Let's Get Lost

reviewed Sat, 04 Oct 2003

Lost in Translation seems to be a movie that people react to with either intense affection or deep boredom.  I fall into the first camp, but I can see how you could be yawning if you didn’t connect with it emotionally.  It’s a film built around emotions, and few things are more tedious than an emotional film that evokes no feelings in you.  Personally, I happen to be simpatico with the sense of being lost, adrift in your own life, that plagues Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, so I felt the movie deeply (I said something like this at a happy hour last night, and a guy whom I had never met before said sarcastically, “Awwwwww,” to which I riposted with Shavian wit: “BITE ME!”  Which is what I say to you if you, too, are mocking my sensitive, heartfelt openness right now:  BITE ME).

Murray, as washed-up actor Bob Harris, is in Tokyo to collect some easy money doing a Suntory whiskey ad.  Buffeted by jet lag and a situation that drives home to him the sorry state of his career and his lifeless marriage, he wanders the hotel at odd hours and seeks solace in Suntory.  Which is how he meets Johansson’s Charlotte, who’s accompanying her egocentric husband but rarely gets to be with him.  Instead, she finds herself alone and drifting around the chaotic city and the hotel (the film is excellent at making Tokyo seem like a funhouse that isn’t any fun).  Bob is lost in the way of someone who plods through life insensately and one day wakes up, looks around, and wonders, how did I get here?  How did this become my life?  Charlotte’s disorientation is more jarring, as though a rug’s been yanked out from under her: one moment she’s standing, the next she’s flat on her back, unsure how it happened.  As one experiencing both kinds of lost at the time (“Awwwwww” “BITE ME”), I clicked with both cynical Bob and vulnerable Charlotte.  The two click with each other, too, and develop an intense camaraderie.

Both Murray and Johansson are superb.  I wouldn’t have thought Bill Murray capable of the subtle facial shifts that eloquently convey his self-loathing and mournfulness, and he tosses off caustic, hilarious one-liners without overdoing it (I should mention that this is a very funny film in addition to its emotional pull).  He’s great in the karaoke scene, spitting out the opening lines to “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?” and Roxy Music's "More Than This" in a “tears of a clown” way, outwardly hamming it up, inwardly roiling.  His chemistry with Johansson is terrific.  I was astonished to learn that Johansson is only 18 – she’s so poised and mature.  I’d never have guessed that the Hanson clone from The Horse Whisperer would turn out to be such a beautiful, talented actress.

I wasn’t terribly impressed by writer-director Sofia Coppola’s previous film, The Virgin Suicides, but Lost in Translation is a quantum leap forward.  One quibble:  Charlotte’s husband (played by Giovanni Ribisi, sounding like a more annoying Woody Allen) is such a self-absorbed jerk, so utterly oblivious to Charlotte’s loneliness, that you wonder what she ever saw in him.  But that’s a minor complaint; overall, I was enthralled by the movie, which joins the extremely short list of best films I’ve seen this year.  Who knows – you may love it, too, or you might be bored silly by it.  But wouldn't you rather give your money to a film like this than to, say, S.W.A.T.?

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