I really wanted to like it...

Rating: 3/10 (15 March 2005)

but I didn't. I rented this on DVD because I had really liked "Virgin Suicides", Sofia Coppola's first film, which was intense and eerie. Also, the pitch of Lost In Translation (LIT) seemed interesting and I thought that Coppola could make a great film out of it provided she showed the same talent as in her first film. Sadly, this is not the case.
It's easy to see what Coppola tried to achieve with LIT: a tale about loneliness, incomprehension and impossible love, devoid of any real plot or action but instead, relying solely on the personalities of the two main characters and the feelings arising between them. This is an incredibly ambitious project, the problem is: if you want to make a movie that is so character-driven, you have to create characters that viewers can identify with and feel empathy for. This is the biggest failure in LIT: the lack of such characters.
Let's look at the protagonists. Bob Harris, the actor played by Bill Murray, is totally jaded and apathetic. Why? Simply because he's been married for 25 years and is in Japan for a few days to shoot a commercial that still earns him 2 million dollars. Really tough indeed. As to Charlotte, she feels blue because her husband works hard to get his 15 minutes of fame and doesn't have much time to devote to her. Big deal. However talented Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are, they can't convince me that these people really have serious reasons to complain and that they're really the loneliest people in the world.
So from then on, I waited and waited again, convinced that something remotely interesting or moving would eventually happen between them. And the wait was very boring since, as I wrote before, there is no real plot. The film is a dilated succession of empty moments, conversations and encounters that seem to have no end. Sometimes, inexplicably, Sofia Coppola throws in totally random things that seem totally out of place, such as the (mildly funny) visual gags with Murray, the karaoke/strip joint/TV show scenes (which are, in addition, unpleasant examples of stereotyping of Japanese people, a constant that sure doesn't help the film) or additional characters like the dizzy action movie star played by Anna Faris (if this is supposed to be a snide attack on the industry of blockbusters, it fails miserably because Faris's character is at least alive and proves much more memorable than any other in the film).
In the end, after what seems to be an eternity (and a boring one at that), Bob and Charlotte say goodbye to each other. This was the only time where I felt a little emotion, maybe because the idea of a heart-wrenching separation is universal. But even this nice moment is marred by a now well-known dramatic trick (SPOILER: before leaving for good, Bob whispers something in Charlotte's ear and the viewer will never know what that was). If they had just kissed, looked a moment at each other, smiled and then separated, then the ending would have been good. As it is, it's just artificial and shrug-inducing.
Overall, Lost In Translation was a massive, cruel letdown. It was all the more disappointing since a lot of time and talent were wasted into it. In order to not be entirely negative, I'll still mention that the cinematography is beautiful (so is Tokyo, apparently) and that the music is good at times. It's still not enough for me to make for a good movie. To conclude, I really hope that "Virgin Suicides" was not just a fluke and that Sofia Coppola's next film will be much better than this one.