Lost in Translation looks like a daydream. A slow, jet-lagged journey through Tokyo’s impersonal tourist traps, the film is a fantasy set in reality; an artistic mixture of self-reflection and repressed desire. The sophomore effort by director/writer Sofia Coppola, Lost and Translation is full of beautifully composed camera shots and culturally pertinent one-note punch lines; yet Coppola’s true talent is her selection of Bill Murray as Lost in Translation’s leading man.
Comics often find it difficult to age gracefully. But Bill Murray managed to reset his sarcastic and slightly awkward persona in more serious, adult-oriented roles, revealing the boredom and confusion that often manifest during mid-life meanderings. As Bob Harris, Murray embraces his own muddled Hollywood history, playing a former blockbuster comedian forced into commercial spots as his film career slowly wanes. Lost in his Hollywood hype, he masks his confusion with fierce sarcasm, a playfully perceptive twist on the actor’s own psyche. Estranged from his wife, who is wrapped up in the world of carpets and children, and unable to direct his quickly derailing career, Harris no longer speaks Hollywood’s language. Highlighting this perennial displacement, he finds himself stranded in a highbrow Tokyo hotel, an entertainer with his echo acting as his only audience.
A carefully trained intellectual, Charlotte, played charismatically by newcomer Scarlet Johansson, is also wondering aimlessly around the outskirts of the entertainment industry. A newly wed, Yale educated academic, Charlotte is slowly drifting from her nervous, hipster, photographer husband, played consciously uncomfortably by Giovanni Ribisi. Unable to embrace her newfound celebrity spoils, Charlotte longs for life’s deeper meaning, bawling after she sees the beauty of Buddhist monks. As her marital self-doubt begins to set in, Charlotte sees Harris as both a father figure and confused child, another hotel guest unable to check out of his permanent vacation.
Lost in the confines of their citadel, Harris and Charlotte string out their sexual tension for a week of late-night drink-dates and karaoke cat and mouse games. Like the seminal new-wave film Clair’s Knee, Charlotte and Bob are among life’s “lucky few”-- conventionally comfortable individuals who create mental games to give their life excitement. As the displaced Americans wander through Tokyo, feeling out their Elektra-like kinsmenship, Coppola doesn’t turn her stars into heroes. Instead, she portrays them as perennial everymen. To her credit, Coppola leaves much to her audience’s imagination, using her cinematography to suggest, not comment on, her ideas.
Full of subtle touches, Lost and Translation opens in route to Harris’ Tokyo hotel, with him glaring up at a billboard, sporting his charismatic commercial advertisement spot. Contrasting beautifully beneath this endorsement enigma, viewers see Harris as an overtired, slightly wrinkled individual, unable to operate his hotel’s workout machine or detag his faded tie-dye shirt. With an exhausted ego, Harris uses his wry comments to escape his frustration, but finds himself lost among Asian stereotypes and love-less lounge singers. In Charlotte, Harris sees an ability to entertain and interpret his stranded emotions; but he also acknowledges the limitations placed on their likeminded flirtations.
Fittingly, Murray’s best moments find him trapped in a luxury-tuxedo. Taking a cue from the drone characters he played in
Rushmore and
The Royal Tenenbaums, Murray manifests his aristocratic misplacement through his discomfort, clipping his tuxedo outfit shut as if he was a mannequin on display. While shooting a whiskey commercial, the actor struggles to understand his Japanese director’s commentary, instead spewing subtle jabs about his career and repressed Japanese racism. But akin to his weather-reporter character in the seminal serious comedy
Ground Hog Day, Murray’s Harris is at heart a romantic whose attempts to create
Sleepless in Seattle jam-pack as many laughs as
Cadyshack. Part Woody Allen, part her father, Coppola uses this acknowledged failure to create a musical melodrama, grounded with normal neurosis and retired, nice-guy clichés.
When she tires of drama, Coppola will create amazing musicals. Lost in Translations’ tight rhythm builds on tension and release, as the star-crossed lovers emotionally tango against the film’s classical score. Appropriately, the film’s most revealing moment is also musical. At a hip, Japanese high-rise, an intoxicated Harris belts off-key karaoke like a carefree child; an actor without a role the comedian is searching for an audience to entertain and finds the spark he needs to rejuvenate his failing marriage and sinking stardom.
Few filmmakers have displaced the Hollywood dream like Coppola does throughout
Lost in Translation. Heir to filmmaker royalty, but burned by the media in her youth, Coppola knows Hollywood’s hot and cold flashes. Using the movie as a metaphor for her own feelings, Coppola doesn’t reject the holiness of Hollywood all together. But she manages to translate the rejected feelings when Hollywood no longer speaks your language.
