Overall Rating
 Awesome: 62.1%
Worth A Look: 12.9%
Average: 7.53%
Pretty Bad: 9.41%
Total Crap: 8.06%
16 reviews, 276 user ratings
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| Lost in Translation |
by Jack Sommersby
"All Too Obvious in Its Intentions"
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Bill Murray -- unlike this overpraised wank-fest -- is miraculous.Lost in Translation is about two frustrated Americans finding solace in each other's company while experiencing alienation while stuck in Tokyo due to career and personal obligations. Bob Harris (played by Bill Murray) is an American action-film star in his early fifties who's there to collect an easy two-million-dollar paycheck for shooting a whiskey commercial; and Charlotte (played by Scarlett Johansson) is the young wife of a fashion photographer who's tagged along with her husband because, after having recently graduated from Yale with a degree in philosophy, she hasn't anything better to do. After an initial encounter inside the hotel elevator, where just a courtesy smile is exchanged between the two, they manage to run across each other numerous times -- mostly in the hotel bar, where, due to insomnia as well as boredom, they make cordial conversation. Over the next few days, they loosen up considerably, confide in one another their fears, their troubles, and, yes, their hope for a more enriching and rewarding life; and, by darned, in the end they evolve into more emotionally-accessible and -fulfilled people than they were before. There's not much more to the film than this, but the writer/director, Sofia Coppola, certainly doesn't want you to think so -- she's hoping that the mere lack of a plot will automatically convince viewers that they're witnessing something "truthful". This is the sad state American film culture has reached: dress something shallow and obvious up with minimalism and art-house artifice, and viewers will go agog at all the nothingness while under the pretense that there must be something genuinely special about it all given its "respectful" presentation that's bereft of boobies and dead bodies. It's process-of-elimination favoritism: if a film isn't full of what we've grown tired of, then what it contains must be special -- it's favorably judging a film not for what it is, but, unfortunately, what it isn't. Thus, Lost in Translation emerges as the biggest vapid nothing since the repugnant In the Bedroom from two years ago, which also arrived on the scene with a wide array of critical acclaim and not so much as an original moment in its overlong, creatively-bankrupt cinematic body.
This is Coppola's second feature film following her 2000 debut, The Virgin Suicides, which was curiously unmoving in light of its true-life story concerning four teenage sisters committing suicide due to a strict parental upbringing. Admittedly, Coppola didn't embarrass herself as a director, even when she didn't show anything particularly indicative of distinctiveness; but her biggest liability there that similarly permeates the proceedings in Lost in Translation is her timidity -- it's as she believes doing too much with the camera is uncouth showboating, so she settles on a laid-back style that would be acceptable for high-grade material that the camera needn't bring anything out of but is decidedly deadly for material as decidedly lacking as this. Due to the absence of emotional immediacy and complexity, the character-driven scenes, rather than fluidly progressing, lackadaisically lurch forward; and it's this, coupled with Coppola's nagging habit of having the camera jerk up and down Cassavetes-style in a frail attempt to convey a you-are-there vitality, that accentuates the film's emptiness where a more sprightly aesthetic approach might have glided over it. Coppola makes a fundamental mistake of equating plainness with "truth" under the guise that understatement itself is an automatic virtue, even if there's nothing particularly enticing going on within or underneath the flabbily-shaped scenes for the audience to key off of -- we work harder just to stay involved with what's presently taking place than contemplating anything meaningful or insightful. Like the equally odious Punch-Drunk Love, here is a film striving mightily to be the ultimate Fable of Loneliness but is too rigidly controlled and top-heavy with blatant intent to allow for the kind of fresh, revealing behavorial idiosyncrasies that would jump-start our senses and envelop us in a wonderfully-etched world of spontaneity, surprise. Hence: Coppola and Paul Thomas Anderson have emerged as two of the most joyless directorial martinets in the business today, snuffing out semblances of life in their die-hard quest to make all-encompassing statements of life. Sitting through Lost in Translation is like laying on a psychiatrist's couch -- face down. It's that revealing.
The film is so chock-full of cliche after cliche that at about the thirty-minute mark I was waiting for Coppola to deliver the punchline. To get the story to its central Charlotte/Bob point, Coppola has not only saddled Charlotte with an inattentive photographer husband (a nondescript Giovanni Ribisi) who conveniently goes away on a weekend shoot so she can be left alone to saunter out alongside Bob, but before even that, she has Charlotte make one of those crying-for-help calls to a friend back home just so she can be put on hold by the too-busy friend. And Bob's been saddled with a too-attentive spouse: she keeps sending him faxes of a new shelf design for his study and FedExes him swatches of different burgundy shades to chose from. And if this isn't enough to pound the audience over the head, before formally meeting Bob, Charlotte even listens to a self-help audio tape that imparts such mind-shattering wisdom like "Each soul begins with an imprint, a pattern selected by your soul before you even get here". Yes, folks, we're talking destiny here! (Did Coppola get points for straight-laced unoriginality, or is it just a passion?) Throw in the character of a bubble-brained blonde actress named Kelly (the always-gruesome Anna Faris, who's not exactly a Jodie Foster in the intellect department herself), Bob having a criminally unfunny run-in with a masochistic masseuse in his room (she insists he rip her stockings -- and you wish you could rip the film right out of the damn projector), a late-night excursion where Bob rocks out to karaoke and Charlotte lets her guard down with Bob in a platonic bedroom chat, not to mention a horde of stereotypically eager-beaver, obnoxious Japanese, and you have something that's so by-the-numbers that the film should come with its own checklist. Lost in Translation isn't bad necessarily because it's stunningly obvious -- well, yeah, it is bad because of this -- but because Coppola has given such unwarranted respect to her own facile screenplay that she keeps you in suspense for the wrong reason: endlessly wondering when its maker is going to snap out of it and deliver the goods her maddeningly self-indulgent approach keeps promising.
