Sofia Coppola’s first feature, an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, was a poetic meditation on the disconnection between men and women and between the past and our memories. With a choral male narrator (a device Coppola took from the book), The Virgin Suicides was told from the point of view of a single clueless male (voiced by properly clueless Giovanni Ribisi) who could represent the cluelessness of all men in the face of the eternal mystery of femininity. Despite occasional moments of preciousness, it was a debut that should forever distance Coppola from the humiliation her father brought upon her by foisting her into The Godfather III and then foisting it into the world.

Coppola’s second feature, the new Lost in Translation is, again, about disconnection, taking the themes from her debut and building on them and advancing them. In The Virgin Suicides, Coppola and Eugenides used an outbreak of Dutch Elm Disease as something of a metaphor for the failures and costs of modernity (as well as as a metaphor for, you know, Dutch Elm Disease and death). In Lost in Translation, she chooses an entire location that could serve as the embodiment of modernity, shooting most of the film in Tokyo.

The plot of Lost in Translation could hardly be simpler: Bob Harris (the priceless Bill Murray) is an American movie star in Tokyo. As he describes it, he’s taken two millions dollars and time when he could have been doing a play to come to Japan and shoot a series of ads for a whiskey. While it’s clear that he’s done this before (his face is on buses and billboards already), he’s lost. He doesn’t speak the language and he’s like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, a giant in a world of, well, Japanese people.

The thing that’s made clear is that Bob isn’t just lost in Japan. He would be lost even if he were back in the United States. He and his wife of 25 years speak like business associates. She’s redecorating his office while he’s off in a foreign country forgetting his son’s birthday and questioning the path of his life. It’s implied that he doesn’t act as much as he used to, but then it’s also implied that he’s rarely at home. It’s a mystery. This is all compounded by the fact that we have Bill Murray playing what is, from what we can tell, a Clint Eastwood-esque action star. But like everything else, the nature of his career and the degree of his stardom are meted out in small details and gestures.

On the other end (literally), we have Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson, bucking to become the poster girl for the word "luminescence"). Charlotte is 20-something and under employed. Her husband is a somewhat frantic, somewhat maladjusted photographer played again with proper cluelessness by Giovanni Ribisi. He is shooting all over Japan, but Charlotte is mostly just along for the ride. A graduate of Yale, apparently, she was a philosophy major. Now, she’s just trying to find herself, mostly sitting on the edge of her bed, sometimes sitting on the window sill gazing.

Bob and Charlotte can’t sleep. They meet in passing several times and the sense something in the other. Exhaustion? Dissatisfaction? Sadness? After enough random moments and half-begun conversations, they strike up a friendship and get to know the film’s third major character, the city of Tokyo and (to a slightly lesser extent) the nation of Japan.

Shot by Lance Acord (who Coppola borrowed from husband Spike Jonze), the Tokyo of Lost in Translation manages to encompass every cliché associated with the city. Certainly we get the dizzying blur of neon and commerce that could easily be compared to Times Square or Piccadilly Circus on speed (or something even stronger). This interpretation is seen in the gaudy excesses of the city, which is set up as haven for frustrated wish fulfillment. In video arcades, gamers play drums or guitar, simulating the experience of Western-style stardom amidst a cacophony of like-minded youth. Bars and karaoke clubs are full of awful, loud, jarring interpretations of Western culture, always somewhat disconnected from their cultural reference points. The raunchy English-language rap in a sleek, but dirty strip club or a hilariously butchered version of The Sex Pistols’ "God Save the Queen" are an example of a culture that is often lost within itself.

On the other hand, as Charlotte wanders through the country, seemingly like a savant with a "Let’s Go!" guide, she keeps happening upon traditional and ancient Japanese activities. She goes to a Buddhist temple and watches a service. She stumbles upon a flower arranging ceremony. She somehow make sit up to Kyoto and watches a couple in traditional garb complete some rite or other in a Japanese garden. She seems all of these things are remains largely unaffected.

The language. The gestures. The covers of "Scarboro Fair." The food. The music. Even the sound of the hotel fire alarm. Everything is foreign. But Lost in Translation isn’t a film about two Americans reaching out for each other in the hell of Japan.

The tagline for Lost in Translation is as simple as the plot: Everybody Wants to be Found.

Bob and Charlotte don’t instantly fall into each other’s arms and into bed because really that’s not what either of them needs. This isn’t a movie where the main characters desperately need to get out of loveless relationships and have a good ol’ fashioned roll in the hay. At a karaoke bar, Bob sings "(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understand?" and that could almost be an over-obvious articulation of the film’s theme (particularly when Charlotte follows him by singing Roxy Music’s "More than This").

The two main characters obviously need each other, but they don’t need each other as reminders from home. There’s the sense that Bob and Charlotte would be just as lost in Paris or in Cairo or in New York City. The city is living reflection of their mood, but it’s not a catalyst, I don’t think.

