Rating: 5 out of 5
If perhaps you are currently underway in creating what you hope will be the ultimate "chance encounter" story, stop right there. Sofia Coppola beat you to it. Of course there were attempts in film before her to do so, most notably Richard Linklater's voluble Before Sunrise, but these efforts (almost tragically, in retrospect) fell victim to their own romantic wiles and could not resist and ending that isolates themselves from situations in the real world. With 2003's Lost in Translation, one of the first true masterpieces of the 21st century, Coppola gave us a quiet, minimalist, bittersweetly realistic romance about finding yourself in someone else.
The film takes place in Tokyo. It is a perfect setting for multiple reasons, the foremost being that it is obviously (paradoxically, but obviously) easiest to be lonely in the world's most populated city. Two Americans wind up visiting Tokyo. I say "wind up" because they aren't entirely sure what happened in their lives to lead them there. One is Bob (Bill Murray), a popular movie star making a short trip to do a few whiskey advertisements. Bob is in a marriage neither happy nor unhappy, but simply there. He doesn't like it, but he's used to it. After 25 years of marriage and kids, he's worn out and bumping elbows with a midlife crisis. He spends most nights at the hotel bar or staring at his reflection. Several floors away from his room is Charlotte (Scarlett Johanssen), a recent Yale graduate who followed her diligent photographer husband John (Giovanni Ribisi) to Tokyo. Charlotte is distressingly disillusioned; as lost as Bob but in a less experienced way. She gazes out at the metropolis from her window, visits shrines and listens to soul-searching self-help tapes, but feels incessantly misunderstood.
Bob first notices Charlotte in the elevator, but she doesn't see him until one night at the bar after a photo shoot. Over the next few days, they have short conversations that are like desperate pleas for help hidden beneath cordial smiles. An unexpected, strong bond forms between them and soon they are exploring Tokyo and going to karaoke parties together. The time they usually spend staring emptily and longingly at the city or into space is replaced by cheerful time spent together, sharing feelings, fears, and loneliness.
Coppola's film doesn't make aggresively artistic bounds into creativity, but more so doesn't dillydally with cliched plot devices. It is a simply but stunningly real film, in which not much happens on the surface but something immense transpires beneath. It is emotionally impacting in a way that only Japanese filmmakers seem to have mastered. Bill Murray's performance is not only clearly the best performance of his career, but one of the best by anyone since his career started. He plays Bob with an engrossing learned patience that we can tell is being chiseled away with every director's comment and every carpet sample FedEx'd to him by his wife. At any moment he seems like he could burst out laughing or crying, yet shows none of it explicitly. Whether or not he is channeling himself, Murray doesn't seem to play Bob so much as become him. He keeps the delicate, pained structure intact perfectly, and is still able to throw the charm on top when he meets Charlotte.
The film is, in fact, a comedy. It's not a Bill Murray comedy, yet it wouldn't be funny if there weren't Bill Murray comedies in the world. It's a comedy of miscommunication, of custom shock if not culture shock. It stems from bewildering situations in a foreign place. We never look down on the characters, but we can't help but be amused at their confusion. The same theme, however, contributes to the film's dramatic elements as well. There's a lack of communication between the characters and everyone else in their lives. Bob and his wife can hardly speak without lashing out at each other. Charlotte's husband does love her, in a boyish way that only Ribisi could pull off, but is too busy to really pay attention to her. If she's at all jealous of John's celebrity friend Kelly (Anna Faris), it's not because her biggest problem is that everyone thinks she's anorexic. Charlotte doesn't think John would cheat, or doesn't care. It's because he seems more interested in talking to Kelly than to her.
In another of Coppola's ingenious moves of originality, she knows it would be divisive to explain whether or not Bob and Charlotte are "in love." It's enough to know that they certainly love being together. Together, they can be themselves. Not just in the forlorn, pensive way that we've already seen, but in the fun, spontaneous way. The way that they like to be. The way that they haven't been in a long time, and were starting to miss more than ever. They're searching for an emotional connection lost between them and their significant others. Maybe there's a physical attraction at first, but what's important is what happens when they reach the middle ground between strangers and friends, where there's no judgment and no expectations, and they can be completely open. They've each blindly trapped themselves in a certain life, and in finding each other they learn to be okay with it. This chance encounter doesn't divert them from their path, it just makes the path a little brighter.
There's a somewhat legendary moment near the end of the film, the last lines between Bob and Charlotte that we are not allowed to hear. Watching the DVD, I was initially tempted to rewind and try to make out what Bob whispers in her ear, but I decided against it. It was a self-indulgent urge that I regret having to fight to repress, a need to know that has been implanted in the heads of many viewers by dull Hollywood films that actively avoid mystery. The inaudible whisper is there to remind us that these characters aren't subjects, they're people. They aren't just specimens under a microscope, they're entitled to some privacy. The moment is theirs, and it would be wrong of us to take it away. Throughout the film, we forget the pressures that would impose on them back home. We forget that Charlotte is in her early 20's and Bob is in his 50's. Many times we even forget they are both married. We're touched by their connection, by the way Bob, someone who's made a living being funny and is tired of doing it, honestly enjoys making Charlotte laugh. We want them to be happy, and with this last obscured line it is possible. The implications of transience and ambiguity are indeed frightening and unsettling, but we should be willing to sacrifice our closure for theirs.
Lost in Translation is a film that no one could have seen coming. Amidst the regular stream of mediocre movies that almost every year submits, it came flying out and hit us all in the face like a wet fish. Even the praise that it did garner carried a bit of shock. It is a timeless film, one that does not deserve to be tied down to any year. Especially a year in which The Return of the King was declared a better movie, and Sean Penn's performance in Mystic River was deemed superior to Bill Muray. It deserves to be pulled out of the fuzzy, indistinct annals of film history and remembered as something original and moving, something both poignant and humorous. Something great.
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