Dullard review: "Broken Flowers!"

The year was 1984. Cyndi Lauper ruled the charts, and Ronald Reagan was president.

Bill Murray was a Ghostbuster, and seemingly on a long career path as a wise-cracking Hollywood funnyman. Jim Jarmusch was no one, just getting going with the art-house film "Stranger than Paradise!" Murray got lost in the late 1980s, an aimlessness that bottomed out with the wretched "Scrooged!" Jarmusch meandered from the brilliant ("Mystery Train!") to the so-so ("Down by Law!").

Move ahead to 2005: Jarmusch has stepped a couple of degrees closer toward the mainstream, and Murray has reinvented himself altogether. "Broken Flowers!" represents the first full-fledged intersection of their sometimes erratic but always interesting careers. (Sorry, "Coffee and Cigarettes!" doesn't really count.)

"Flowers" allows Murray to once again showcase his ability at portraying a man of infinite regret. In that way, this performance, coming relatively soon after "Lost in Translation," feels self-referential.

Yet Murray is still able to say so much in scenes when he says nothing at all. One that is especially evocative: his character, on a quest to find an old love who may have borne him a son, stumbles out of a hotel room onto a balcony, a styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, to overlook a noisy and generic American landscape.

Jarmusch is up to some of his old tricks here, such as the slow fades between scenes. As with "Paradise," this movie plays with the idea that the static can be deeply moving.

DULLARD RATING: Rocked!