The hunt for a lost child begets regret

With Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch's sly, touching new film, Bill Murray reaffirms his status as the quietest comic actor in movies today. His voice barely rises above a murmur, and his face remains almost perfectly still, its slightest tics and flickers captured by Jarmusch's discreet, mostly stationary camera.

The stillness is appropriate, since at the start of the movie Murray's character, Don Johnston, seems to have arrived at a point of stasis in his life. We first see Johnston on the couch in his large, tastefully decorated suburban home. His latest girlfriend, Sherry (Julie Delpy), is in the midst of leaving him, an event Johnston greets with a resignation that looks a lot like indifference. He is surrounded by nice stuff -- a big television, sleek furniture, a Mercedes sedan -- and has plenty of money, having been some kind of computer entrepreneur before retiring. A movie (or a movie critic) more inclined toward psychologizing might suggest that Johnston was depressed. In any case, as he tips over on his couch and falls asleep, we can surmise that he is inert, at rest, not going anywhere in particular.

But Broken Flowers, like some of Jarmusch's other movies, is a road picture, which sends its poker-faced hero on a journey across a nondescript US landscape into his own past. As Sherry is saying goodbye, a letter arrives, typed in red ink on pink stationery, informing Johnston that 20 years earlier, he fathered a son. The anonymous message, apparently from one of Johnston's former lovers, warns him that the boy may be looking for him.

Johnston's impulse is to do nothing, but his neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), has other ideas. Winston is Johnston's friend and also, in almost every way, his opposite. In contrast to the slothful bachelor next door, he is a hard-working family man, with a wife, five children and three jobs. He is also something of an amateur detective, convinced that with the right clues and sleuthing methods, Johnston can find the mother of his supposed son and the missing pieces of his own history.

And so Johnston sets off, for brief reunions with four women he used to know, who are played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton. What he finds are possible clues -- basketball hoops suggesting the presence of a male child; a typewriter sitting on a patch of unkempt lawn; various pink objects, including a bauble-encrusted cellphone -- and also further puzzles. His welcome, as he shows up in a rented car with a bouquet of flowers, varies. At one house he finds warmth and a roll in the hay for old times' sake, but elsewhere he meets with awkwardness, suspicion and even a punch in the face.

Does he find what he was looking for? I can't really say, and only partly because I don't want to spoil the movie. Winston's belief that the truth can be known -- about other people, about oneself -- is an idea the movie respects but does not really endorse. We go to the theater expecting to see experience tied up in a neat, attractive package, but the best movies frustrate that expectation.

Broken Flowers is certainly beautiful, as lilting and seductive as the music, by the Ethiopian jazz artist Mulatu Astatke, that accompanies Johnston on his trip.

Jarmusch's frames are full of odd, lovely details, and he has a rigorous visual wit reminiscent of classic cartoons and silent comedies.