Broken Flowers

This movie is Bill Murray at his dryest, how much you like it will depend upon how much you like sitting with that; I'm mostly fine with it. I think of all the Second City/SNL graduates, he's been the most artistically succesful (not that it's been much of a horse race).

It's about Murray looking up old girlfriends to see which, if any, is the mother of the son he's just been told he has. It's enlivened by neatly understated performances by the supporting cast. One sequence in the film has at least one too many "inside" qualities to it, however.

Murray meets first an old flame's teenaged daughter, whose name is Lolita (of course) and exposes herself to him (of course). Her mother is played by Sharon Stone (of course) and her father is dead, explaining the flaunting (of course).

Stone, BTW, is surprisingly terrific in this; I haven't seen everything she's ever done, but I'm gonna out on a limb and say it's the first time she's played a recognizable human being in...forever.

In some ways it compliments Happy Endings, which was also, in part, about a search for a son (and no, I don't have a father, thanks for asking). But where that movie had a few too many characters spread too thin, this one doesn't do quite enough, for my taste, with the few it has.