So I watched this last night. Now, I'm a fan of Jarmusch films, and I have been for a few years. I love his characters, the breezy dialogue, the strange situations which are treated as totally normal. The alienation. The ennui. But this movie...
Well, a synopsis, to start with. Bill Murray stars as Don Johnston, an aging Don Juan (the Don Johnston thing is just one of many, many lazy jokes the script indulges in) who suddenly receives an anonymous letter that claims he has a son from a relationship twenty years prior. His friend Winston (played by Jeffrey Wright with some sort of Jamaican accent), who is an amateur detective, convinces him to go looking for all the women who he had a relationship with around that time and hunt for clues to see if he can figure out who's the mother of his child. Winston gets the women's current addresses off Google and makes plane and car reservations for Johnston (who's apparently independently wealthy from something having to do with computers). So he sets off, for no apparent reason...I say "no apparent reason" because we're supposed to think he's suffering from some sort of mid-life crisis but Murray just deadpans it the whole way through so we never really know what he's thinking. He meets up with four women:
1. Sharon Stone, who married a NASCAR driver who died in an explosion. She lives with her hot jailbait daughter, Lolita (another weak joke).
2. Frances Conroy (the mom from Six Feet Under), a former hippie who is now ridiculously repressed and works in real estate.
3. Jessica Lange (who apparently has had fucktons of plastic surgery since she no longer resembles Jessica Lange), a former lawyer who turned into a hippie-ish "animal communicator" when her best friend, her BLACK DOG NAMED WINSTON (hahahaha, just like Jeffrey Wright's character, that's kinda racist) died.
4. Tilda Swinton, who is some kinda angry biker babe who lives in a shitty farmhouse.
He also goes to the grave of a fifth one who died five years ago. The movie tries to make a big deal out of the color pink as some sort of symbol (the letter is written in pink stationery, Johnston brings each woman pink flowers, he looks for the color pink amongst their belongings), but it's a type of precious piece of nonsense which doesn't really mean anything aside from the obvious.
Like I said before, it's a deadpan performance from Murray. He hardly emotes (yes, even less than a protagonist in a typical Jarmusch film). If you've seen his work in stuff like Lost in Translation and Rushmore and whatnot...yes, he's playing the same character. Again. It seems Murray has found a schtick that's gained him critical praise so he's sticking to it. Still, he must care about the film, I thought. I mean, at his age, I imagine he'd only take the time for something he's passionate about. Especially with the tons of location shooting this particular movie had. Then I came across this piece of trivia in Wikipedia.
Bill Murray agreed to do this film under the condition that it would only take 6 weeks and that he was never more than 60 miles from his home in Rockland County, New York.
What a lazy fucker. He only took this movie 'cuz it was close to his house and he could finish it in a month and a half.
Ichi rates this film 3 Suiciding Father Mikes out of 5.
