An abridged version of Jeffrey Overstreet’s review of Lost in Translation is available at Paste Magazine.
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Written and directed by Sofia Coppola; director of photography, Lance Acord; edited by Sarah Flack; original music by Kevin Shields; sound designer, Richard Beggs, production designers, Anne Ross and K. K. Barrett; produced by Ms. Coppola and Ross Katz; released by Focus Features.
102 minutes. Rated R.
STARRING: Bill Murray (Bob Harris), Scarlett Johansson (Charlotte), Giovanni Ribisi (John), Anna Faris (Kelly) and Catherine Lambert (Jazz Singer).
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If you read much poetry you’ve come across those rare poems that, in just a few short lines, can move you as deeply as a great novel. The smallest work of art, crafted and sharpened just right, can cut deeply… cut through to revelation, inspiration, and hope.
Lost in Translation is going to be one of those small poems for a lot of moviegoers.
Thus, as you will see, I found it impossible to sum up this small movie in a short review. So bear with me…
In Lost in Translation, director Sofia Coppola shows the eccentricity and subtlety of Jim Jarmusch, the poet’s gift of Krzysztof Kieslowski, and a piercing sense of humor all her own. For all of the attention that her lead actors will receive-or at least deserve-at Oscar time, this is Coppola’s film.
There aren’t many women directing movies at this level. Think of some. You have to work at it, don’t you? Jane Campion and Lynne Ramsey have made their mark in art house films. Penny Marshall and Nora Ephron have scored some points with comedy. When The Virgin Suicides opened in 1999, Sofia Coppola quickly earned a place on the “most promising” list. But now, with Lost in Translation, she joins the ranks of the best. And I don’t just mean the best women in film-I mean the best directors… period. In fact, this one’s better than anything her dad, Francis Ford Coppola, has directed in twenty years.
A husband away from home, a wife neglected
Translation‘s story is simple, roomy, introspective. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, an American movie star persuaded to stay in Tokyo long enough to star in a commercial for Suntory malt whiskey. Clearly, he does not want to be there. He seems uncomfortable, unsure what to do on his own. Perhaps because he does not think much of himself. He has no friends there worth meeting, nothing he really wants to do outside of running up a hefty bill at the hotel bar.
When he’s not spending hours withdrawn and glum, he’s fending off the ogling and ridiculous questions of fans, both Japanese and tourists. His clients arrange for entertainment to stop by his hotel room clad in lacy stockings, even though he has no interest in shallow flings (especially with non-English-speaking prostitutes who invite him to “Lip my stockings.”) His phone calls home to his wife are frustrating–she is having trouble holding down the fort by herself, and seems to think he’s gallivanting around the world having a grand time. Their conversations are strained, the stuff of a marriage’s last days.
Thus, in front of the cameras, Bob is a wreck of sarcasm, stress, and frustrated incomprehension. Somehow he musters the patience to endure the commercial’s frantically gesticulating director. Over and over again, he raises his glass and recites, “For relaxing times, make it Santory time.” All of this artifice, all of this melodrama, all of this money and time… for a whiskey commercial?
Underlining the falsity of the whole endeavor, it’s not even whiskey in the glass. To Bob’s chagrin, it’s just iced tea.
Since we’ve seen Murray play exasperation before (Groundhog Day), we half-expect Bob to sucker-punch somebody. Murray has clearly set the standard for portraying the guy who would give anything to be somewhere else. But he’s never been as good, as complicated, and as natural as he is here. Nobody else could have played Bob Harris. Kevin Spacey would have been snide and shrill. Jeff Bridges would have been too opaque and would have smacked his lips a lot to signal his angst. Tom Hanks might have had fun with the role, but Murray’s face is an encyclopedia of expression, both subtle and clownish. He’s just a joy to watch.
Fortunately for Bob, he’s in the same hotel as Charlotte, the young wife of an American photographer, left behind for long days, bored silly by the place. Scarlett Johansson plays Charlotte in a turn that matches Murray’s for pathos and intensity if not for complexity. Charlotte is not quite a grown woman. The opening shot of the film emphasizes that she is just a few hours riper than a naïve college girl. We quickly observe that she’s just beginning to wake up to life’s disillusioning lies. The first flush of passion in her new marriage has already faded to a gray chill. Her husband John (Giovanni Ribisi) hardly notices her as he bustles about the hotel room preparing for the day’s work, even as she sidles gorgeously past him, clad only in simple cotton underwear. She’s left with an immense and quiet sadness, staring out the window at a cold foreign city, wondering if her life is over.
So they glide through the streets, Bob and Charlotte, strangers in a strange land, two broken pieces that we know will fit like a perfect puzzle. Charlotte searches for meaning and purpose in the markets like Chihiro in the ghost world of Spirited Away; Bob sighs in his limo and stares up at his own visage on gigantic commercial banners, dwarfed by his own smirking image.
