Subtle with Outstanding Performances

Rating: 10/10 (19 September 2003)

Lost In Translation is easily the best movie I have seen this year. It moves you to the point where you want these characters to do something about their pain by the end of the movie, but it's not that simple. It offers no pat answers, no obvious resolutions. Instead, we experience a very existential view of how Bill Murray, feeling like his best years are behind him, and Scarlett Johansson, feeling that her best years are before her, manage to meet in the middle and begin to feel that maybe the best time could be now.
Murray is very good, very understated. Johansson is so beautiful that her loneliness seems criminal. Tokyo provides them with a physical setting that depicts their emotional setting: It is familiar and tangible but does not unfold the way they expect it to unfold.
Their situation is a difficult one. What do you do to find happiness? Abandon the commitments that you made 25 years ago? 2 years ago? The title invites you to not miss the point. It's too easy to bring your own experiences to bear on what these characters are going through, as some other posters have done, but if you understand how to read these performances I believe you will agree that what they have captured is something wonderful about the way bonds sometime form between people.