A film of quiet, droll simplicity, Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" looks at the complexity of perception. It observes how the people who we touch and who touch us can, to the outside world, define us; and how the things with which they fill their lives define them. Even girded with this knowledge, the outside world may never know the reality of that person or the person they have impacted. Our perception, however, has been born.

The story through which Jarmusch explore this idea follows Don Johnston, played with an easy magnetism by Bill Murray, as he works to track down a woman who claims to have birthed his child 19 years earlier. Setting about the task of finding the unknown…

The last in Murray's renaissance period, Jarmusch slows things down to a melancholic crawl with endless POV driving shots, Murray starring at stuff, pondering with a frown at the stalemate his life is in. This would most likely become a monotonous bore without Murray in the role, but thankfully he is the first person perspective here and there isn't a moment he isn't on screen. He's one of the few actors who can play it deadly straight with the camera locked off on his face and there are many different conclusions to come to on what he is thinking. This is the joy of Broken Flowers, watching Murray think.

This is a great film to throw on after waking up…

Winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury for the first time and nominated for the Palme d´Or for the fifth time in 2005, Broken Flowers follows a very similar tradition of Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt (2002) regarding the adventures of an aged man that makes an undesired journey to discover more about his family bonds but ends up discovering more about himself and the importance of the present life.

Dedicated to Jean Eustache, the superior post-Nouvelle Vague independent filmmaker – even if I humbly think that Stranger than Paradise (1984) would have been a much more honorable and appropriate dedication – Broken Flowers opts for common storytelling techniques that circle around a common story that progresses uncommonly. It is…

Slow-burn character drama-slash-travelogue from Jim Jarmusch featuring Bill Murray, and if that doesn't make you want to go out and watch it there's no secret waiting at the end of the journey that will change your mind. It's basically a series of vignettes bookended by Murray's interaction with Jeffrey Wright doing the best work I've ever seen from him.

For me, the story is about a man who searches through his past for a quilting point which will make his present more recognizable to him. But I've read several other reviews which give different interpretations of the story (about a man who visits a series of his old flames), and I think the real strength of the writing is that…

Oh, Jim Jarmusch.

How you teach me, time and time again, with the utmost grace and generosity, how truly great storytelling is to render your story and characters simply and clearly - while letting the sum of the parts gradually accumulate to so much more than can be put into words.

So while I see a middle-aged man tracking down his former lovers to figure out whether one of them bore him a son, what I feel gushing through me is the melancholy inevitability of growing older, the sad truth that we always hurt the ones we love the most, the never-ending joy of a good memory shared, the inherent loneliness of simply every mortal being, the beauty of being…