http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/artslife/story.html?id=bd2a9672-b00e-48ce-8725-2c0906e5dab3

Deadpan can only go so far before it's dead boring

Robert Fulford
National Post
August 30, 2005

At the beginning of Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, Bill Murray sits alone
as the TV plays an old movie that Jarmusch has carefully chosen for its
symbolic power. It's the first of many symbols that Jarmusch will spray
over the audience in the next 105 minutes. He has filled Broken Flowers
with messages, and wants to deliver them with as much force as possible.

Murray's character is watching The Private Life of Don Juan, a 1934
melodrama by Alexander Korda. We don't learn much about that film from
Broken Flowers, but Jarmusch knows his admirers will look it up as soon as
they get home.

So we have now learned that Korda's story ends with the collapse of Don
Juan's erotic career, his public disgrace and his retirement from the
ranks of sexual overachievers. We also know the movie failed, partly
because the situation of the star, Douglas Fairbanks, resembled Don
Juan's. Fairbanks had become famous playing young daredevils, but in 1934
he was 51, overweight, somewhat bald and only five years away from his
fatal heart attack.

Disappointment, humiliation, the deterioration that accompanies ageing:
Those were Korda's themes, and on this occasion they are Jarmusch's too.
Murray, given the evocative name of Don Johnston, becomes the latest
embodiment of the Don Juan myth, which has served Mozart, Moliere, Balzac,
Goldoni, Byron and George Bernard Shaw (and that's the short list). The
shape it takes here makes an odd comment on current movies. Jarmusch may
be the king of the independents, but on this outing he can be as
heavy-handed as an old MGM warhorse.

Don's latest girlfriend, who leaves him as the film opens, goes out the
door calling him "a Don Juan." She considers that a devastating insult.

He's not so sure. He's not sure of anything. In an odd way, he's no longer
involved in his own life. He made enough money in computers to stop
working and devote himself to his hobby, pursuing women. We sense this
hasn't entirely worked out. No doubt some of the men who look forward to a
retirement on the golf course are appalled to discover that it's not so
much fun when you do it every day.

Something like this has happened to Don. Misery has infected his soul, a
kind of affective deadening. He's one of those people for whom "the great
affective-passional functions and emotions," as D.H. Lawrence wrote, have
ceased to exist. Certainly something has made him passive.

A letter arrives, apparently from a girlfriend of two decades ago. She
says he impregnated her and now has a 19-year-old son -- who would, if he
exists, be Don's only child. The alleged mom doesn't give her name or the
name of the son, and Don is inclined to ignore the letter. Ignoring things
is now his habit. But a neighbour persuades him to seek out some women he
slept with around 1985 and find his son.

As Broken Flowers grinds on, we realize that Jarmusch wants to make, in
his ironically inflected way, two points:

1. You just never know how people will turn out. One old girlfriend has
become a closet organizer; people pay her to arrange their clothes.
Another works as an animal behaviourist who can tell you what your pet is
thinking.

2. An erotic life pursued thoughtlessly could well make you feel kind of
sad.

Those thoughts may not strike anyone as fresh, but clearly Jarmusch
believes he's on to something. As a long-time Jarmusch fan, from Stranger
Than Paradise (1984) to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), I found
Broken Flowers painful. It's a road picture with no destination, no points
of interest, and no resolution.

It made me think of Elmore Leonard's maxim: "I try to leave out the parts
that people skip." Jarmusch reverses that rule. He carefully inserts all
the parts we would like to skip. Every time Don gets on a plane, for
instance, we cut to an aircraft rising into the sky. Is that an ironic
comment on other films? Whatever, it plays as a longueur, one of many.

Yet Newsweek loved Broken Flowers, The New York Times liked it, David
Edelstein of Slate called it brilliant and the guy on the San Francisco
Examiner reached into his drawer and pulled out "masterful." Reviewers
fastened on the word "deadpan," the ancient and honourable style most
famously developed by Buster Keaton. Two reviews I saw actually compared
Murray to Keaton.

Certainly Murray shows us, most of the time, an immobile, impenetrable
poker face. We have to guess that Don's personality has been so badly
battered by hurricane-level emotions that it's hiding permanently behind a
moat of inscrutability. But it's ridiculous (some would say blasphemous)
to mention him alongside Keaton, a great artist, a performer of infinite
variety.

Keaton had gravitas. His stoic expression never failed to mean something.
As James Agee wrote in a famous 1949 essay, "No other comedian could do as
much with the deadpan." That great, sad, world-weary countenance could
suggest everything from mulish imperturbability to a will that was
awe-inspiring in its determination to endure.

Murray's Don makes no such impression. After a while, in fact, it begins
to look as if there's less to him than meets the eye. Is he expressionless
because he has nothing to express? He may be unreadable, but he gives the
impression that if we could read him the text would be no more
illuminating than, say, Fun with Dick and Jane.

Jarmusch has carefully developed a repertoire of understatement;
typically, his actors show no reaction even to astounding events. But when
Broken Flowers combines Murray's deadpan acting with Jarmusch's deadpan
direction, they cancel each other out.

In recent years, the great tradition of Keaton's art has been nimbly put
to work several times, perhaps most memorably in two superb but quite
different European films, Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past, from
Finland, and Patrice Leconte's The Man on the Train, from France. Each of
them plays with deadpan as an element in a story about people we want to
know better. But in Broken Flowers that noble tradition comes skidding to
a halt. It would be too much to say that it leaves deadpan dead on
arrival, but there are moments when that's how it feels.

--- Peter T. Chattaway ------------- http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/ ---
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they
   claim remembrance, on account of their scars. -- Chris Marker, La Jetee

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