TheRetroCritic

Soon after the success of Lost In Translation and in between Wes Anderson projects, Bill Murray once again went down the indie route and starred in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers , an odd little movie about a guy on a mysterious quest to find an estranged son he may or may not even have. Upon seeing the film back in 2005, I was hoping for a clever mesh of laughs and quirky goings on but left the cinema feeling way more confused than expected. Yes the film was funny and Murray's deadpan deliveries did bring the occasional lol here and there but this "felt" more serious. Throughout the film there's a nostalgic, passive vibe in the air which increasingly gets more negative in tone. Murray's journey starts off fun enough but by the end you really start to feel the emotional weight of his quest that's being carried on his shoulders. It should have been so straight-forward and yet every time he meets an ex wife to try and find out whether they're the m