Broken Flowers

When you put the master of laconic storytelling, Jim Jarmusch, together with the master of deadpan, Bill Murray, the result may not be to everyone's taste. Murray plays aging lothario Don Johnston (all puns intended), a serial romancer whose latest love (Delpy) is walking out and leaving him to rot in his well-heeled bachelor solitude.

This lonely, impassive existence is disturbed by a letter claiming Don has a son he's never heard of. And while Don would rather do nothing about it, it is his neighbour Winston (Wright), who, driven by his own curiosity, nags Don to take to the road.

Broken Flowers unfolds as a series of vignettes against a backdrop of grey, suburban middle-America photographed by David Lynch collaborator Frederick Elmes. It is for the most part a sequence of dislocated one-on-one encounters in which Don comes to face with his past but seems incapable of engaging with it.

This creates a bit of a problem for the spectator. The films asks them, like Winston (a fantastic characterisation), to find something behind Don's impassive exterior, something to root for, a person to empathise with. But Murray plays it blank faced, for all the world like Buster Keaton, and mostly without the relief or character revelation that physical comedy can bring.