Murray's tour De force, and the delightful aftertaste

Rating: 9/10 (14 May 2008)

The famous Romanian director Tocilescu said that LIT is a movie that you can be in love withas with a girland also that it's one of his top favorite movies.Indeed,one of the first things that can be said about LIT is that it's a movie to be enjoyed, savored, delighted in, cherished, it leaves a delicious aftertaste. The few different fine things do add up to a coherent and homogeneous whole. It probes the things that deserve to be probed.
I greatly appreciated and liked the lead's performanceyet much less the (intensely dis-likable) girl (Scarlett Johansson) that he's teamed up with.
Teachout pointed to this category of actors whose excellent _expressivity is accompanied by a certain narrowness; i.e., they are very fit for a certain type of rolesthey are _prespecialized, like Spacey and Murray. Today these remarks about the congruency of a cast might be displeasing for the fanmentalities. Yet there are such actors who,unable to prove their universality,do shine in certain classes of rolesSpacey and Murray are like this. Lost in Translation is a movie to savor;the taste it leaves is relevant. Or,to put it so:Murray's role here has a giant humane relevance, it is humanly relevant (--while Spacey's role in A. Beauty was a tour De force, esteemed as suchyet humanly irrelevantsheer antics ).Brando was perhaps the only actor who was humanely relevant while being totally clownish; all the rest have to choose.I think that Murray's role here can be compared with that of Spacey that I have indicatedand that Murray's superiority, artful intelligence are patent. Murray's role is as a matter of fact an European role,of a Gabinian conception. Understated and very sharp. (And not by the fake sharpness of Spacey in A. Beauty.)Murray's role could be one of the notable roles in the artistically significant cinema.
Mutatis _mutandis, Lost in Translation is a masterful demonstration of what something like,say,American Beauty should have beenor should of looked like. The unobtrusiveness of the style is all the more _praisable.More exactly, this is how a theme and a subject like A. Beauty's should of been treated, approached. And maybe this is the main point hereone of the two main pointsthe pertinence and sense of the approach. (The other being Murray's role,which was not a difficult oneyet it required finding quickly that right note and key to it .) In a word,I enjoyed the movie,highly rated Murray's role,and do praise the aftertaste. Tocilescu put it exactly--Lost in Translation is not Fellini (as it is not Welles, Antonioni, Visconti, Bresson,etc.);yet,it's truly and intensely enjoyable.Good movie,more such films would be welcomed;it is psychologically tactful and lucid,it finds the naturalness that most of the comments about this film simply loose or ignore or distort .It firmly handles the subject,it perspicaciously explores its content. (In literature,this would be Maugham, Maurois, France, AC Doyle,Cronin,Barring,A. Daudet it's not l'Isle Adam, Tournier,Wells,Rabelais,Jarry ,but it ain't cheap fun, eitherit's a thing of savorgood already classic stuff.) One more thingit is said that the kiss at the end was not in the script,and that this was added to the primal script. I would have liked it better without this stuff, anyway.
As for Murray's roleeverybody liked itTeachout, myself, my boss in the hematology clinic, and Ebert and "many accounts".