Downbeat character piece that meanders

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2004)

Just saw LIT the other night and was blown away. The visuals were stunning. Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray were excellent. Unfortunately, too often in this movie the "plot" meanders and the characters too often become part of the scenery in the many beautiful set pieces. It's a bad sign when in watching the deleted scenes (I saw this on DVD) you can think of entire sections of the movie that could have easily joined them on the cutting room floor.
The comedy is that of the downbeat and jaded. Ignore any critic who uses the word hilarious in his or her review.
Bill Murray plays a washed-up actor in Japan to film a whiskey commercial. Scarlett Johansson is a twenty-something wife of a hot shot photographer who leaves her to work in and around Tokyo. Murray and Johansson meet and begin a whirlwind relationship, exploring a Tokyo that is a profusion of light and sound.
Unfortunately, Murray and Johansson have no chemistry and there is little sexual tension between them. Watching them together is like watching an awkward middle-aged man hiring an escort for the first time. Their relationship hints at nothing deeper. The only eroticism in this movie is generated when the camera, apparently run by someone with a fetish, focuses on Scarlett's legs as she, in panties, lounges, lonely and sad, for long stretches in her apartment.
The movie wisely avoids the typical older man have a mid life crisis meets younger woman trappings, but fails to offer anything engaging in its place.
Coppola apparently shot with an 80 page script and improvised many of the scenes. It shows. There is a slow, pointless section that takes place at a hospital and a wild montage of a night out that, while fun and gorgeously constructed, is entirely expendable. The movie relentlessly sets up the Tokyo landscape, exploring its nuances. Unfortunately, it does this at the expense of a subplot involving a third character that would have enlivened the airless relationship between the two main characters.

The movies makes you feel the characters' boredom and aimlessness, but never transcends it to make you care about them. Indeed, this movie has zero narrative drive. That Coppola won an Oscar for the script is laughable.
The best movies strike a balance between character development and plot. LIT is top heavy with the former. I couldn't help thinking this would have been a better short film, but with no market for those, this had to be expanded into a feature film.
7 out of 10 stars.