Lost in Translation
Bill Murray seems to have made a career out of playing worn-out, melancholy men with lives on autopilot, unlucky in love, doomed to walk this earth alone. In Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums, he played a bored steel tycoon and a sulking psychiatrist, respectively, chasing women much younger than himself only to be dumped somewhere mid-movie. In Groundhog Day, Murray's wry weathercaster would have never gotten the girl but for his five million chances at reliving the same day over and over again.
These days, Murray just looks sad. We feel his sadness just by looking at him. But we laugh anyway because we know that behind the dour fascade, Murray's laughing, too, comically deadpanning the cruel absurdity around him, eyebrow cocked, wry one-liner a second away. His comedic milieu is the old standby of Goofus and Gallant, Murray playing the zany, irreverent foil to the Universe's straight man. The only real difference between Ghost Busters and now is that the craziness of old has been internalized, toned-down in the mellowness of middle age, making the Gallant Universe suddenly look foolish in comparison for its stuffy self-righteousness. Instead of acting out radical absurdist notions, the New-Old Murray basks in ironic disbelief at the comedy of errors moving about him.
In the opening sequence of Lost in Translation, Murray's character (a washed-up action movie star) rides through downtown Tokyo, staring out the window at the neon lights and throngs of people passing by. He is the Stranger, an observer outside the world he observes, totally unengaged in its hustle, its bustle, its connections and relations. He is Alone, looking out at the Other. Or, in the parlance of Volkswagen: Murray is not a driver on the highway of life; he's a passenger - a passenger fed up with all the drivers, weary at the high-adrenaline movers pushing him around the city, through his stale marriage and a diminishing career.
Sophia Coppola uses the old dramatic trick of creating situational and visual metaphors for her characters' interior lives in this, her second movie. And even if it doesn't come off as transparently as we'd like, we are still grateful to her for avoiding the Sophomoric Talk Trap, of properly showing us everything on the screen instead of merely saying it. So rather than hearing Murray sob into his whiskey that his wife doesn't understand him, that he feels totally disconnected from his art, that he's alienated from most of the world - we just see him riding, nonplussed, in a limousine, looking out the window. We see him blinking at a 4-AM incoming fax from his wife asking about upholstery samples. We observe him struggling to get through a day of shooting for an inane whisky television ad. And instead of having her characters wax philosophical about the difficulty of connecting, Coppola simply drops them in a foreign land (Japan), where they literally speak a different language from everyone else.
Lost in Translation, suitably, is about less talk, more show, and it works like a charm. Sophia Coppola clearly knows how to tell a story visually. Richard Linklater, here's a lesson; Kevin Smith, take note.
While staying at a posh hotel in-between the whisky commercial shoot and a TV appearance, Murray bumps into a recently married, recently-Yale-graduated twentysomething drifter (spot-on played by Scarlett Johansson) who is spending her days hanging out waiting for her fashion photographer husband to return from his gig. They recognize each others' loneliness and decide to be alone together, roaming the city, part comforting one another, part falling in love.
Much will doubtless be made of all the throwaway jokey jabs at Japanese culture, at the old schtick of stranger-in-a-strange-land, of old-man-falls-for-young-girl. But the best scenes in the movie are those showing these two characters simply being alone with themselves in Japan's less-traveled backstreets. Of Murray playing golf, solo, under a looming Mt. Fuji. Of Scarlet Johanasson witnessing a traditional Japanese wedding from a secluded vantage point in a formal garden. These scenes radiate such peace as to nearly arrest the celluloid from advancing through the projector and suspend us in Bazin's ideal 'holy moment' of God incarnate captured by eye of the cinema.
Wonderful.
My only gripe with the film is that it hardly seems lit, that interiors are dim and dreary and lacking in that punchy contrast that we've become accustomed to with the likes of Conrad Hall and Dante Spinotti behind the camera. That, and the profusion of handheld work, combines to make this one of the most visually uninteresting things I've seen in awhile. I really hope this was just out of budget or time restraints and not some sort of misguided quest for photographic "realism." I mean, c'mon, it's a movie; there's no real there, just flickers of light. Why not make them beautiful?
***1/2 (out of four)
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