Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are (separately) stuck in Tokyo for a week, left, for the most part, to their own devices and unable to find activities of interest or to sleep in the unfamiliar environment. He’s a movie star in town to shoot some whiskey commercials for megabucks; she’s the wife of a rock and roll photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) who’s busy with his shoot. They’re staying in the same hotel and after bumping into each other a couple of times, strike up a friendship.
Sofia Coppola wrote and directed Lost in Translation, partly based on similar experiences she had earlier. Over on Rotten Tomatoes I see mainly very positive reviews linked, and of course it has gotten a few Oscar nominations, but I really felt left down by the movie. Yes, the two leads give great performances and Ribisi and Anna Farris (playing a dumb blonde movie star also staying in the hotel) are convincing too but Lost has two major flaws that in the end put it in the good, not great, class:
- There are odd production errors, most notably a very visible boom mike, that break the fourth wall for no given reason. If Coppola wanted to say something meta about filmmaking itself she didn’t get it across to us; oddly, none of the reviews I checked mention these flaws but can’t hurl enough superlatives around.
- After initially establishing the loneliness and restlessness of the two main characters, the script keeps separating them even though the scenes apart add little or no value to establishing character and seriously detract from the main focus on the relationship. I’m particular thinking of her second shrine visit and his golf outing.
I suppose I’m not overly surprised that LiT landed four Oscar nominations–for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Script and Murray for Best Actor–but I truly think this is one of those times where people swallowed the hype. I credit it to the track record of Coppola (who many felt was unjustly overlooked, even snubbed, for her first major outing, The Virgin Suicides), a radical visual portrayal of Tokyo itself, Murray giving a much more subdued, controlled performance than he’s really ever done before (okay, he might deserve the nomination) and Johannson’s radiance and very hard to ignore opening shot of her fine ass in pink panties.
recommended
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