[*Copy editor–type note: The i
in In in the title is capitalized
here, following the opening titles appearing in the movie proper. In the DVD
packaging, it is lowercase, as would be the usual style per most sets of style
rules for a preposition in this kind of use. I follow the convention used in
the opening titles in the film, but it is technically incorrect.]
[Edits done thru 2/15/13; one important for understanding a sentence is between * *. Additional edit 2/20/13. Another edit 2/25/13. Edit 7/9/13.]
This film was hailed when it
came out—it certainly marks an improvement over director Sofia Coppola’s
previous work, the interesting but odd The
Virgin Suicides (1999), an adaptation of a novel—and Lost In Translation got four-star reviews and related plaudits that
today sound a little hyperbolic. (Note:
Her Wikipedia bio suggests she made a film before The Virgin Suicides, in 1998. But I will assume for this discussion
that this is incorrect, for a few reasons: the article is inconsistent on this
[note the omission of the 1998 film on the list of what films she directed,
toward the end]; as far as I know, she has never been noted outside Wikipedia as directing something before Suicides; and she seems routinely to
take about three or four years between films.)
Today, while LIT is still definitely worth a look, I
think it shows more what a small film it is—meaning, a game effort on a little
budget where luck played a partial role in its making (with all else). Yet it
still treats some important themes with good taste.
For one thing, it is nice as a
mood piece, and while its values of taste (such as in music or certain
lifestyle things) may in some instances be a bit dated (like a perfume that was
big five years ago) or somewhat objectionable to the pro-proletariat sorts in
Obama’s America, I think the aspect that has aged the least is Bill Murray’s hearty and good-sport performance, which is as interesting for its comic
bits as for its serious side, which latter was lauded in 2003.
Scarlett Johansson, the
one other “big star” here (she is a bigger deal now), seems strikingly girlish
and not fully seasoned in LIT. (Note
how she’s on Broadway now for a Tennessee Williams play, and has had a string
of high-enough-profile films for some time—she even did three pictures with director
Woody Allen. She seems to have accumulated a beefier oeuvre than has, say, Evan Rachel Wood, who I think many would say is a better actress.)
When we look more at the themes
Ms. Coppola wanted to treat as she wrote on them, we will see how strong, or
not, this film is.
A summary peek at Bill Murray, a comic-acting veteran
Bill Murray is the only member
of the 1970s Saturday Night Live
ensemble (he joined in the second season) who is still a going concern as a
movie actor. (Even Dan Aykroyd has lain low for some time [update: Garrett Morris is active, but on TV's 2 Broke Girls; on that, see this blog entry of mine].) Murray showed he could branch out into films
with the cult favorite Caddyshack
(1980), the critically panned Meatballs
(1979), and the more esteemed but not great Stripes
(1981). The first of these was directed (as his first directing effort) by
Harold Ramis, who like Murray came
out of the Second City comedy troupe (a brother of Murray’s also helped in the writing or
producing of Caddyshack). Murray later
hit comic high points with the esteemed and loved Groundhog Day (1993), also directed by Ramis, and What About Bob? (1991), directed by
Frank Oz.
In about 1998, with the Wes
Anderson–directed film Rushmore, Murray started accumulating a record as a worthwhile dramatic
actor; he did similar work in Anderson’s
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001; see my November
25 review). Today, in dramatic terms, he has made it all the way to portraying
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park on
Hudson (2012), which is up for an award or two. Over the long term, he may
be seen as permanently colored (for better or worse) by his Saturday Night Live/comedy persona (and
such entertainments as the 1980s Ghostbusters
films), and (from what I’ve found from more than one source) he is
idiosyncratic for the movie industry in not employing an agent and in taking work
offers via an 800 phone number. But he is a recognizable asset that has had a
surprising staying power, given the many changes in Hollywood, wrought not least by technology
and changing tastes and marketing strategy, over the past 35 or so years.
