Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, a washed-up movie star who unhappily finds himself in Tokyo shooting television commercials for a popular brand of whiskey. Murray is no stranger to the role of middle-aged borderline-miscreant. In Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, he delivered a brilliantly taut performance as Herman Blume, the disgruntled millionaire with an unhappy marriage and a couple of ungrateful kids. Murray artfully channels that same character in this movie and succeeds in adding a whole new dimension to him. For Bob Harris is not only rich, unhappy, and utterly unfulfilled, but additionally is self-aware of the failing health of his soul. As we see him look into the mirror in his lonely hotel room in Tokyo, we observe the face of a broken man who yearns for a way out. Indeed, we learn that Bob has given up acting in a play in order to do the whiskey commercials, which earn him a handsome fee of two million dollars. However, Bob’s face reveals but one thing: perhaps this man should check his priorities.
In what promises to be one of the most subtle performances of the year, Scarlett Johansson plays Charlotte, the young wife of a professional photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) who pays little attention to her. She feels sidelined by her husband’s work, and has no job or aspirations of her own that could add meaning to her life. While her husband is gone on a week-long photo shoot, she attempts to endure the loneliness of the Tokyo hotel by listening to cheesy self-help tapes and sleeping throughout the day. At nights, she ventures downstairs to the hotel bar in hopes of finding someone or something to cure her depressed aimlessness, or at least distract her from it. It is there that she finds Bob Harris. Although he is twice her age, she quickly recognizes that they are both lost in an unfamiliar world that cannot hope to fulfill their basic spiritual and emotional needs. And the reason for this is that they both have had no hand in shaping the contours of their current state of being. Both Bob and Charlotte are living lives that are not their own.
The rest of the movie shows us the little interactions between Bob and Charlotte that ultimately lead to a kind of spiritual renewal for them both. Each can see the other’s faults, and can see those same faults in themselves. In one comical yet utterly revealing scene, Bob shows up at Charlotte’s hotel room wearing an orange camouflage t-shirt. Charlotte instantly quips, “God, you are having a mid-life crisis.” But of course, the audience cannot help but remember the times of languid loneliness and quiet desperation that have been plaguing Charlotte herself since the beginning of the movie. Her crisis is just as real. Perhaps Bob and Charlotte have more to learn from each other than their situations in life might suggest.
By the end of Lost in Translation, we find that Bob and Charlotte have taught each other more than just how to endure their crises; they have taught each other how to rise above their depressions in order to be able to fashion their everyday lives in their own images. In relating to each other through their pain and confusion with life, they unexpectedly reawaken their long-lost vigor for life.
Written and directed by Sofia Coppola, this movie is above all a concrete testament to Ms. Coppola’s true talent and unchecked potential. This movie follows on the footsteps of her beautifully tragic The Virgin Suicides, about five sisters who are so sexually and socially repressed by their overbearing mother that they would rather die than keep on enduring the unnaturalness of their lives. Taken together, Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides establish Sofia Coppola’s original, confident voice in film. She is intimately concerned with characters who follow the rules, but who find that doing so leads to unhappy, unnatural lives of stasis. For Ms. Coppola, one or the other has to give—either the rules, or the person. She has set up a truly engaging moral dilemma in her films that prevent us from looking away, no matter how painfully real such a dilemma may be.
No longer may we refer to Ms. Coppola as Francis Ford’s daughter, for her films have now cemented her reputation as a truly independent visionary.
I’d give Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation an A.
"...this movie is above all a concrete testament to Ms. Coppola’s true talent and unchecked potential."
director: sofia coppola
starring: scarlett johansson, bill murray, anna faris, giovanni ribisi
