Hollow Man

Just watched Broken Flowers. Once upon a time, Bill Murray played these wise-asses, with a smart mouth, and that look that indicated he knew he was in this crappy movie, but at least he was getting paid. It was the kind of look that polarized audiences. Some, who loved that smart-alecky behavior, and others who were reminded of some class clown who thought he was smarter than anyone else, and who you would have kicked his ass, were you not such a coward. Guess which camp I fall in?

Since Murray has edged to the geriatric set, age has softened the edges, and created a general sense of pathos, and therefore sympathy. In less hands, Murray's role would appear like so much sleep walking, yet, he stares, reacts, with a minimum number of facial tics, and still conveys the emptiness of his life.

Hmm, ok, so Murray plays Don Johnston (with a "t"), who everyone says is a ladies man. Sherry, his current flame, has just left him. He treats his women casually, having sex (presumably) then leaving them or they leave him. Despite numerous references to Don Juan (the movie plays on his TV, his neighbor refers to him several times that way, and his name is an Americanization, though the film plays it for laughs, confusing it with Don Johnson, the Miami Vice actor, who himself was something of a "Don Juan").

He gets a letter from an ex-flame, who says he has a son looking for him, and now he wonders whether it's a prank, or whether it's for real. His neighbor, who seems Jamaican, suggests he talk to women he knew at the time, and suggests five women, although one is dead.

But Jarmusch is an indie director, and indie directors tend not to give you what you want. You expect four encounters to start to raise some meaning into his life, that he reflects about what could have been, and why is where he is. And in a sense, that is exactly what happens, yet, he doesn't provide us, the audience, with a kind of emotional resonance to really like these women.

The title, if anything, suggest broken promises, as a man who cared only about having a good time, and left the women he knew despairing, while he did well enough for himself. Except did he really? Once he looks at the kinds of women he hung out with, and the aftermath of their lives, it's a mere reflection of the kind of person he is as well. The search for his son is a search for meaning. A mainstream pic, were it willing to touch on the same subject, would give us this meaning, and make us feel good that some redemption is eventually possible. And Jarmusch almost gives it to us, but yanks it at the last moment, unwilling to give the cheap redemption that Murray's character doesn't fully deserve.

Or does he? Murray plays Don so blankly, that it's hard to believe he was ever a Don Juan. What do women see in him? We're only told by those around him that women like him, and yet, he's not really a charmer with any of the women he meets. For the most part, they eat dinner, talk about superficial things, and that's it.

In the end, what I noticed most, was the little touches. The houses that they go to actually look like houses. Cluttered, untidy. And the sounds and visuals, from the ubiqutous car alarm that has awoken many a person, to the ding, ding, of a door opened in an American car, to the awkwardness of sleeping on a plane, to the trays and sounds of an airplane, to the traffic on a small highway, Jarmusch observes the qualities of modern day life with great acuity, paying as much attention to these details as he does to any sort of allegories he might be painting.

Dave claims the film is about death, that Murray is a dead man, and his neighbor Winston is showing him his life, like some ghost of Christmas past, and yet, if that's true, Johnston doesn't want to see his life again. He knows that he's lead a meaningless life, and Jarmusch presents it as so meaningless, that we, the audience, are left to fill in, with our imagination, what kind of person he must have been, filling in details that are left implied.

So an independent pic is often like this. The main gist of the story is man looking for his son, just as, say, When the Cat's Away appears to be a film about a woman who's lost her cat, when it's more about the lost people that surround her in her neighborhood. The cat's a red herring, and the son, in some ways is too. It's a meditation on the mistakes we've made in life, and the search for meaning.