From its whimsical opening shot — a dreamy contemplation of a female derriere in repose — to its beautifully realized finale, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is a cinematic poem for people who don't think they like poetry. Coppola's film is a comedy, first and foremost (although it's many other things, too), and it's more than funny enough to engage even the most rudimentary or shriveled sense of humor. At the same time, Lost in Translation is a supremely delicate weave of small, oddly evocative moments that seem far more concerned with communicating the elusiveness of feelings than with connecting the dots between a story's beginning, middle and end.
Coppola's eccentric little wisp of a film is about two people, of very different ages and circumstances, who meet in a strange, faraway place and make a connection. We've seen variations on this Brief Encounter shtick too many times to count, but almost never have we seen it executed with such rare insight and playfulness.
The movie's not-so-secret weapon is Bill Murray, who has been very good before in films like Rushmore and Groundhog Day, but here finds what might just be his perfect role. Murray's Bob Harris is a burned-out movie star, a decade or two past his prime (not unlike Murray himself), and now reduced to hawking whiskey in a series of commercial spots for Japanese television. Harris is middle-aged, long married with kids, drinking way too much, and quite probably in the throes of a serious midlife crisis. The fact that he's all too aware of his own middle-life meltdown and even able to joke about it doesn't much help.
Bob spends his days doing his whisky ads, struggling to understand the mangled English of various Japanese directors and technicians. He spends the evenings in the bar of his sleek Tokyo hotel knocking back whisky and listening to a lounge singer do terrible things to Scarborough Fair. Among the handful of other Americans hanging out at the hotel bar is a young woman named Charlotte (Ghost World's Scarlett Johansson), and she and Bob catch each other's eye, then keep crossing paths until a friendship eventually solidifies.
Although they're very nearly three decades apart in age, it's clear from the outset that Bob and Charlotte are kindred spirits. Besides being jet-lagged and sleepless in Tokyo, they're both literally strangers in a strange land — aliens to both their surroundings and, in a sense, to their own lives. She's an unemployed, recently graduated philosophy student, newly married to a celebrity photographer, and unsure of what to do with the rest of her life. Most of Bob's choices, on the other hand, are well behind him, although he's just as lost as his new friend, and his doubts run just as deep.
At any rate, Bob's going crazy in his hotel room, and Charlotte's new husband is away on assignment most of the time, shooting rock bands and vacuous movie stars. So it's only natural that the two amiable but utterly disoriented Yanks hook up to go running wild through the neon jungles of downtown Tokyo. The movie spends its time following Bob and Charlotte, alone and together, as they're swallowed up in the sensory overload of modern Japan, or in downtime back at the hotel. That's about all there is to Lost in Translation, but it's more than enough.
Sofia Coppola, who wrote Lost in Translation as well as directing it, achieves a seemingly effortless balance of understated wit, lyricism, and off-the-wall absurdity. Much of the movie is oddly structured and elegantly deadpan, not too far afield from one of Jim Jarmusch's filmic non sequiturs. In fact, many of the sequences in Lost in Translation have a loose, almost improvised feel that Jarmusch himself might envy. Coppola displays a sure hand and keen instincts for just the right image at the right time, and communicates much through minimal dialogue and just a series of perfectly chosen little scenes, some not lasting much more than a shot or two.
It's hard to imagine anyone other than Bill Murray pulling off this material so perfectly, and much of the film's success is directly attributable to him. Murray commands our attention whether he's playing the clown (with trademark, almost perversely mordant elan), simply reacting to some stray bit of idiocy or silently milking every last ounce of poignancy out of a dramatic moment. Coppola gives her star plenty of room to stretch out, both dramatically and comedically, and the results are often stunning. Murray is equally effective locked in a communication breakdown with a Japanese call girl demanding her stockings be "lipped," or in a bit of physical comedy involving an inscrutable exercise machine or bringing down the house with a nakedly emotional Karaoke version of Roxie Music's More Than This.
Lost in Translation paints memorable portraits of both of its sweetly dissatisfied, all-too-human characters, but there's a third and equally important character here, too, and that's the city of Tokyo itself. Coppola's movie offers a glimpse of modern Japanese culture that's very nearly as fascinating as the similarly focused cine-essays found in Chris Marker's seminal San Soleil or Wim Wenders' Tokyo-Ga. Lost in Translation doesn't trade in the stoic artistry of Marker or Wenders, though, which is not at all a bad thing. Lost in Translation actually feels much closer to that brilliant Simpsons episode where Homer and the gang win a trip to Tokyo.
Coppola's camera is as unselfconscious as it is nimble, juxtaposing the city's insanely throbbing video arcades and uber-fashionable nightclubs with the exquisite serenity of its temple rituals and flower-arranging ceremonies. The portrait that emerges is of a complex and deeply contradictory wonderland, as garish, tawdry and soulless as it is contemplative and sublime.
The fact that we're seeing all this from the point-of-view of a couple of sleep-deprived and deeply disoriented outsiders only increases the movie's surreal, vaguely dream-like undercurrent. Everything becomes a curiosity colored by the jet-lagged eyes of our guides, insomniacs who inevitably view their surroundings through emotions that tend to be either flattened or exaggerated. Ultimately, very little seems to actually make sense, outside of the truth of what's happening between Bob and Charlotte.
And if you're wondering just how that May-December thing plays out, you'll just have to see the movie.
Suffice it to say that Lost in Translation is too good a film to do the expected thing. Ignoring the obvious and bouncing along from one quirky strength to another, the movie reveals its true weight only in the end, after having accumulated a wealth of details that point the way to all sorts of curious things that are lost and things that are found. And, the best find of all is the movie itself, a glowing confirmation that Coppola is much, much more than just a pretty name.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2003.