A Platonic May-September affair

Rating: 9/10 (5 December 2005)

I don't know why I had trouble with this movie. Old guy gets young, beautiful girl ought to work for me, being an old guy myself. Maybe I was jealous. I couldn't do karaoke the way Bill Murray does it. And after a night on the Tokyo town, I couldn't carry Scarlett Johansson home in my arms and tuck her into bed and turn out the light. Well, I couldn't carry her. And she does have pretty eyes and nice legs and beautiful skin. And she's a good actress, although this part did not stretch her or even challenge her. And after a fashion one gets used to the slightly arrogant Bill Murray style. His character is, after all, an action hero who gets paid $2-million to make a whiskey commercial.
Whiskey. I think that is what it is. I don't like whiskey or cigarettes and I usually don't like people who like cigarettes and whiskey, although I recall a song from my parents' time: "Cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women/They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane." (I'll take the wild, wild women.) Such might conquer the boredom felt by out-of-towners in a high rise hotel in downtown Tokyo that director Sofia Coppola (Francis Ford's daughter) was at great pains to get across to us in the opening scenes. I also don't like bars and I think that people who spend their time hanging out in bars are mostly lonely alcoholics. Ditto for gratuitous smoking in movies and obvious product placements.
So I almost gave up on this, but the DVD jacket does say, "OVER 80 FOUR-STAR REVIEWS." (That would five stars on Amazon.) Something must be wrong with me. Or maybe there is a big contrast coming in the second half of the film, and all this 21st century, big city, international First World ennui is necessary to set that up. But isn't it a little heavy how Scarlett hangs around in her panties waiting for her husband to return, and when he does he either goes to sleep or off to doing something else. Wow, one would think he would NOTICE. The camera surely does.
Okay, I saw the rest of the film and ...
There is a lot of artistic shtick in this movie. In fact it would be an art movie if it weren't aimed so directly at the mass mind--well, the mass mind over thirty. The long pauses and the way the camera lingers to SHOUT: notice this scene! how excellent it is, or to punctuate a point, how profound or how prosaic.
But I like the clumsiness of their relationship and the way it is drawn out.
The shots of Japan are wonderful, like a travel log. Mount Fujiyama in gray in the background; Mount Fujisan in the background in full color and snow cap. The games arcade in Tokyo, the game machines like Vegas slot machines all in a row. The clean, straight lines of the bars and the exercise rooms, black and whites; the square wooden bowls out of which they drink the wine; the lights at night on the boulevard, outdoing Times Square in their gaudy neon-ness. The touristy feel to the movie. The Japanese untranslated. The sleeplessness as though they were near the Arctic Circle with twenty hours of daylight. The easy Hollywood feel to the psychology: our hero's pix on the side of trucks drinking Japanese whiskey, suavely; the need for the hero to hide from his public; his obviously dyed hair; the "satire" of the blonde mediocre starlet who affects anorexia; the sense that Sofia Coppola lived something like this. One can imagine her boredom, and then the interested older man.
I also liked the bit with the semi-talented lounge singer, again like Las Vegas--her picking him up, so to speak, he too drunk to protest or to remember. Again the Hollywood idea of the pecking order. The banality of the glamorous life.
It is also to Sofia Coppola's credit that she got the relationship exactly right: she knew how the old guy felt and she knew how the young girl felt, and she knew what was right and what would be the right ending.
I guess I should say why this movie affects me and brings out the impatience in me and calls forth my sardonic nature. It is that I have been there where Bill Murray's character was and I played it the same way. I am not so sure I did the right thing. I tell myself I did, but I am not so sure.
See this for Sofia Coppola who made her father proud.
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)