Broken Flowers (2005)

Bill Murray strikes me as one of those actors that you really dig or wonder what he is all about and how he managed to have a career.  As you have probably guessed, I fall in the latter category.  In his early roles I found him slightly too sour to appreciate and in his later roles he has adopted a kind of Zen stillness which is mystifying.  Put him together with the director, Jim Jarmusch, whose films specialise in stillness (although I must admit a real liking for his "Dead Man" with Johnny Depp and "Ghost Dog..." with Forest Whitaker), and you get a movie like this one where at the end, you wonder why you bothered watching it in the first place.

Murray receives an anonymous letter on pink stationery announcing that he is the father of a now 19-year old son.  His next door neighbour, Jeffrey Wright -- speaking with a weird Jamaican accent -- encourages him to seek out his ex-flames from twenty years previous to find the truth.  So he reluctantly begins a road trip which has him visiting Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton.  That the film ends with his being none the wiser nor being any better a man comes as no surprise.