Broken Flowers, etc.
Broken Flowers
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Release: August 26, 2005
**** 4/5
Movies like this they always mis-market. They put together these terrible trailers, picking and choosing the accessible bits from an entire feature and stringing them together for a neat 2-minute preview. And just like that, everything changes: sad and subtle kinds of humor are made “quirky,” the puzzle-like nature of lost youth and relationships come off like dots on the trail of a cheap mystery novel. What I’m trying to say is, if you haven’t seen Broken Flowers, check out its trailer embedded at the bottom. Then ignore it, forget it ever happened–and see the movie anyway.
In all honestly, this trailer isn’t as bad as it gets. Sometimes previews are so tonally off it almost feels like false advertising. But it just reminds me of a misleading kind of simplicity that’s always bothered me. It’s Goodfellas being in the Action section at Blockbuster. It’s American Beauty in the Comedy, right next to Airplane!, Annie Hall and American Psycho. And I get it, it does makes sense: how exactly do you explain the contradiction of something like Broken Flowers, why it works, what it is–an odd but hyper-introspective and sometimes depressing road movie with a big-time comic actor playing a role so on the fence of comedy that it almost isn’t? Then, on top of that, there’s grappling with the fact that in a lot of ways the movie’s a sort of one-man show. You gotta simplify, maybe even lie a little bit. The term “necessary evil” comes to mind.
But the point is that Broken Flowers truly is a great and complicated film, just like Goodfellas, Annie Hall and American Psycho are. These are not just comedies. They’re funny, sure, but they’re also poignant and heavy and so well shot, so well acted. And you see this all the time: Six Feet Under they call a comedy; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in some circles is a rom-com. And how do you label something like my latest obsession Breaking Bad, a surprisingly funny series about cooking and dealing meth but actually about death and dying? Is it a crime drama, an action comedy?
What’s really weird is that it seems today there’s been a kind of acceptance over genre’s obsolescence, but still a desperate tie to it. I can’t tell you how many people have told me in the past that they haven’t and wouldn’t watch something like Deadwood or The Unforgiven because they “don’t like Westerns,” a genre that first started really changing probably all the way back when Sergio Leone went all Italian on them sometime in the ’60s.
“Genre movies,” it’s a real term, it’s what they call something that doesn’t pull any punches about what it’s trying to be–usually your Kill Bill Vol. 1’s and most of your slashers. They call them that because they’re obvious, because there’s no subtlety to running around with a sword and killing people for 90minutes. Unlike a, say, Punch-Drunk Love, which is a comedy…but kind of a surreal one, and also really sad, a portrait of loneliness–oh, and of love–oh, and of just about everything else. “Dramedy,” I guess Punch-Drunk would fall into that one, another bogus newly-invented sub-genre that fails to clarify or identify anything . Good guys just don’t wear white hats anymore. Bad guys almost never wear black.
In the end, maybe it’s that all the best work just simply can’t be categorized. Maybe the great stuff is great for the very fact that it resists genre, that it’s just too big for it?
(which doesn’t mean genre films can’t be great, too. I love Kill Bill. I also love Suspiria and zombies and blood and guns and a good old fashioned exploding head.)
If I had it my way I’d revolutionize the whole system. First, Westerns+. That’s my new genr e. ©. And in fine print under the label I might even write: “No John Wayne or John Ford Included.” That a piece feature saloons and Sheriffs, that would be the only requirement for getting in. And then all the rest would be divided into 3 categories: Minor, Ambitious and Take My Word for It. And I’d of course have final say in all major categorizing decisions.
This town needs a serious enema.
So ok, all things considered, sure, maybe I’m not the cinema “everyman”–but the entire experience, why I don’t like to interrupt a viewing, what different emotions different scenes bring out in me, the titles that fill out my Netflix list, it’s all about exploration. Yeah, for me that exploration is partly educational, to see what the fuss is about with a lot of these directors and “classics.” But more than that, what’s really gotten me to continuously sit down and commit two hours of my life to something time after time, to risk wasting that time, to risk being disapointed, is all personal. Everything that surprises me, every emotion I didn’t see coming is another molecule of something bigger I find out about myself. They’re glimpses into the future and the past at the same time. They tell my story before it’s even happened yet.
Which is just what Broken Flowers did. And that’s funny, considering I only went in expecting to have a laugh.
Other titles I’ve watched recently:
The Iron Giant***3
The Ladykillers **2
Broken Trail ***3
Mulholland Drive *****5
Burn After Reading ***3
Smart People **2.5
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ****4
Shows I’m watching:
Errol Morris’ First Person
Penn & Teller; Bullshit!
Mad Men
True Blood
Entourage
Hung
Shows I can’t stop thinking about:
This American Life
Breaking Bad
This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 6:14 pm and is filed under essay/social crit, film, whatever else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
