My big mistake finally corrected

Rating: 9/10 (26 August 2015)

Finally saw this 8/23/15, forgetting the reviews that had scared me away for twelve years. For no particular reason recently I decided to take a look and was more than a little surprised, quite pleasantly so.
I had been put off by the critics' description (and indictment) of the film's slow pacing. But, as I learned after only a few minutes, it is not slow, only accurate and quite real. Real life can move slowly and still interest us. And in the slow pace there is great energy. Maybe this movie is not so slow after all.
Ms. Coppola has assembled acting, cinematography, editing, and sound to create a believably engaging portrait of two people stumbling along through different stages of life. In their disparate situations both middle aged celebrity Bill Murray and recently wed Yale philosophy-degreed Scarlett Johansson are so adrift that even their presence in a foreign country on the other side of the world cannot make them more frustratingly, despairingly lost than they already are. Johansson and Murray deliver the resulting tangential relationship as they form a natural alliance against the souring and confusion of their lives.
Cinematographer Lance Acord stars by putting up on the screen images that are both beautiful and true to life, a spotlight that refrains from hogging itself in pursuit of Keats' ideal.
It is a measure of how much I enjoyed this movie that I intend to let a little time go by and then see it again. "Lost in Translation" should ring a thematic bell or two for anyone who has seen similarly intense tentativeness in "Brief Encounter" (1945), "Chungking Express" (1994), "Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud" (1995) or "The Lunchbox" (2013).