Lost in Translation
The paradox of modern business travel is that it can make you feel brutally anonymous while scraping you down to your truest self. The airport lobbies and hotel bars, the rooms pregnant with waiting: They replace the details of our regular lives with uniform dislocation. This is limbo, or what the Buddhists call bardo, and it can be a terrifying form of grace.
Sofia Coppola's lovely, lapidary ''Lost in Translation'' is about this stateless state of being, and about two lost souls who find themselves waltzing together in the void. It's not a love story, or, at any rate, the sort we expect from movies. It's something deeper and simpler, and it allows Scarlett Johansson to arrive as an actress at the same time it finally gives Bill Murray the great role that has always eluded him.
Murray plays Bob Harris, a Hollywood megastar whose prime is a decade or so behind him. He's in Japan to shoot a television ad for Suntory scotch, a project that will enrich his bank account with little effort on his part and no damage to his career back home. What Bob isn't prepared for is the sensory assault that is 21st century Tokyo and the plain fact that he can't sleep.
Neither can Charlotte (Johansson), the young, intelligent, barely formed wife of an antic rock 'n' roll photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) in town on assignment. Since her husband is forever running off to a shoot or gossiping with a bubbleheaded movie star (Anna Faris of ''Scary Movie,'' turning in a lethal dissection of a specific Hollywood type), Charlotte finds herself wandering into flower-arranging classes, taking long midday naps, and spontaneously weeping. She's vestigial and she knows it.
Bob's only human contact, meanwhile, comes in the form of a double-talking Japanese director (sample instruction: ''I need mysterious face'') and FedExed carpet samples from his wife in LA. He catches Charlotte's attention one night in the hotel: The two share a raised eyebrow over the terrible things the lounge singer is doing to ''Scarborough Fair,'' and soon they've formed a mutual support group and are scampering around Tokyo in an exhausted, elated daze that gathers profundity as it goes. The movie shares with Richard Linklater's 1995 ''Before Sunrise'' a sense of the way a man and a woman can feel as if they're the only two people on the planet.
''Lost in Translation'' is longer on atmosphere and observation than on story, but you don't mind: Coppola maintains her quietly charged tone with a certainty that would be unbelievable in a second film if you didn't suspect genetics had a hand. Her eye for detail is precise and often extremely funny, taking in the sight gag of Murray wrestling with a Tokyo hotel showerhead or marveling at the potted surrealism that is Japanese TV. At the same time, Coppola's knack for putting just the right French retro-rock tune on the soundtrack or casually framing a shot that you'd want to hang on your wall is the mark of a complete director. There's been a lot of hype lately about Francis's baby girl. On the basis of this movie, it's earned.
What may be most remarkable is the way Coppola and her actors sidestep the whole older man/
younger woman thing in favor of a punchy, tender humanism. Bob and Charlotte need to be different ages -- she hasn't yet begun her life while he's on the other side of the curve -- but sex never really gets put on the table, even if you sometimes see Bob's eyes droop with longing. Neither of them wants to wreck the mood. They're also just too tired. Maybe if ''Lost in Translation'' had been directed by a man, these two would have found some way to get busy. Maybe not. Certainly only a woman director would allow Johansson, with her real-girl body and sardonic eyes, to bloom with such compassion. The actress is also starring this fall in the film adaptation of the bestseller ''Girl With a Pearl Earring,'' and she's as reserved and intense there as she's emotionally sprawling here. There really isn't anyone else like her in movies at the moment.
This is Murray's homecoming, though. There have been hints before, in ''Groundhog Day'' and ''Rushmore,'' of the melancholy that lies behind his lazy mockery, but ''Translation'' marks the first time he has explored it. It's a performance of high comedy -- Murray can't not make you laugh -- but one that's rooted in Bob's panicky regret over everything that has slipped through his fingers.
At one point, he and Charlotte find themselves singing karaoke with a group of Japanese party kids, and after they've wobbled through ''(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding'' (him) and ''Brass in Pocket'' (her), Bob lays into the old Roxy Music chestnut ''More Than This.'' It's below Murray's natural register: He sings it softly and, you realize with a jolt, seriously. ''More than this,'' croons the master ironist in his most naked moment on film, ''there is nothing.''
''Lost in Translation'' gets more out of nothing than most movies even try.
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