Of course, they meet. Unable to sleep or find anything fulfilling in the charades to which they are bound, they gravitate toward each other in the luxury hotel bar. There are sparks, yes, but not of the fierce erotic kind. Instead, their rendezvous brings two failing hearts suddenly to life, beating and warming the film from the center and spreading out to the edges of the frame. Their conversations are flirtatious, playful, casual, and yet you can feel their desperately lonely hearts finding a hold.
The streets are suddenly full of possibility. They dash about Tokyo, sharing laughs with the citizens even if they don’t fully understand them. Ultimately, they both find something worth getting out of bed in the morning for. Those circuses of the media and of Japanese pop culture become something to chuckle over instead of reasons to despair.
Empty lives, a search for place and purpose
Coppola makes this emotional, spiritual journey come to life by giving us powerful imagery and perfect accompaniment instead of obvious, blatant dialogue. We see Bob submerged in the hotel pool, Charlotte immersed in the assaulting noise of an arcade. Together, they stare wide-eyed in amused bewilderment at the dancers in a bizarre strip joint; they jump into karaoke parties and sing songs that become surprisingly appropriate and affecting. You can hear the emotion and the desire that has been hibernating in Bob’s heart bursting out in karaoke performances of Roxy Music’s “More than This” and Elvis Costello’s “(What’s So Funny About) Peace Love and Understanding.”
Just as Bob finds release in surrendering to this silly game and singing his heart out, Charlotte finds release in surrendering herself to something larger as well. We see her wander through Tokyo like an angel from Wings of Desire, pausing in temples and at shrines. The deliberate nature of the Japanese traditions intrigues her. When she is given a small part to play in one of them, doing something as simple as planting a flower, she does not really know what she’s doing, but there is a small thrill in playing a part in a larger mystery. In stark contrast to the instant-gratification of technology and pop culture, here there is beauty in tradition and ritual and history. Instead of serving herself, she is serving something Other.
It’s almost too much of a cliché that Charlotte would suddenly reveal a secret wound, confessing that she unnecessarily endures a physical flaw. Of course, she keeps the wound so she can focus her angst on a tangible pain. But Coppola uses that to surprising effect. She turns the treatment of that physical malady into another bonding experience for this alienated odd couple, surrounded by technology that tells them next to nothing. It crystallizes their larger dilemma. Charlotte is hurting at the disappointment her marriage has become, while Bob, older and wiser, can give her some counsel and comfort.
“Does it get any easier?” she asks. He cannot of course tell her that things will be fine, but he can give her reasons to keep striving. Counseling her, he counsels himself as well. He may not have much to say at all, but merely his presence is enough to make a difference. Further, in being acknowledged, listened to, and respected, Bob is finding confidence and a reason to live. His identity, his ideals, what he cares about… these have all been lost along the way. Just as Bob and Charlotte have become disoriented and dislocated in Japan, they have lost track of themselves in their contracts-Charlotte in her marriage, Bob in his work. Neither of them have found satisfaction where they were supposed to. Only in love… and yes, something higher than romantic love… do they find at last something for that spiritual thirst. Speaking in their native language, making connections, being themselves, they rediscover what was “lost in translation.”
“I’m trying to organize a prison break,” Bob tells her in one of their early encounters. “Are you in or are you out?” Indeed he’s trying. He does not know that she’ll become, in the end, the key to his escape.
An American movie with a sense of restraint
Most American films would lead Bob to fulfill dreams of escape from commitments into the bliss of indulgence. Instead, he escapes into the freedom of a new perspective, a new faith that good things can still happen, that grace can happen, even in his life as a middle-aged married celebrity with kids.
Bob and Charlotte’s relationship is one of the most complex and wonderful relationships I’ve seen in a film. I can think of only two others that have a similar nature. In Peter Weir’s Fearless, a traumatic experience formed a bond of tenderness and mutual enlightenment between Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez. They became wiser than those around them, but as Ecclesiastes tells us, “Increasing wisdom results in increasing pain.” In the end, Bridges must choose to withdraw from his past life in contempt or else bite the bullet and remain faithful to his responsibilities and commitments. In My First Mister‘s Albert Brooks and Leelee Sobieski hung suspended between romance and father-daughter understanding, until sentimentality swamped the film’s final act and upset their delicate balance.
In Lost in Translation, sentimental crowdpleasing never plays into it. The two acknowledge, subtly, the awkward romantic attraction, but they also demonstrate unusual maturity and depth in their resistance to that pull. They recognize that one is speaking from a place of age and experience, the other from a place of youthful exuberance and fear of the unknown. He can offer her hope for a meaningful marriage. She can offer him the rewards of inquisitiveness and playfulness. She can remind him that relationship flourishes in intimacy, not over the telephone. What Bob and his wife once had is “lost” in its electronic transference; it might be rediscovered when he goes home, lies down, and touches her again.