Far be it for Coppola to fill in her one-hundred-and-two-minute running time with interesting observations, her hopeless reliance on obviousness isn't applicable only to the hastily filled-in details of the story but the story premise itself. In dealing with the matters of alienation and discontent, she's gone the typical route of having her characters experience these in a foreign land, whereas, by contrast, director Jane Campion, in her muddled-yet-watchable In the Cut, chose to tell a similarly-themed tale through the eyes of two dissatisfied New Yorkers (superbly played by Meg Ryan and Jennifer Jason Leigh) in their own everyday land. There, the piercingly beautiful opening-credits sequence where Leigh finds herself temporarily dislocated on an apartment terrace during a wind-blown flower-petal storm alone is more enchanting than the entirety of Coppola's wank-fest, but two even more telling moments followed: when Leigh's character remarks to her stepsister that she needs to move out of her noisy building, Leigh treats the noise as metaphor -- it's merely representative of a more collective dissatisfaction; and when Ryan's schoolteacher, who feels a stranger in the Big Apple during a mid-life crisis where she feels ill-defined, relaxes in a bathtub and tells her new lover "I'm scared of what I want." it has tenfold the penetrating resonance than Charlotte's meek and meager self-reflection of uncertainty to Bob as they lay beside each other in bed. Where Coppola fails to employ the camera to capture and convey expressive mood (as if it's "hip" to photograph nothingness to convey just -- and only -- that), Campion garnishes every frame with the kind of texture and movement that incisively mirrors her characters' inner anxieties and reflects quite tellingly of how one's environment can go from comforting to suffocating. In the Cut is a botch as a thriller -- the plot wobbles, the pacing is laborious, and the whodunit angle is negligently rendered -- but it's extremely affecting as a character study on a level that Lost in Translation cannot even begin to approach because its characters are too boxed-in by Coppola's limited perception of how Americans actually relate to one another. Campion's characters seem to be existing in a whirlwind; Coppola's in a vacuum.
What somewhat redeems Lost in Translation, however, is the miraculous star performance of Bill Murray. Murray's usual brand of ironic detachment has served him well in broad comedies where his refusal to commit himself to the level of emotional urgency of that of his co-stars (even in the face of a green-slimed ectoplasm in Ghostbusters and a hard-as-nails drill sergeant in Stripes) evoked an aura of superiority that was always endearing, never smarmy. Here, he's required to slowly reveal yet hold himself in, and Murray, who failed in his first dramatic performance as a disillusioned ex-soldier in The Razor's Edge, gives a near-brilliant performance of modulation and insinuation. His movie-star character knows how to present himself to the general public -- when having to face them, he all but flips on a switch to get himself into Mr. Congeniality mode -- but when he's with Charlotte, uncertainty gradually overcomes him; he's good at superficial talk at the hotel bar, but when their casual relationship begins deepening, he has to wade around the perimeters of intimacy before feeling comfortable and secure enough to commit himself. After over two decades of watching Murray act the wiser, it's refreshing (and, at times, breathtaking) to watch him take hold of a multi-faceted role and bring off emotional transitions with the dexterousness of a top-flight dramatic actor. He's that good here. Somewhat regrettably, though, the performance might have been even greater had Murray had a more interesting co-star than Scarlett Johansson to play off of. She was dazzlingly alert in supporting roles in Ghost World and The Man Who Wasn't There but gives a dull, unresponsive performance here -- even Murray's stalwart self can't convince you of his character's infatuation with her. Coppola reportedly envisioned the project as "Bill Murray Goes to Japan" before she began to write it, and this feels about right, because the screenplay's happenstances don't seem to have grown out of anything organic, just something superficial. And though Murray succeeds in vividly grounding his fair share of the dramatic baggage with gravitas and rootedness, he can't salvage Coppola's rickety ship of pretentiousness that, through all serious intent and purpose, is no more illuminating than a postcard.
@ Jack Sommersby, 2003Skip it.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8132&reviewer=327
originally posted: 02/29/04 13:15:37
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USA
12-Sep-2003 (R)
DVD: 03-Feb-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2003
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