Lost in time.

Rating: 3/10 (1 November 2003)

Director Sofia Coppola has revealed that she had steeped herself in Antonioni films before making *Lost in Translation* (and indeed, there's a clip from Fellini's *La Dolce Vita*, Fellini of course being of the same time and place as Antonioni). The movie painfully reveals its influence. This movie would have seemed profound and groundbreaking in 1963. But in 2003, it seems trite. We have a pushing-60 has-been action star (Bill Murray), who's rueful over a disintegrating marriage and a career that has been reduced to hawking whiskey on Japanese television. In other words, the Unhappy Middle-Aged Man. But since he's earning TWO MILLION DOLLARS for appearing in the commercial, it's hard to empathize with this sad-sack clown. In 2003, we need more than a man who KNOWS he's ridiculous, who KNOWS he has a ridiculous -- and ridiculously lucky -- life. We're already a step ahead of Murray's character: i.e., we know he's ridiculous, too. In 1963 all this might have been a revelation. Not so today. And we have the beautiful, talented Scarlet Johansson as Charlotte, the young wife of a photographer who has abandoned her in the hotel while he's off working. Very unfortunately, Coppola makes Charlotte a philosophy graduate from Yale. This goes against the grain of much of what we see: would a person like this even GET married to a fashion photographer? would she listen to trashy, pop-culture self-help tapes? would she -- Little Miss Philosophy-Degree-From-Yale, a presumable bookworm and culture-vulture -- be this morosely bored, anyway?
Thus stranded together, Murray's Bob and Charlotte find each other while marooned in their Tokyo hotel. We're ultimately meant to be touched by their growing friendship, mostly because of each character's sad backstory. But their backstories just aren't sad enough to merit sympathy, let alone all the melancholy that hangs over each of them in their separate hotel rooms.
*Lost in Translation* is not a terrible movie by any definition. Murray and Johansson are quite fine, and manage some genuine chemistry. Coppola is also a genial tour guide for Tokyo. (Comments about this film being stereotyped or racist will surely come from politically correct knuckleheads who don't realize that any critique of Tokyo's modern culture is perforce a critique of American culture. Downtown Tokyo looks a lot like Times Square on a busy night, after all. Besides which, Coppola is at pains to show us glimpses of a truer, more traditional Japanese culture throughout the film.) But this movie is very easy to overrate, and the smart critic -- and viewer -- will likely fail to succumb to the impulse.