Through about half of Broken Flowers Don Johnston (Bill Murray) just sits there. Seriously. Just sits there. Just sits there.

There is of course, a purpose to the sitting, as Don kindly realizes for us at the end. The past is behind us, the future has yet to come, and so the present is all we have. Unfortunately for the audience, Don doesn’t realize this until the end, and so he spends the entirety of the film in a (quite literally) static present as he remains caught up in an unfulfilled past.

It’s a nice idea, but guess what? We’ve seen it before. It’s called About Schmidt and it was much better. Broken Flowers is less funny, less interesting, and less affecting than the Nicholson film was.

The worst part is that the entire story is, unnecessarily, a series of plot holes. Near the film’s lethargic beginning, Don gets an anonymous letter from a former girlfriend, informing him that she had a son through him, and that the son was out looking for him. With the help of his friend Winston (Jeffrey Wright), Don sets out to find the author of the letter among a list of possibilities. When he arrives at each house, he looks for “clues” that each woman might be the author.

Don’s behavior is strange for a list of reasons. First, if his son was near, and he was concerned about his son’s arrival while he was away, he could have just waited for him to arrive. Second, Don had all the phone numbers. He could have just called them up, said he was an army recruiter and apologized if there were no 19-year-olds in the household. He could have figured it out real easily. When he arrives at each house, he apparently believes that none of the women will tell him about the son. But does he not think they will grow suspicious when he starts asking about children and typewriters?

The one line that I think we are supposed to think is hilarious, “I’m a stalker…in a Taurus,” feels equally contrived. Don is complaining to his friend, but Don was the one who picked up the rental car, since he was paying for it himself, he could have made any change he wanted to when he rented it.

Broken Flowers has its moments; moments of melancholy, of epiphany, of subtle complexity. But watching Murray sit for two hours doesn’t really move us so much as it moves us out of the theater.