Sometimes people tell me that Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is deep. I believe that their minds, unable to grasp the vast meaninglessness of this movie, have simply added their own wishes for depth to it.

Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, a washed-up movie actor who comes to Tokyo to make two million dollars on whiskey endorsements. Murray's excellent performance shows us a man who's been gradually losing what he loves. His marriage, although not in deep trouble, has become uncomfortable; it seems that both he and his clingy, frustrated wife (present only as a voice on the phone and words on faxes) know it, but don't know what to do about it. The movie roles he enjoyed are long gone, and now he's faced with choices between ill-paying theater and well-paying (but soulless) product endorsement.

Scarlett Johansson plays Charlotte, a bored and spoiled young woman who sits sullenly in a Tokyo hotel room while her husband, an entertainment photographer, works. Occasionally, she wanders out of the hotel room--without a guidebook, without even a phrasebook--and returns disappointed that she feels unmoved by what she's seen. She feels she doesn't know her husband (hardly a surprise, since she rarely tries to speak to him about anything of substance). Johansson makes Charlotte seem like a real person. Unfortunately, Charlotte is the sort of person I can't stand: A privileged person who expects everyone to drop everything to make her happy--even though she seems to have no idea what will make her happy.

Charlotte and Bob meet in the hotel bar and strike up a temporary friendship based on their dissatisfaction. They make fun of everyone and everything they see: The stupid (but nice) actress Charlotte's husband knows, the lounge singer with the lovely voice and the horrible taste, the unfamiliar food at the Japanese restaurants. Bob's way of handling the language barrier is to make jokes in English at the expense of the hosts and businesspeople who are treating him with such kindness and professionalism. This is only one of the things that made me so embarrassed to watch this movie with a Japanese-American friend.

THE SCRIPT, SUCH AS IT IS

Gradually, Bob and Charlotte bumble through this very slow film, flirting weakly with each other as they mock the people of Tokyo and have heart-to-hearts about their own misery. In one of the only scenes that really works for me, Bob tells Charlotte about his marriage and his children. The contrast of innocence and experience in that scene is lovely. Bob's marriage may be a cage, but when he shares his experience with Charlotte, it gives hope that Charlotte may find either a reason to stay with her thickheaded husband or a reason to leave him.

The plot (I use that word loosely) makes it hard for me to get into the movie. Bob's gotten himself into such a hole, no choice he can make will improve anything. Naturally, he finds a way to make it worse; this provides the one dramatic turn. Charlotte takes an interest in something besides herself only briefly, on a trip to Kyoto; it's not remarked upon, and at the end, no one can say whether she's learned anything. The end itself is the ultimate cheat, the cheap trick that any fiction teacher tells their students not to do: The noncommittal ending. The characters speak, but we don't hear what they say--we have to go look up the lyrics of the Jesus and Mary Chain song playing over them the final scene and try to relate them to the situation.

I'm boggled that the screenplay has received both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, and that it's already won the Golden Globe. Although Coppola wrote a few clever lines, the pacing is glacial, the conflict weak and uncompelling, the characters unsympathetic, and the ending a cop-out. Many jokes center around L/R confusion--how velly hiralious! I can only guess that people call Coppola a good writer because they're so grateful that she's not acting any more.

PLEASE, SHE'S EMBARRASSING THE OTHER AMERICAN TOURISTS

Charlotte is my biggest problem with the movie. She starts out whining about how misunderstood and how smart she is, but there's really very little evidence in the script to back this up. She does not work, and does not appear interested in getting a job. We never see her pick up a book. Her biggest claim to fame is pronouncing "Evelyn Waugh" correctly. Even the dumb actress gets it half right. Charlotte has neither the manners nor the intellectual curiosity to discuss music with someone who tries to engage her in conversation. She does not behave like an intellectual person; she behaves like a rather stupid snob who was admitted to an Ivy League college on the strength of her family's name and bank accounts.

More troubling, though, is her ugly-American arrogance. The first things Charlotte says about Japan are complaints that a) she "didn't feel anything" in a temple and b) she unsuccessfully "tried" the centuries-old art of Japanese flower arranging. She has not bothered to learn the pronunciation of ikebana; one can't imagine that she tried to learn anything about the art itself. We see her try to communicate with only one person who isn't American--and that's an apparently Japanese friend she knows from the States.

Really, the only good thing about Charlotte is that she looks like Scarlett Johansson.

IN CLOSING

Lost in Translation isn't a complete loss as a film. The cinematography is very pretty, and the supporting cast performs nearly as well as Murray does. Most of the Japanese characters speaks in unsubtitled Japanese; this keeps the audience from getting too far ahead of the perpetually confused Bob and Charlotte. When Bob and Charlotte aren't doing their "oh, look at the funny foreigners" cultural elitist routine, some of the scenes are funny.

If you manage to enjoy Lost in Translation, I'm happy for you. I could not muster the interest or the sympathy. The self-inflicted troubles of the bored rich bore me. I have no sympathy for cultural elitists. I couldn't like these characters, and couldn't come up with a reason to care what happened to them. Perhaps it's for the best, then, that for those two excruciating hours I spent with them, nothing did.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age