I was, quite simply, thunderstruck to find that Bob and Charlotte never cross the line. American films have a troubling tendency to teach us that we must indulge when that opportunity arises … or else miss out on something. Those storytellers may be making excuses for their own selfishness. They probably haven’t experienced the deeper rewards of restraint, of commitment, of keeping promises, of weathering storms, of waiting for the right thing instead of seizing upon the first thing. When we “seize the day” with any passing romance, we lose the opportunity for lasting, deeper relationships that develop a history, that have proven resilient through good times and rough times. As Tolkien wrote, “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” Here, somewhere between the “freedom” of America and the “form and manner” of Japanese tradition, we have a perfect balance: two people who recognize romantic potential, and yet have the decency to define their relationship very specifically, to honor more important things.
Coppola’s made a masterpiece,
and she’s only just begun…
It feels like a true story. Coppola’s script sprang from her own experiences in Japan. We get the feeling she made some wonderful friendships there, short, sweet, meaningful. She shot the whole film entirely on location in Japan, and I haven’t seen a film as delighted and fascinated by a city since Wim Wenders’ gave us that angelic perspective on Berlin. We drift, we discover, we delight in some things and we wince and withdraw in dismay from others. But in the end, we are sorry to part with it.
A good deal of the film’s hypnotic power should be credited to cinematographer Lance Accord and editor, Sarah Flack. Accord, famous for his Fat Boy Slim music video that starred Christopher Walken, finds enchantment in the low lights of the bar, the slide of streetlights across car windows, and (perhaps inspired by Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi) he finds a memorable canvas in a hotel window at night, which reflects the silhouettes of the people in the room and fills them with constellations of the traffic outside and far below. Flack sews all of this dreamy imagery together with the same cleverness that she brought to Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant little film The Limey.
The actors make this subtle subtext work by making every conversation uniquely authentic. Johansson is now a force to be reckoned with. We first noticed her as the teen traumatized in a riding accident, in Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer. More recently, her performance as Rebecca Doppelmeyer in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (alongside Thora Birch) earned her the Toronto Film Critics Association award for Best Supporting Actress. Joel and Ethan Coen were the first to capitalize on her premature-maturity, revealing a complicated woman trying to break out of a silly schoolgirl uniform in The Man Who Wasn’t There. She is the kind of intelligent beauty that could bring Kieslowski right out of his grave, vowing to add a fourth episode to his Three Colors trilogy just so he could create a character for her and film her.
As her husband John, Ribisi is a busybody, wearing huge sunglasses and clothes that make him look like a kid playing dress-up. He keeps the guy from being utterly evil; he’s still affectionate toward his wife, but the passion is going if not gone. When he and Charlotte bump into a ditzy American actress (Anna Faris of the Scary Movie franchise), he acts like a kid with a crush on Cameron Diaz. (At first I thought that Faris was too shrill and over-the-top, but then I reflected on how many young ladies I’ve met who are just like that.) Seeing the photographer ogle at this airhead, our sympathies for Charlotte deepen.
Hollywood-head Americans aren’t the only ones in the film getting jabbed for shallowness. Parts of Japanese culture are presented for the bizarre, empty, ego-trips that they are. It’s hard not to chuckle in bewilderment at the Japanese equivalent of Johnny Carson, a blonde, Asian, Chris Tucker-type hosting a show so bizarre that it makes Saturday Night Live’s “Sprockets” seem ordinary. This could be seen as a cheap slam on Japan, but Coppola is not targeting any particular culture. She would have found equivalents anywhere. It feels more like she’s reminding us of the ways we preoccupy ourselves at the expense of meaningful, truly liberating relationship.
Was it a fling? Or something profound?
I am almost certain I will end up arguing with certain viewers over whether or not this film condones infidelity or celebrates unfaithfulness. Many will argue that one of the film’s final moments-indeed, it’s most climactic-is evidence of a betrayal.
I will disagree with those claims. That exchange is instead the desperate gesture of two people to each other, expressing gratitude for what they’ve shared, sadness that it is not meant to continue, and delight that they have discovered how life can be unpredictable and full of unexpected delights. When they were despairing, they found comfort in each other. They have discovered that in a crowded lively city or in a wasteland, anything can become meaningful when experienced in relationship. Of course, they have a certain longing for each other. And their flirtations show that sex certainly crossed their minds. But instead they have shared the bond of kindred spirits, an understanding and a hope-something their spouses wrongfully deny them.
But in the end they they honor their commitments. Like the hero and heroine of Fearless, they have attained a higher awareness, and the strength to grit their teeth and go home… to do the right thing no matter what the outcome.
Bob and Charlotte may not yet have discovered the choreographer of their lives, the one that has given them these gifts of grace-and neither, I suspect, has their filmmaker. (She personally removed me from a list of press lined up to interview her in Seattle… probably because she saw that I write for Christianity Today.) But art says more than the artist can ever know. Bob and Charlotte are learning some of the lessons explored by Solomon in Ecclesiastes: that wealth, fame, and experience are empty and meaningless unless they are experienced in the context of a caring relationship. They are one step closer to discovering that when they serve a higher purpose, and enter into a relationship with someone truly Other, no matter where they find themselves they will have a deep sense of purpose and belonging.