Broken Flowers

There is the hit list with five names on it, the tracksuit with a prominent yellow stripe and the parenthood suddenly foisted upon the protagonist. Yet, in Jim Jarmusch's existential road movie Broken Flowers, no one exactly wants to Kill Bill Murray (although someone does take a swing at him) and he is not on a journey of revenge, but rather of regret, nostalgia, melancholy and miscommunication, in this bleakly funny portrait of a middle-aged playboy meandering towards something like adulthood.

At about the same time that inveterate womaniser Don Johnston (Bill Murray) is left by his latest girlfriend (Julie Delpy) with the words, "You're never gonna change," he receives an anonymous letter, supposedly from an ex-lover, claiming that he is the father of her teenage son. Don is shaken out of his moping inertia by neighbour Winston (Jeffrey Wright), a dope-smoking Ethiopian family man and amateur detective, who sends Don out on the road to look up all his old flames of 20 years ago. Yet, what starts as a half-hearted attempt to solve the "mystery" of the unsigned letter, quickly expands into a more metaphysical quest for what was and what might have been, for the disorientation of the present and the uncertainty of the future, as Don finds himself standing alone at the crossroads of middle age.

For all its concern with a wrinkly bachelor, Broken Flowers is full of happy marriages. Jarmusch's previous films can be neatly split between those with linear narratives (Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Dead Man, Ghost Dog) and those with an episodic structure (Mystery Train, Night On Earth, Coffee And Cigarettes).

Broken Flowers is the first to bring these two into blessed union, dividing Don's journey into deliciously contrasting segments, each devoted to one of his exes - the still wild Laura (Sharon Stone), hippie-chick-turned-homemaker Dora (Frances Conroy), "animal communicator" Carmen (Jessica Lange), bitter biker girl Penny (Tilda Swinton) and cold-in-the-ground Michelle. Each encounter is a finely observed and beautifully performed vignette in its own right, but together they sketch out a past from which our grey Lothario has been irrevocably set adrift.

Broken Flowers is also the perfect marriage of Jarmusch and Murray. Their relationship might have got off to a rocky start in one of the more throwaway sections of Jarmusch's shorts compendium Coffee And Cigarettes (2003), but here the writer/director's restrained nonchalance finds its ideal partner in Murray's special brand of deadpan.

From his earliest turns on Saturday Night Live in the Seventies, Murray has always epitomised jaded ennui and now that he really is middle-aged, he has been honing his hangdog cynicism in films like Cradle Will Rock, Rushmore, Lost In Translation and The Life Aquatic, in search of the ultimate on-screen mid-life crisis. He was born to play the bemused, bewildered Don Johnston and if the screenplay keeps reminding us that his character's name sounds similar to both Don Juan and a certain heartthrob from Miami Vice, his ashen presence renders any such comparisons absurd.

Murray's Don is a ridiculous, tragic figure - lost and confused as he realises too late that he, like the flowers wilting in his vase, has passed his bloom - and this aimless odyssey would be unbearably depressing were it not so very funny.