"Lost in Translation"

Sofia Coppola's stealthy romance about two Americans stranded in Tokyo is a work of marvelous delicacy -- and offers the performance of Bill Murray's career.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sept. 12, 2003 | Sofia Coppola's magnificent and delicate "Lost in Translation" is a love story but not a romance, a picture that fits into no identifiable genre because there's no category fluid enough to properly cradle it. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, a Hollywood action-movie star who's been flown to Tokyo to make a whiskey commercial, giving him a respite from his kid and his wife of 25 years, with whom he's settled into either a wobbly holding pattern or a businesslike truce that prevents them from killing each other -- it's hard to say which. Scarlett Johansson is a quiet, bookish young woman named Charlotte, who has come to the same city with her hotshot photographer husband (played by Giovanni Ribisi). She clearly cares for him, and yet the two float in parallel spaces that never intersect. They're like strangers who wake up in a rumpled bed together only to realize they've been married for two years.

Charlotte and Bob meet in the bar of the Tokyo Park Hyatt. The two of them have drifted there after spending sleepless hours' worth of channel clicking in their respective rooms, like zombies who can no longer bear the boredom of being undead and need to at least go through the motions of feeling alive.

And after that meeting, everything and nothing happens in "Lost in Translation": The picture's muted intensity isn't just a vague mood -- it's a subtle but very specific type of narrative drive. Coppola (who also wrote the screenplay) is a stealth dramatist: Instead of unfolding in precise pleats, her movies unfurl like bolts of silk. There are no handy place markers between scenes to help us tick off how many minutes are likely to pass between this or that point of conflict and the denouement. Revelations don't click into position; they swoop down, seemingly from nowhere, and settle in quietly, like a bird coming to roost.

To some people, this is a maddeningly diffuse type of filmmaking, but I'd argue that Coppola's precision is simply the sort that's measured in sine waves, not milliseconds. "Lost in Translation" is Coppola's second movie, and it marks her as one of our most gifted filmmakers (of either gender). Her first picture, the elegiac and gorgeously made "The Virgin Suicides," was cautiously praised by some critics, but I remember encountering, in conversation at least, plenty of people who took glee in cutting it down, basing their arguments not on the specifics of the movie itself but on their convenient perception that Coppola was able to make movies only because she has a famous dad, Francis Ford Coppola. Or, more preposterous yet, many refused to acknowledge that she could be a good filmmaker since she had given such a bad performance in "Godfather III."

Strangely enough, or perhaps not so, no one has accused Sofia's husband, Spike Jonze (the director of "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation"), of riding on the Coppola coattails, even though, as Lynn Hirschberg pointed out in a recent New York Times Magazine profile of Sofia, Jonze's movies have also benefited from the Coppola family support network. Jonze is not without talent: He's an occasionally entertaining filmmaker. But it's frustrating that he's received so many more accolades than his wife, who is well on her way to becoming a great one.

"Lost in Translation" is a movie about dislocation and the blessed salve of connection. Both Bob and Charlotte are strangers in a strange land, the strange land not being Japan, but their own skins. The very surface of "Lost in Translation" -- it was shot, beautifully, by relative newcomer Lance Acord -- seems alive with nerve endings, from the lonely waltzing molecules of the hotel bar to Tokyo's blaze of blinking neon, which seems both welcoming and reserved. (New Yorkers will probably be struck by how much parts of Tokyo resemble Times Square; it's as if New York has a mirror complement on the other side of the world.) A strong sense of place is a necessity in a movie about dislocation: The city knows for sure who it is; it's the people moving through it who are riddled with doubt and uncertainty.

Bob is undergoing something of a midlife crisis, but it's not the usual kind, perhaps because in Coppola's view, there's no usual anything when it comes to human emotion. He's obviously frustrated with his marriage, but you get the sense he's bound to his wife by some sort of dutiful calcification, if not love. (She never appears; she's merely a surly, disembodied voice on the phone, ringing Bob at all hours to demand a decision on what type of carpet he'd like for his study at home.) Charlotte, who is in her early 20s and who has been married only two years, is far too young to have a midlife crisis. She's youthful and radiant and possessed of a very fine-grained intelligence that announces itself in whispers. But it's as if her heart has aged too fast inside her. Bob first spots her in an elevator, nodding a courteous but bland "hello" to the only other American in that tiny space. Later, they recollect that first encounter. "Did I scowl at you?" Charlotte asks, as if she believes the aura of her inexplicable unhappiness is the first thing anyone would notice about her.

The closest I can come to dissecting the mechanics of Coppola's talent (since you can't dissect alchemy anyway) is this: She frames a movie around her actors instead of around her own vision. Coppola has said that she wouldn't have made the movie if she hadn't been able to get Murray, for whom she wrote the role. He was reportedly reluctant to take it at first, but, thankfully, he did.

Murray has always been an actor of almost subterranean sensitivity (in pictures like "Scrooged," Michael Almereyda's "Hamlet" and "Rushmore"). But this is his finest performance. Murray is often funny here -- his lines loop around us, their unwitting victims, like licorice whips. But he also shows us a range of feelings that we immediately recognize, among them lovesickness, bewilderment, self-deprecating resignation -- such feelings are, after all, universal. But Murray makes them feel new and raw, as if he has locked onto the most universal and most painful truth of all: that even as our bodies age, we're all teenagers inside, susceptible to intensity of emotion and heartbreak that we all think we left behind long ago.

Next page: Bill Murray's character is big in Japan. No, literally -- he's big in Japan