Murray’s somewhat oddly shaped face—his head
is a little like a misshapen pumpkin or somewhat round squash (with his
pock-marked skin, you could say, echoing the uneven surface of a squash)—has long
seemed to go with his sly humor, which features sudden irony or a sophisticated
wryness. He is like an advance on the old hippie/rebel humor that was big with,
say, George Carlin or the Smothers Brothers—Murray adds a sort of “hip” class to his
see-through-illusions type of comedy. His somewhat “post–baby boomer” perspective
suggests he is not someone of George Carlin’s generation, still fighting Nixon
or (today) quite alienated from the world of smart phones, or (alternatively,
not-liberal) like that subset of Vietnam vets who are still fighting Jane
Fonda. (Even Murray’s Vietnam-combat-related humor in Caddyshack seemed like secondhand riffing with “found folk wisdom,”
not like the product of someone who had actually partaken of the crucible of
demonstrating in Washington, D.C., or cursing Presidents Johnson and Nixon
within the period from 1964 through 1973 or so.)
Nowadays, with more subtlety and
seriousness to his performances, he no longer seems the practiced, well-known
clown, but someone passing through older age—now he has white hair, his puffier
face all the more suggesting a skeptical wryness that goes with older age—with
his spontaneous humor adding grace notes to a sort of stoical air. He could be
considered a sort of poet of the “postmodern skeptical romantic” (gee, I’d
better cut it out with trying to do this kind of analyzing—I might get hired to
do cultural criticism somewhere, and then I would get writer’s block).
Lost In Translation I think marks the most publicly recognized phase
of his transition from comic actor to a more serious one—he actually seems used
by director Sofia Coppola in a fairly star-struck way, as if his being a known
brand helped beef up his character without much writing work on her part. And
here he shows (despite his intentions, perhaps) how his performance really
presents the most heart of any character in this film, as seen (in part) in his
shifts between both humor and more dry/sober delivery. While some might feel
his performance isn’t seamless in this regard, he definitely shows how he looks
down both corridors of his career (whether or not at the time he was conscious
of this “divide in the road”)—the plucky comedy of his past, and the dry
seriousness (or a slightly sweetened version of this) often featured in his
future roles.
Some production-personnel (and actors) background
This film, while often tasteful
and with decent enough comedy (when it scores; sometimes it doesn’t), is quite
a bit an early effort: Ms. Coppola’s writing is rather undeveloped/immature at
times, and often the film seems like a well-photographed effort by a small,
earnest group that sometimes snatched some footage on the fly. Moreover, this
is a family-business product of a sort that would almost turn me off, if it
weren’t for the sense of a simpatico/tasteful mentality behind it. Ms. Coppola
is, of course, the daughter of director Francis Ford Coppola. (She was, I
understand, the baby in the christening scene at the end of The Godfather [1972], and turns up as
the four/five-year-old squirt in Hearts
of Darkness [1991], the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now [1979]. She also made a famously panned debut as an
actress in The Godfather Part III
[1990], as Michael Corleone’s daughter.)
Francis (as he is widely known),
with longtime producing associate Fred Roos (who early in his career was a
casting director, such as in Five Easy
Pieces [1970]), executive-produced Lost
In Translation. Ms. Coppola also co-produced the film with Ross Katz (I
don’t know anything about him). The family tradition aspect even shows up in,
during the making-of doc, a depiction of what Francis used to do at the
beginning of productions, supposedly for good luck: to have the whole
production team join hands and chant a nonsense word: “Fu-abba, fu-abba, fu-abba!”
Stars include Giovanni Ribisi
as John, the photographer husband of Johansson’s Charlotte—he is so busy
shooting a rock group and doing whatever else that his freelance-seeming job
requires of him in the Tokyo stay that he inadvertently neglects Charlotte. For
her part, Charlotte,
as a more long-term issue, seems to be in a melancholy state of “not knowing
what to do with herself next,” which potentiates her emotional (not sexual)
fling with Bill Murray’s visiting old star Bob Harris. More on all of this
later.
Anna Faris makes an
appearance as a bubble-headed action star named Kelly (it’s interesting how few
characters in this film have last names [though we find out from a DVD extra that Kelly's surname is Strong]). There are also contributions by
numerous Japanese players, including one who plays a supposed friend of Charlotte’s named
“Charlie Brown.” The Japanese production company Tohokushinsha Film helped produce this movie, as an apparent sine
qua non (including maybe having fake “Bob Harris”/Suntory ads appear on a
building or on a vehicle on the road).
