A Quiet Revolution in Filmmaking

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2003)

America has always had a myth of itself as large and unruly. In this myth men are always cowboys or Jedi knights who ride off into the sunset or whiz across the sky at supersonic speeds. Alternatively the male hero is an entrepreneur or mad scientist who uses his ruthless business acumen or technological wizardy and not a small amount of dumb luck to gain power. Mostly, the women of our American imagination are pretty and demure, but when they rebel they do so like the men, with noise and bravado, like ever so many clones of Princess Leia shooting her way out of a tight spot.
American film has long fed and nurtured these fantasies of power. Our film icons are rough and tumble men like those played by John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, hard-bitten tough guys who administer the American way of justice at the point of a gun. The nerds among us are force fed our American role models through the likes of Christopher Lloyd, who plays Doc Brown, the crazy scientist in Back to the Future, and is able to make everything come out right in the end. Either way, in the American myth that Hollywood so loves, the American is nearly always the winner. Even when he fails, the American fails spectacularly, on a grand stage.
For many American and mostly male critics the greatest of all American movies is Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy, a cinematic stage-play that wraps up all the elements of American fantasies of power, violence, and tragedy into a single epic- length package. The extraordinary success of these movies, both with critics and audiences, speaks volumes about the predominant values of our society. Thus it is a surprise and almost a shock to see the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, Sophia Coppola, make a movie for American audiences that in so many ways challenges these predominant values, and indeed neatly flips them on their head.
Her latest movie Lost in Translation is everything her father's films are not. Where he spoke of power, anger, and violence his daughter speaks of equality, love and unexpected tenderness. Where he drove home his points with the force of bullet into the brain, she quietly opens a page on human life and lets us draw our own conclusions. While his focus was always on the overtly dramatic, she chooses moments of quotidian life and embues them with a gentle poignancy. As a storyteller of domestic discord and the subtle pangs of love she reminds one more of Eric Rohmer, an avowedely European (gasp!) director, than anyone we've ever produced in America.
Bill Murray, who's never gotten the credit he deserves for being able to be both dramatic and wryly comic at the same time, plays Bob Harris, a washed-up, down-on-his-luck actor who arrives in Tokyo to shoot a series of whiskey commercials. While there, he develops a friendship with Charlotte, (Scarlett Johansson) a young American woman who spots him sitting alone in the hotel bar. Together they walk the streets of Tokyo, with all its frenetic lights, noisy pachinko parlors, and incomprehensible street signs. And from a plot standpoint, that's really all that happens. But no plot summary can begin to communicate the emotional nuances that are the real substance of this film.
In fact, it almost seems pointless to talk about the movie at all, for although Bob and Charlotte do speak, words here are far less important than actions and their meaning. Johansson, who gives a luminous yet astonishingly understated performance, conveys more of the fierce intensity of her evolving sentiments for Bob through gesture and body language, than she does by anything she says. And this may well be Ms. Coppola's point, that when it comes to matters of the heart, what we say in words is nearly always lost in translation. What really matters is feeling.
In her willingness to confront head-on the problems of loss, disorientation and misunderstanding Ms. Coppola is doing something largely unheard of in American film. For true powerlessness, the sense that all of what you've done up to this point may be wrong, and that the future you planned may not turn out to be any better, and may quite likely be worse, is the very opposite of Americans' hegemonic dreams of glory. In her placement of two Americans trying to negotiate and navigate in a strange and foreign land she is also, perhaps unwittingly, creating a metaphor for American behavior in a world after September 11th-a world that seems not to make sense, but that we had better try to understand, for that is all we have.