Bill Murray is funny, except for about 93 percent of Broken Flowers (Photo: STV)

I had a lot of questions to ask Bill Murray about his role in Jim Jarmusch's latest film Broken Flowers, which opens next week and features Murray's most understated performance to date. I wanted to hear more about his evolving tradition of restraint—how Flowers' Don Johnston builds on Lost in Translation's Bob Harris, who in turn built on Rushmore's Herman Blume, who seemed like Murray's first finely tuned, revelatory hybrid of esoterica and longing.

Then I thought about it, and it occurred to me that this tradition stretches back even further—way, way back, in fact, to Saturday Night Live. Remember Murray's turn as Paco, the Latino game show host who famously murmured: "Quien es mas macho? Senor Fernando Lamas o senor Ricardo Montalban? Lamas? O Montalbahhhhn?"

To my disadvantage, I recalled this moment on the red carpet with Murray standing in front of me. Then I choked on laughter, and that was pretty much the end of that.

I mean, I still asked him about restraint, but with Murray in full-on modesty mode, it was as hollow an exercise as his dramatic debut 20 years ago in The Razor's Edge. "I don't know," he said. "It's just reacting to what people are doing. Sometimes all you can do is stay quiet. It just seemed like the right thing to do."

But is it harder in a movie like Broken Flowers, where he performs so many protracted scenes alone in silence?

"Oh, yeah" he said, nodding insistently. "Yeah."

Therein lies the difference between the droll comedian Murray and the droll art-film Murray. The latter tends to absorb rather than reflect, and never has Murray absorbed more than he does in Flowers. He plays Don Johnston ("with a 'T,'" he informs amused new acquaintances), a self-described bachelor more aptly characterized as a disconnected bourgeois has-been. Don retired maybe a little too young from a successful computer business, and his separation from work or any kind of ambition in turn alienates his live-in girlfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy). When she announces she is leaving, Don can barely summon any opposition. The scene provides vague hints that Don could be reacting as much to déjà vu as he is to losing Sherry; Murray's expressive eyes suggest this is not the first time Don has scared off love.

An anonymous letter he receives soon reinforces the point. Typed on pink stationery and illegibly postmarked, the author announces herself as one of Don's old flames who raised the son he never knew they had. Now that the son had reached adulthood, she writes, he had set off to find his father. Don shares the note with his neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), whose detective hobby leads to an itinerary of ex-girlfriends for Don to visit—from auto-racing widow Laura (Sharon Stone) to down-and-out housewife Penny (Tilda Swinton).

Jarmusch has not made a film this spare since Dead Man, but in a vast improvement, Broken Flowers relies less on that film's contrived imagery and genre conceits (there is no genre) than it does on its incomplete themes of loneliness and even invisibility. To some of the women—most notably the exurban "pet communicator" Carmen (Jessica Lange)—Don ceased to exist long ago, and his re-emergence only confirms his irrelevance. But as such, each of the women's reactions and even their respective social strata strike at some part of Don that clings to him like so much scar tissue. Jarmusch and Murray work in concert to present this phenomenon as economically as possible; the silent exchanges between Don and the even more damaged Dora (a superb Frances Conroy) crystallize Don's failures in a way that Jarmusch's striving pink symbolism cannot reach.

Don's struggles rationalizing the appeal of the film's younger women also come off a tad forced, as though Jarmusch really, really does not want his viewer thinking about these women in any context outside the scene at hand. To wit, these are not only the women with whom Don would have hooked up in the past, but more importantly, they are also the women with whom his mysterious son would hook up now. This link allows the viewer at least a glimmer of hope that maybe Don is connected to something—and even something as basic as a biological tradition is substantive enough to sustain Don during a quest that ultimately devolves to a manhunt for himself. His intimate knowledge of Laura's daughter Lolita (another clunky symbol, but you kind of have to applaud the risk) is only a fraction of what it would have been if Don were 30 years younger, but he does not allow himself the opportunity to fantasize; in Jarmusch's world, even fantasy is a young man's luxury. Instead, Don gets the left-over nightmares—candy-colored flashbacks of everything (and everyone) he cannot have or can never know again.

If, at the end of the day, Don's only choice is to move on, Murray acknowledges all of this with the same resignation you expect he would have even in the best-case scenario. In a role Jarmusch said he wrote especially for Murray, he comes as close to mastering his trademark balance of underwhelmed and overwhelmed as he ever has. Critics will probably revisit his performance during Oscar season, but whether or not it is award-caliber fails to address the answer to a larger question, one that discriminating filmgoers must always, always ask when tracking Murray's career:

"Quien es mas macho? Lamas? O Montalbahhhhn?"