Though I can best make this
remark after I review Apocalypse Now,
it’s kind of fun to see LIT as not
only, thematically, a small sachet “coda” to Sofia’s father’s Apocalypse Now—as in, “What do Americans
do when they visit the Far East now? They
come as emotionally put-upon tourists, not wage war on the locals.” But also,
there were mini-challenges for LIT
that echoed some of her father’s, such as a typhoon that came to Tokyo in the
midst of production (though this didn’t damage things for the film, or the
city, as did the typhoon hitting the Philippines in May 1976 during production for
Apocalypse Now).
The issue of a sort of
ethnocentrism to LIT is spelled out
in the film’s Wikipedia article. In fact, both Apocalypse Now and LIT
seem to potentially offend East Asians with their depictions of those races,
though in AN this could be excused on
the grounds that in any war activity, especially when the war is against
members of another race, the “other side” is looked at in a demeaning if not
dehumanizing way. In LIT, the
“racism” is less excusable, because Bob Harris, Charlotte, and the others are
privileged, mostly educated people who ought to know better; but I suppose you
could “excuse” the racism to the extent that the film is largely about American
tourists dallying in a foreign land, under the influence of severe jet lag and
maybe a few too many visits to the hotel bar. And, after all, you can get fair
enough views of Japanese “in a complimentary light” with the courteous bows and
deferential manners, as well as sophistication, in passing scenes. (Meanwhile,
the impression of the Japanese as aggressively verbal, if not verbose, comes
out especially strongly—or is pilloried conspicuously enough—in the scene in
which Harris is filming the Suntory commercial.)
Assessing LIT
To a large extent, this is a
film to be watched for its esthetic pleasures; yapping about it critically
doesn’t do everything for appreciating it. The photography is very good; the
composition of shots (when not simply taking advantage of a beautiful view that
fell in the crew’s laps) reflects a particular modern school of art that I
can’t name, which I think was alluded to in professional criticism of the film
in 2003.
On an emotional level, often
helped by the soundtrack music, the film is suffused with a sort of “sweet
melancholy” of the kind that might come to people not only with their own
ongoing personal causes for “being down/at a loss” but also due to extreme jet
lag in a culturally very different country (and one that, amid people who are
courteous enough to often give little bows, is rather “manic” in its PR
effluvia, at least in the city). Its sort of emotionally “twilight” mood is conveyed
visually and in the rich sound, including Tokyo-derived hooting and ringing effects
(with sound collage wrought by Francis Coppola associate Richard Beggs). In one
respect, LIT is somewhat like Girl, Interrupted (1999; see my April
19, 2012, review)—in that, as with the earlier film, an ongoing emotional
background—which could be more deliberately evoked in a literary work—may not
always be obvious to viewers, due to their own temperaments.
In other words, with Girl, Interrupted, in order for you not
to see the women in the mental hospital as acting-out brats, you have to
understand that they all, in their respective, peculiar ways, have an ongoing
“undertow” of grinding depression, “intrusive thoughts,” and/or the like
coloring their consciousness of things. Similarly, with LIT, you have to understand Charlotte and Bob Harris—who do both
comment, twice, on being unable to sleep—as being in weird states of mind
because of “getting used” to a vastly different time zone, with all else. This
mental dislocation helps you understand why they drift through the emotional mist
to the mini-affair they have—with their own lives also more-objectively featuring
causes for discontent anyway (Charlotte has doubts about her new marriage; Bob
Harris, to use Sofia Coppola’s very trite word employed in the script, is
undergoing a midlife crisis—which I’ll talk about more responsibly shortly). As
it happens, the “fling” they gravitate to really is only a matter of “partying
together” and dating at a restaurant. It is an emotional dalliance, not
sexually consummated.
Importantly, in a scene just
past the middle of the movie—which Murray comments on astutely in a DVD extra
comprising a talk by just Coppola and Murray—Charlotte and Harris are in a bed—in
the last moment, strangely postured, as the shot has it (suitable for maybe a Rolling Stone cover)—and talking about
her (for lack of a better word) ennui and concerns about her future life.
Harris, from his twice-as-old perspective, gives her some advice. The words of
wisdom, overall, are telegraphed briefly, suiting the casualness of the scene
and yet economically attuned to the higher-interest theme of Charlotte’s issues. And I think the scene is
very good in that it shows them really just having a “talk affair,” not a sexual affair. Murray apparently had to throw his weight
around a bit during production to get this scene this tasteful way, and I think
that was a very good choice.
