Unsettling, yet pleasant.

Rating: Null/10 (13 December 2004)

I'll admit, my initial reaction to any movie without action or comedy is not generally good. As such, I had to stave off those feelings throughout Lost in Translation. The question to be asked, then, is, "Was it worth it?"
The answer is indistinct. The movie got off to a rather dull start. That is to say, after the initial opening scene, with nearly a minute of nothing but pure sexuality (can you really justify the clear shot of a woman's backside, otherwise?). Typically, that turns me off more than anything. Not the sexuality; the dullness. I gave up on Oliver Twist after reading the first page, after all.
However, on the level of a character study, this movie succeeds splendidly. Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a washed up actor, in Tokyo to film a commercial for an excessive sum ($2,000,000), speaks no Japanese. In fact, he's woefully inept at understanding dialectical differences between Americanized English and Japanese-tinged English. As one may imagine, he's displaced.
Shortly after arriving, in a state of insomnia, Harris meets a young woman named Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), who is also feeling displaced. Dragged to Tokyo by her photographer husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi), Charlotte is feeling unloved, and is questioning whether she made a mistake marrying John.
As the admittedly shallow plot unfolds, we see a developing romance between Charlotte and Bob. Rather than cave into the typical Hollywood physical portrayal of romance, however, director/writer Sofia Coppola chooses to push the film in an entirely different direction; romantic tension is portrayed by awkward conversations, vocal inflection, and facial expression more than anything. This is a decidedly pleasant change, leaving the audience feeling as if there's a true tension, rather than an imagined tension. The two characters aren't entirely sure they should be attracted to each other, yet they are. Had Coppola caved into Hollywood clichés, it would have come across as yet another fanciful film in which a couple has sex while pretending they have grave misgivings.
The ending of the movie, however, is rather unsettling. It's not necessarily a *bad* ending, merely unsettling. Lest I spoil the movie, it will suffice to say that there is no apparent resolution to the problems each primary character is having outside of their personal relationship with each other. It resembles real life, in that things don't always change for the better or for the worse; but do we really want a movie that results in no change?
For the changeless resolution and the dull beginning, I give it 7/10.