Depth Charge

STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT: Johansson and Murray cool out.

Bill Murray strikes a profound note in an otherwise shallow movie.

by Sam Adams

There's no need for Bill Murray to chew scenery; with a waggle and a grin, he can coax it right into his mouth. It's hard to think of another actor who can seem so relaxed on screen, at least without seeming disaffected or bored. As a younger man, Murray's laconic calm passed for "what, me worry?" insouciance, but as he's grown older, the layers of nonchalance have peeled away, revealing a muted sadness under the laissez-faire exterior. From Ed Wood's faded queen to Rushmore's lovesick dreamer, Murray has been digging steadily deeper, and with Lost in Translation, he hits bedrock.

Sofia Coppola's observations of contemporary Japan are no better than superficial, but she has to be credited with one true stroke of genius: writing Murray the part of Bob Harris, a faded movie star who's come to Japan to shoot a series of lucrative but deadening spots for a local whiskey. As Bob pulls into town, he sees his own image staring down at him through the limousine window, but it's as if he doesn't recognize himself, or doesn't want to. Disassociation has become his means of survival. That tuxedo-clad figure, so reminiscent of the swaggering compere from Murray's SNL days, is an afterimage, a ghost, one he can conjure up but not connect with.

Separated by a generation but united by their mutual rootlessness, Bob forges a ships-in-the-night friendship with Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), who flips aimlessly through her philosophy books while her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) shoots Japanese rock bands, too busy to notice his wife's creeping unhappiness. Drawn to each other across the lobby bar -- lit, like most of Lost in Translation, in the half-yellows of hotel light -- the pair bond in a way too sweet for consummation, unless you count the karaoke pas de deux that finds Bob answering Charlotte's version of The Pretenders' "Brass in Pocket" with Roxy Music's "More Than This." In keeping their relationship platonic, save for one closing kiss, Lost in Translation betrays the morose sentimentality that Ghost World sidestepped; Lance Acord's glistening, remote cinematography tells you that this won't be the kind of movie in which things actually happen. If Murray's broken through his hipster reserve, Coppola hasn't.

Lost in Translation is a beautiful movie, hauntingly so, but there's something of a cop-out in the way it keeps Bob and Charlotte isolated from their respective spouses; Charlotte's appears only in a few brief scenes, while Bob's intrudes as a distant phone voice (Coppola's) and occasional fax, mostly concerned with finalizing the decor of his new home office. For all its elegant world-weariness, the movie's grasp of sexuality is essentially adolescent, prizing the impossible crush over flesh-and-blood relationships. The movie's greatest misstep is when Bob catches one of his old movies, dubbed in Japanese, on late-night TV, and he's shown acting opposite an orangutan. A good cheap laugh, perhaps, but not enough to justify its cheap demeaning of Murray's character; it implies he's a hack, rather than a figure of tragic compromise. Coppola's characters want more satisfying lives, but only if they don't require too much effort. Murray's performance, perhaps his greatest, suggests a longing the movie otherwise lacks the courage to contemplate.

Lost in Translation

Written and directed by Sofia Coppola A Focus Features release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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