(For those who wanted plain
blunt sex, there is a wears-thin scene where Bob Harris deals with an escort of
sorts—a woman sent [by the people producing his commercial/photo-shoot gig] to
supply him with “premium [role-playing] fantasy.” For more “stimulating”
visuals, there is the scene in a sort of strip-dance club at which, by some
poor-taste choice within the story, Harris and Charlotte have been arranged to
meet Charlie Brown and friends. This is the sort of sequence that moved the
film’s rating to R, and it can be blinked over—or, for the squeamish, made an
occasion for a quick trip to the john.)
The emotional sojourn of Charlotte
Generalities
Part of this entry’s headline
includes the clause “a derivative girl swims in an upheaved world,” which as a
theme I like and want to do right by, but I don’t know how well it fits this
film. Granted, Charlotte, a recent college grad (majored in philosophy) and
newly married to her busy photographer husband, is feeling as if her life is
stagnating, and/or she doesn’t know what to do next career-wise (and seems,
judging by the bed conversation just mentioned, to have hankerings but
uncertainties regarding the issue of having children). To me, Charlotte is the least well-developed
character in the film—actually, only two characters count as to their rich
development: her and Bob Harris. And while Bob is pretty richly drawn thanks to
Murray, Charlotte’s
seems skimpy and unsatisfying, due in part to Johansson’s performance (not a total disappointment) and due in part to
the writing. (This role was noted as Johansson’s first adult one, along with
that in another ~2003 film, about a Vermeer painting.)
On one level, it may be all that
Sofia Coppola wanted was for Charlotte to exemplify a typical
early-twenty-something’s “major life challenge,” once all the hard schooling
and kissing-up-to-elders is over for now, and the threshold to productive
adulthood is underfoot: along with a more objective side, this can mean dealing
with issues of, on the psychological level, what has variously been gotten at
by ennui, alienation (more a 1950s term), acedia
(a medieval concept) or “weakness of will” (a hoary philosophical concept), or “bad
faith” in the sense of Jean Paul Sartre (this doesn’t mean “bad faith” in the
more normal sense, including ill-intentioned, but more exactly “a lack of
good-faith effort to reverse ongoing stagnation,” or such). (This is not meant to be a definitive set of comments.)
This is the ongoing character
issue for Charlotte.
Add to this her emergent jet-lagged state, with (left idle by her husband) her
sometimes being relegated to sitting like an elf on a window ledge looking idly
outside (while entrancing music adorns the soundtrack); and all in all, she is
not helped with her condition of melancholy.
The rambling phone confession-of-sorts
In one scene that seems almost very
well-done, after she has visited an evocative shrine, complete with monks and
tolled bell, she is on the phone home with a friend and she talks somewhat
ramblingly about having gone to see a shrine, where there were “monks chanting,
and [she confesses] I didn’t feel anything. … [I] even tried ikibana [sp?], and
John is using these hair products…. I don’t know who I married”—and she is
interrupted by her listener, who goes off the phone for a minute.
This is a classic sort of
moment, with a young-twenties sort, where she “protests” her confusion and wish
for connecting the dots and getting more of a sense of satisfaction and
direction, and only ends up seeming to unwind a series of disconnected
thoughts. As often happens in such a situation, her listener momentarily gets
bored, or vexed or whatever, and leaves the phone in a way that seems rather
rude; and then, “refreshed,” the listener comes back on and shows there is real
life she has to attend to, has to go, etc. Charlotte, brought back to reality with this
(not entirely as suits her), voices some sense of apology/thanks, and is
quickly off the phone (maybe feeling rebuffed, or not quite), and dissolves
into increasing teariness. The writing here may be a bit crude, but what the
scene accomplishes, and its intent, is noble enough and sets up Charlotte’s
aspect of the story—where she is coming from—well.
In short, at least with regard
to her new husband, she has not simply “lost that loving feeling” (per the
Righteous Brothers), but is starved for some kind of meaning and direction. A
lot of us have been there….
Making the connection with Bob Harris
One of the scenes that work best
is when Charlotte and Harris first talk together at a bar at the hotel. This
not only sets up, in the characters’ action and interrelation, the direction
they will take for the rest of the film, but is one root for why Bill Murray
was lauded for his performance as he was (he was nominated for an Oscar, though
he shrugged off the accolade—bless his heart; he knows himself). Charlotte
actually seems more in control of her life than usual when she initiates the bar-side
conversation, and Harris—with Murray employing a sober voice that is about as
warm-and-cuddly as the raw voice of someone just picking himself up from a
cataclysmic physical accident, though he isn’t being cold or brushing-off—is
frank about things, only in a measured way interweaving occasional Bill Murray–style
ironic humor.
