Bill Murray plays yet another somber role

By DAVID GERMAIN / AP Movie Writer

In this photo provided by Focus Features, Don Johnston (Bill Murray) goes on a cross-country journey to find his mysterious ex-lover who claims to have a child with him, in “Broken Flowers.” (AP Photo/Focus Features)

In “Broken Flowers,” writer-director Jim Jarmusch again makes clear that the journey, not the destination, is what matters to him. And in Bill Murray, he has found an ideal traveling companion.

This strange, dream-like road trip is a near-perfect match of droll director and droller star. Jarmusch has enlisted great stone faces in the past: Johnny Depp in “Dead Man”; Forest Whitaker in “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.”

Yet with Murray, who hilariously starred in a segment of Jarmusch’s bull-sessions collection “Coffee and Cigarettes,” the filmmaker finds a peerless vessel for his aloof, minimalist style.

Despite a quest that should be fraught with emotion — a man’s visits to old lovers in search of a son he never knew he had — Murray registers scarcely any expression beyond the apathetic world-weariness fast becoming his trademark.

Balanced against more overt co-stars Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Julie Delpy, Frances Conroy and Jeffrey Wright, Murray stands as a wondrous question mark just begging audiences to formulate their own answers about what lies beneath his cryptic demeanor.

With such stars and a more accessible story than usual, Jarmusch has created his most commercially appealing movie yet, without sacrificing much of the inscrutable detachment his cult fan base enjoys.

The movie’s structure is typically episodic. Murray plays ladies man Don Johnston, the classic Don Juan who knows his appeal is slipping with age and may not really care, putting up only token resistance when his current lover, Sherry (Delpy), leaves him.

Sherry’s departure corresponds with the arrival of a pink letter from an unidentified ex-flame, telling Don he has a 19-year-old son who may be trying to contact his father.

Don seems unfazed, content to run out the clock in seclusion, listening to music, watching TV and living off the wealth he gained as a computer whiz (Don’s disinterest runs so deep now that he doesn’t own a computer himself).

But his neighbor and buddy, family man Winston (Wright), steps in and convinces Don to take an elaborate trek to visit the women who could have given birth to his son in that time frame:

— Loose and lively Laura (Stone), widow of a race-car driver, whose daughter, Lolita (Alexis Dziena), exposes Don to the sort of Nabokov titillation her name implies.

— Dora (Conroy) is the flip side of Laura, living an antiseptic life in one of the prefab luxury homes she and her hubby (Christopher McDonald) sell for a living.

— Carmen (Lange) should be a space cadet given her profession, an “animal communicator” who puts people in sync with their pets. Yet she’s a shrewd, passionately pragmatic woman who sends her old lover packing with a brusque insight or two, her protective assistant (Chloe Sevigny) adding to Don’s discomfit.

— Penny (Swinton) is a biker chick whose fierce and fleeting exchange with Don works brilliantly as far as it goes, which is not very far, the actress in and out of the movie in a flash.

Don devolves from welcomed surprise guest to interloper to outright intruder, compounding his state of general confusion without offering a shred of enlightenment.

Murray has been playing subtle variations on the same sad-sack theme for years now in “Rushmore,” “Cradle Will Rock,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Lost in Translation” and “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”

Yet his schtick never grows tired — it gets richer with each incarnation.

Murray is amassing a body of work in a comic-drama vein to rival the madcap mania of his “Caddyshack,” “Stripes” and “Ghostbusters” years.