This Movie Is Lost Alright

Rating: 4/10 (30 October 2003)

Full disclosure:I thought both "The Virgin Suicides" and Sophia Coppola's short film "Lick the Star" were a whole lot of nothing. I'm a fan of narrative filmmaking, something that Sophia herself has fessed up to not being terribly interested in. On the other hand, I had higher hopes for this film, mostly because I had just gone to Japan (and Tokyo) for the first time this year, and I really like both Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson.
Alas, Sophia failed to deliver, yet again. "Lost in Translation" is a mostly dreary exercise. I would say it's just a bunch of scenes, one following the other to no discernable point, except even the "scenes" themselves are mostly empty.
Please spare the prose defining how Bill and Scarlett are each "lost" while fiddling around in one very swanky hotel. I would rather say that both are, unfortunately, playing shallow characters from which we never gleam any inner life over the film's running time. They're bored because they're boring.
Not only do Murray and Johansson play fairly drab characters, they manage to spend their time with possibly the least interesting people in Tokyo, with Coppola pal "Charlie Brown" leading the way. Unless you're taken in by that nexus of downtown bohemia and jet set glam slumming through the night as only people without day jobs can, they might as well as been in a foreign-language Omaha for all they get out of Japan.
And the shame of it is Bill Murray deserves a vehicle like this, one for him to reveal his improv talents and that deep streak of melancholy he has that has only grown with age. His maturity is reflected in that he relies less and less on shtick now:he knows how to hold an audience with the smallest behaviors and reactions. We get a demonstration of this here, but to no end.
Which leads me to ask those here singing "Lost"'s praises:what's the matter with you people? Am I one of the few to see and admit that the emperor has no clothes?
There seems to be this sense of satisfaction here, that a) if you "get" this film it is because you are operating on a higher plane and b) if you don't, why, you're just too conditioned to "commercial" moviemaking and your senses too dulled by American bombast to "appreciate" the quiet and sensitivity that Coppola has instilled her film with.
As a card-carrying fan of Taratino/Oliver Stone school of filmmaking, let me say "baloney." Let me only point to Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" which manages to provides strong characters, a definitive sense of place, and plenty of quiet time with its actors all the while servicing a compelling narrative.
However, I do also enjoy the small character studies that "Lost in Translation" aspires to be. However, in this case, we never learn anything more about Murray's movie star or Johansson's young wife from about 10 minutes into the movie up until the end. All we do is observe them in the strictest sense, but we never really "see" anything.
None of the dialouge provides any further insight into these people. In the films that I like, the people in them express themselves in such a way that we learn more about them as we go. In one scene Bill tells his wife on the phone he wants to get healthier. The next scene he orders beer with his lunch. There's an illusion of an connection between the two:you'd get a hernia trying to make a real one.
My advice is to see the works of Eric Rohmer, who knows how to do this stuff right.