nan | 楠木

Bill Murray returns as a guy with little facial expression in Broken Flowers, a quirky road-trip film that is quietly comical.

The gist of the plot is thus: Murray is Don, a retired businessman who’s still unmarried. He has a girlfriend called Sherry (Julie Delpy) but she’s leaving. As she’s going out the door, the mails’ come in, and there’s a bright pink envelope. It’s a letter from a old love of twenty years past, and while she forgot to sign (and decided to type the letter), she did mention that Don’s got a 19 year old kid, and he’s looking for his dad. Don decides to do nothing; but alas his friendly neighbor Winston (a hilarious Jeffrey Wright) would have none of it, and arranges a road-trip for Don to seek out 4 old loves who could be the writer.

It’s a clever setup: essentially, this allows the film to have 4 mini-pieces, as each encounter would be separate story. And these encounters, as expected, are vastly different. Among other things, Don receives a warm welcome (and another night together) from one, while getting a punch from another.

Like most road films, the trip is symbolic for discovery of oneself. In Broken Flowers, Don knows who he is, and what he has done, but he’s never rethought his past. The trip for him, therefore, is a path down memory lane, an adventurous exploration of his past. No, there’s no regret – his youthful years have been happily spent with various girls, and he probably wouldn’t have had it any other way. But those years have long gone by, and now he’s a middle-aged bachelor and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Is it a son he never knew he had? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just those years that have gone by, though he knows they can never come back.

7/10