onto DVD, a whole new generation of filmgoers, not having known Bill Murray from Saturday Night Live in the '70s, may only associate him with the art-house cinema of Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and now Jim Jarmusch (see interview). I can just imagine the shock when they catch up with Caddyshack or Ghost Busters: Oh, you mean he was once actually meant to be funny? Next thing you know, they'll be saying the same about Jerry Lewis.

One thing about Flowers: It makes Lost in Translation and The Life Aquatic seem like slapstick. Jarmusch uses Murray very well, but to very little effect. Don (Murray) spends what seems like the first half-hour of the picture sitting on the couch in his darkened suburban home, dressed in a track suit, doing nothing. It's like Yasujiro Ozu, but not in a good way. His younger girlfriend (Julie Delpy) is leaving this "over the hill Don Juan," which actually rouses him to his feet. Once she's gone, however, the couch beckons.

Then Don gets an anonymous letter on pink stationary informing him of "my hypothetical son," now about 19, apparently searching for his father. His amiably meddling Ethiopian neighbor (Jeffrey Wright) loves to play detective, so he compiles a dossier on four of Don's old lovers from 20 years past, and shoves him out on the road to locate the source of the letter. "I'm a stalker in a Taurus," Don complains, but it beats being a lump on the couch.

This is where things should perk up— a road trip across generic America, where Don visits his old flames (in order: Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton, which leads us to believe Don was much handsomer two decades ago). Things begin well with Stone's character, a cheerfully lusty widow with a teenage daughter who doesn't even know why it's funny that she's been named Lolita. We smile inwardly with Don, who spots a few clues, then piles back in his Taurus for his next destination. But, really, it's all downhill after that. The other actresses are good, but your main impression is of Murray simply driving around to the mix tape Wright gave him (featuring Ethiopian rock and Ohio hipster pop by the Greenhornes). One requires a high tolerance for deadpan with a lack of incident, and you expect Don—and the movie—to get someplace eventually.

But his journey is an inward journey, and his growth—though I'm sure Jarmusch would never use that word—comes more in a sigh of recognition than with hugs, tears, and swelling music. Jarmusch has always been a minimalist, but Flowers is too much so—almost as inert as Don. Jarmusch's hipster lack of affect was a better joke in the Day-Glo '80s; the best response to the crassness of the Reagan era was, perhaps, to have no response. But now, what precisely is he not responding to? Don's inability to commit to a woman, let alone commit to movement, doesn't seem rooted in any kind of philosophy (though he is asked, eventually, if he's a wandering Zen master).

In its small, poignant way, the movie belongs more in the Bill Murray canon, not that of Jim Jarmusch. (One shelf is expanding, the other isn't.) His intensely restrained performance is like watching the rock gradually yield a sculpture within. Or a tombstone. As in The Life Aquatic or Lost in Translation, his character is looking backward, and not liking what he's made out of life. If there are 100 notes of resignation, Murray has sighed most of them since becoming, with Rushmore, the world-weary adopted father to a younger generation of film artists. Why do they love him so? A past master of irony, Murray hasn't now suddenly become sincere, the sad clown who cries. It may be instead that his alertness to random, alternate frequencies makes him more alert to life's randomness. Ironies can be both melancholy and funny, tragic and hilarious, and maybe an old joker knows that best.

Still, those qualities don't make Flowers powerfully tragic or profound. At the end you think, "I should've cared more." Just like Don. (R) BRIAN MILLER

Caterina in the Big City
Opens Fri., July 29, at Seven Gables

I'm sure there are countries in the world where Mean Girls, Heathers, and Thirteen haven't been dubbed into the native tongue and their lessons learned, but I'm equally sure Italy isn't one of them. For that reason, it's hard to understand why this tame, muddled, and derivative coming-of-age flick got made in the first place. Why it was sent back here, to the international center of teen-centric culture, is an even bigger mystery. Heroine Caterina (Alice Teghil), seemingly 12 or 13, isn't very interesting; her adjustment problems are hardly unique when her family moves from the sticks to Rome; and the cliques she must navigate are so ridiculous that their supposedly charismatic ringleaders would both be ostracized at any American high school (and probably end up eating together at the same outcasts' lunch table).