Life’s a Mess in “Broken Flowers”- Spoiler!

If you’ve seen “Broken Flowers,” you may be surprised that it’s in a blog like this. “But nothing happens in the film!” you may complain.

That’s exactly the point.

Don Johnston, played to perfection by Bill Murray, is a life-long bachelor in search of the mother of a son he may have fathered. Reluctantly scouring America, he ends up home without answers (By the way, I’ve just given the movie away in two sentences.). The ex-girlfriends he meets are each quirky in their own way; each is a piece of his past one hopes would be in a mix of women loved and left by Don “Juan” Johnston. It’s a film that says much more than I can hope to understand and dissect. It ends as it begins- with nothing resolved.

We've come to expect in our films neat, tidy plots that start at the beginning and end with some sort of cathartic resolution. We want to see the main character save someone, fix wrongs, etc. Don tries. He really does, in his own plodding way. He even runs into a boy around “his” son’s age and tries to find out if he is in fact the son looking for him. The young man is understandably creeped out and high tails it before Don can get any sort of explanation. The spinning camera shot around Don is representative of the confused turmoil going on inside his head. Life is not always explained. Life isn’t a neat little movie with a beginning, middle, and end that has a rising plot and is resolved in the last five minutes. Life is messy, and this is a film about life.

However messy the film leaves us feeling, it’s a beautiful mess worth at least a little introspection. After all, what would you do if you couldn’t resolve a major life circumstance? Don wrestles with just that. The film isn't preachy about the answer, it doesn’t moralize anything for us. It simply asks.

Sometimes that’s the only thing we can do, to ask as the world spins on, with or without answers to those questions.