Lost in Translation

Directed and Written by Sofia Coppola

Starring Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray

Rated R for some sexual content

102 minutes runtime

What a socko three years for Scarlett Johansson (“Ghost World,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Lost in Translation”), a young actress who is combining quality and quantity with three smash hits in so many years.  Her latest effort with Bill Murray is a triumph of understatement.  Unfolding like a Japanese tea ceremony, her soul-sister affair with Murray tells a story of love, and life, lost on duty's alter.

Stranded in Tokyo with her mostly-absent rock-and-roll photographer husband John (Giovanni Ribisi—“Cold Mountain,” “Gone in Sixty Seconds,” “Boiler Room”), Charlotte is the very picture of a rebel without a cause.  She has a life that many would envy.  Entrée’s into the glamorous show-business world of her husband, a whole new country to explore at her leisure and a body any man would die for.  But all she is can do is sit on the window sill of her luxury high-rise hotel and watch life pass her by.  Her few human interactions are with people we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies, the shallow and the superficial.  The missing persons of a world of cameras and whiskey--if their souls aren’t stolen by the lens, they are subverted by the bottle.

Speaking of whiskey, that’s why Bill Murray is in the land of the rising sun, to make whiskey commercials.  Murray is cast as a movie star who is known for his action movies involving many loud and spectacular car crashes and explosions, but a decided lack of acting.  No rarity there.  He has been whisked away to make commercials in Tokyo for some high-rolling Japanese businessmen who, for reasons never explained, are sure he can sell their brand of distilled spirits.  In a bizarre reenactment of the tea ceremony gone awry, he mugs at the camera holding a glass of the product.  Actually it isn’t even the real product, but only apple juice, he confides.  Hating every moment, but caught up in the net of his success, he has become his own worst nightmare: the man who gets what he wants.

But what Bob Harris really wants is to be himself, at home.  Reminders of the life he has left behind are thrown into his face every now and then in the form of carpet samples for the new house his wife is building, and terse messages from her reminding him of the latest birthday he has forgotten.  She even tells him in advance of important days he will probably forget.  His life is the existential hell of the career slave; Charlie Chaplin’s dazed and confused working man, condemned to be abused even by his elliptical trainer.

Through a series of chance meetings, Bob and Charlotte form an alliance of alienation and immediately bond as angst-mates in the lap of luxury.  Like her previous smash performance as Becky in Terry Zwigoff’s “Ghost World,” Johansson teems with frustrated energy in playing the intellectual trying to cope with the physical world.  Is Bob her lifeboat?  Will he get her off the island in spite of the odds against them both?  Is she really younger than Woody Allen’s last supporting actress?  You’ll have to watch the movie to know for sure.

Bill Murray is still the master of dry humor and has vast opportunities to use it as he banters with his unilingual directors in a hopeless battle to make the best of selling the mechanized world’s most universal anesthetic, spirits.  He uses it himself, off-screen, and states with certainty that it works.  But he is just a little too on top of his game to make a very believable drunk.  Nobody who is that subtle and witty can have a headache and bad liver.  Maybe he should watch more Mickey Rourke, or Billy Bob Thornton in “Bad Santa.”  A good fight now and then would have given this story a little genuine anger and offered some action at the same time.  As it is, the animated dinosaurs walking across the mammoth TV screens in Tokyo’s picture-perfect copy of Times Square offer the only action to be had.

Nonetheless, Murray’s understated acting is perfect for his part in this movie.  The screenplay itself speaks volumes and the surrealistic story of the Japanese and their never-ending quest to emulate America is funny enough in itself.  All Murray has to do is underline the fantastic nature of it all, and he does that in fine style.

Having delivered his understated performance, he will have a tough time competing against Sean Penn for the leading actor Oscar in this year’s Academy Awards.  In fact, he will have a hard time competing against any of the other four nominated actors.  Sophia Coppola is the big winner in this movie with well-deserved nominations for both her writing and directing.  She is only the third woman ever to be nominated for a best director Oscar, following Lina Wertmuller in 1976 for “Seven Beauties,” and Jane Campion in 1993 for “The Piano.”

The movie features some thoroughly excellent supporting performances, including Catherine Lambert as an unintentionally over-the-top (or under-the-bottom) lounge singer who is blessed with a complete blindness of her own sold out performance (and I don’t mean sold out as in standing room only), and Anna Faris as a rock and roll bimbo of the first order.  Both roles are important foils for the lost souls of Bob and Charlotte.

Sofia Coppola’s excellent job in writing this original screenplay, apparently by herself and from scratch, has not gone unnoticed by the Academy Awards voters who have nominated her for a best screenplay Oscar.  Nor has her direction of the picture, for which she has garnered a second nomination, and a third co-nomination with producer Ross Katz for best picture.  Coppola will go down in history as only the third woman, and the first American woman, in the history of the Oscars to be nominated for the best director award.