They approach Tokyo and each other in ways that perfectly play into the performance styles of the actors.

Johansson is an actress whose style is so casual and so natural that she seems to be totally innocent of the cast and crew around her. This is a trait that I noted back in 1996 when I first noticed her in Lisa Krueger’s gem Manny & Lo. Years of following her career have done nothing to change my opinion that we’re watching the development of an actress whose potential is limited only by directors’ ability to find a way to use her porcelain beauty and slightly atypical features. She has huge, wide eyes, a lush and inviting mouth and an button nose that still seems too large for her face. She opens up for the camera in a way that is both beautiful and deceptive.

For the first half of Lost in Translation, I marveled mostly at Bill Murray. I thought that without him the movie couldn’t exist, but that Johansson could probably be replaced by several other young engenues. I was wrong. Johansson just responds to the world around her in gentle ways that don’t immediately jump out. She seems content to let the movie, the plot, the action, come to her. She doesn’t attack the camera, like Catherine Zeta-Jones. Nor does she flirt desperately with the camera until it has no choice but to love her, like Kate Hudson or Meg Ryan. She waits patiently and draws the camera in.

I wish I could explain this better, but you have to just sit back and watch. Her Charlotte is lost in Tokyo, but she’s just as lost in bed with her husband or out with friends. She’s never passive though. Some people sleepwalk through life, but she’s walking with her eyes open as if she’ll know the answers when she sees them.

She gets some hint of the answers through Bob, with whom she first makes eye contact on an elevator (it’s easy… he’s around a foot taller than anybody there).

Bob is Bill Murray, or at least he’s Bill Murray insofar as we as viewers understand Bill Murray and his screen persona. Charlotte diagnoses Bob as being in the middle of a midlife crisis, but he isn’t really. She projects a certain wisdom onto him because of his age and decides that his uncertainty is caused by facing middle age, but Bob’s approach to the world is driven by a bemusement that goes far deeper than anything that could be satisfied by buying a Porsche. He’s lost, but he’s been lost for so long that it could almost be his address.

Like so many Bill Murray characters before him, Bob is a man who isn’t quite comfortable with his own skin, a man who refuses to just accept any of the idiosyncrasies of the modern world. The older Bill Murray heroes, like Tripper Harrison of Meatballs, rebelled against their world, usually in vocal outbursts. After Razor’s Edge, though, a new kind of Murray hero emerged, the resigned hero who has to learn to break out of his shell, if only a little bit. Certainly Murray can be brilliantly absurdly manic when he wants to be. Look no further than Kingpin or Wild Things.

In his best work, though, Murray has found a way to internalize his performances to the point that he has the greatest economy of facial gestures of any actor since Buster Keaton. While none of the physical comedy in "Lost in Translation" approaches a Keaton-esque level (it’s still superior), Murray plays a character so dour that every centimeter of raised eyebrow and every intimation of knowing smile is like a treasure. Murray has two scenes opposite directors who don’t speak any English that are Oscar-worthy on their own. Impressively, this character is Murray’s to the extent that he never needs to wink or raise his eyebrows at the audience. A surprising number of his moments feel unguarded and stripped of pretense. This forms a holy trinity with Groundhog Day and Rushmore as the best work this perpetually underappreciated actor has ever done.

Together Johansson and Murray have the most natural of chemistry. The long conversational pauses that make up much of the movie work because we sense that the characters on screen are just listening to the silence. Sure, Quentin Tarantino characters are post-modern enough to recognize uncomfortable silences and comment on them. In this movie, Coppola’s characters are innocent and romantic enough to know that not all silences need to be feared and that amidst language chaos and confusion sometimes mutual shared silence is a beautiful thing.

Bob and Charlotte reach out to each other as friends, but much of the film is beautifully romantic, though rarely ever in the ways you’re expecting.

Coppola may have only directed two movies, but she is a master at creating and sustaining mood. She uses myriad tricks from a complicated sound design to a well-integrated soundtrack to editing that fluidly connects the film’s series of largely unjoined "moments."

Sometimes, perhaps, the film’s visual direction is a bit too loose, the camera’s eye a bit too wandering. The shifts of focus within seemingly every shot only sometimes feel organic. There’s also something just a bit too fuzzy about her sense of narrative, though that floating sensation makes her films feel like short stories (if not as rich as novels).

Those flaws aside, Lost in Translation is a transporting film. At one point, Bob and Charlotte lie on a hotel bed drinking wine (or sake) and watching Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. I guess Anita Ekberg hopping into a fountain, bosoms heaving, can certainly be one version of the sweet life. Coppola makes it clear, though, that sometimes just reaching out and having somebody there is enough.

This joins American Splendor as one of the small treasures of the late summer and early fall, a film that probably deserves 4.5 stars out of five.



Recommended: Yes