Absolute Rubbish

Rating: 1/10 (8 March 2004)

This must rate as about the most disappointing film in recent memory. Absolute nonsense. I strongly advise anyone who is seriously considering wasting their money on this sorry excuse for a film to save their money and spend it on genuine quality such as Mystic River or 21 Grams. The very fact that this film exists demonstrates that nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood, does anybody seriously think that directionless nonsense like this would have been made had it not been a Copolla at the healm?? I think not.
Now onto the film itself. At the end of the day this is simply a concept film where the concept is seriously deficient. OK, I get the message - all out relationships, with one another, with our family, our work colleagues, our neighbours are, to a lesser or greater degree, 'lost in translation'. By transposing the film to Japan where the language barrier further accentuates that concept we are forced to consider the other barriers that exist between us beyond that of language, i.e. emotional barriers.
And I get the fact that the lack of dialogue is supposedly used to further demonstrate that language is never the key barrier between individuals, that people don't connect through words but through their attitudes, ideas, emotions, beliefs etc. The problem with this film is that Copolla doesn't know how to express this concept in any meaningful way. The lack of dialogue does work on occasion but it needs to be supported by powerful emotive performances on the part of the leads (Bill Murray deserving of an Oscar?? - you have to be joking!) and at least a hint of dialogue, however subtle, to pull the strands together (how on earth Copolla won Best Original Screenplay for a film without dialogue is beyond me). The only dialogue that exists is trite and shallow. Maybe that was the intention, that the characters can't express themselves in words, but I just found myself crying out for the characters to reveal a little more of themselves and their situations.

Ultimately, the film comes across as a series of set-pieces that just feel like fillers. Bill Murray striding mournfully across a golf course does indeed express his disconnection from his own and others lives but then so does him lying on his bed night after night after night unable to sleep, and so does him sitting at the bar alone, and so do numerous other 1 minute scenes. The same applies to Scarlett Johansson. We don't need it hammered home quite so tediously and repeatedly that the prime characters are feeling lost and removed from time, people and place - we get it in the first 15 minutes. Copolla should move on and build the film around that fact but instead wallows in this single concept, very boring and very disappointing. I think you'd call it flogging a dead horse.
It also struck me as a film bordering on the racist. I read a few reviews that suggested that this was a comedy - well the only alledged comedy I saw was all at the expense of the Japanese and the supposedly hilarious fact that they don't speak English. After about the 10th shot of Bill Murray looking bemused at a Japanese speaker I felt angry more than amused, I thought we'd left that ignorant brand of comedy back in the dark ages of cinema where it belongs.
Ultimately, I left the cinema feeling that in the hands of a more accomplished writer/director this film *may* have worked but as it stands it couldn't be any wider of the mark.