With the dialogue spare, but the
comments forthcoming enough to paint the various emotional aspects, we see how
these two people gradually sidle up to one another for whatever value each
brings to the other in their emotionally fraught situation. (Sorry if this
sounds like a second-rate version of critic Michiko Kakutani.) Interestingly,
the film’s flawed nature turns up here, too—in its writing: one of the most
wince-inducing lines is Charlotte’s saying “You’re probably just having a
midlife crisis” (for me, I would say a midlife crisis is not much different
from crises you have in your youth, except you’re readier for them
emotionally), and adding, “Did you buy a Porsche yet?” This is the kind of
upscale-brat joke that would make me spit if I were in Murray’s (or Harris’s)
position. But Murray
saves the scene from banality by employing his sly humor: “You know, I was thinking about buying a Porsche.”
Party time
When Charlotte finds that her husband is going
away for a photo shoot until Sunday (we assume the current moment is several
days earlier in the week), she is free to entertain herself more richly with
Harris. John has given his blessing to the idea that Charlotte
can hang out with “Charlie Brown” and “those guys,” but Charlotte will rope Harris into the deal.
A scene where Harris comes to
her hotel room with a dorky T-shirt on, and decides to turn it inside-out—and
hence needs a label cut off—introduces an interesting little moment. While some
turns in this film are amateurish, other moments show especially nice insights.
After Murray/Harris has sat down for Johansson/Charlotte to cut the tag off,
the actors do something that may be as much due to the personalities of the
actors rubbing against one another as to any intended “revelations” of the
fictional characters. When they chat about some pretentious philosophical CD
she has, Murray
seems to express some vexation at Johansson, including a brief look at the
camera. Then a shot focused on Johansson, finishing up with cutting the label
off, shows her semi-roll her eyes, as if reacting to something minorly
obstreperous in Murray.
This almost might seem too trivial, except the shots keep these displays of
emotions in—and I think Sofia Coppola, like her father, was too aware of the
value of stray shows of emotion in actors *not* to include such a take displaying
something incisively revealing rather than another that doesn’t include it.
In relationships with love
developing, or at least rising a little to the occasion, the opposite impulse
can arise in people too: they may be attracted to each other, but there is
something that, passingly, repels them too. This particular “counter-love”
phenomenon (you might temporarily call it) is seen in the more consciously
thought-out Hitchcock film Vertigo
(1958; I still haven’t fully reviewed it, and may not), which is admittedly
less normally “romantic” about love than LIT
is. In Vertigo, when Scottie has
finally gotten Judy to dress up as his beloved Madeline, and they kiss in her
apartment, there is an air of extreme rapture, with the soaring Bernard
Herrmann music (seeming almost too powerfully Wagnerian for the scene), and the
characters are seen as the camera seems to move around them. The scene of the
stable, where some glorious epiphany about Madeline had earlier come to
Scottie, is shown in the background as they kiss for a long moment. Then the
music takes a weird turn, suddenly enters a strangely toned canter, as Scottie
pauses and parts a bit from Judy/Madeline, as if wondering what he is doing,
what is going on. There is a rupture in the rapture. Then he goes back to
kissing her.
“Counter-love.” There are a lot
of interesting facets of the pros and cons of love relationships in a book I
hope to quote from before long (and if you think it’s nerdy to talk drily about
this, I agree; I have a hard time delivering this rock ’n’ roll).
Anyway, after Charlotte has cut off the label, and she and
Harris have reacted briefly negatively to each other, they are out the door as
eager as two schoolkids, with the soundtrack music gearing up for party time.
Then comes montage. Scene of a
dance-hall-like place, with fireworks projected on big balloons. Murray shows he dances
dorkily; we can’t get everything from
our big stars. One quiet group of youth has the Japanese version of a
pothead—with tattoos including that of a pot leaf. A later scene is of a
cramped club of some kind, where some kibbitzer from behind a bar starts
shooting some weird toy gun, and chases Harris, Charlotte, and a few others out. Outdoors
scene, bottle thrown and breaks. Harris and Charlotte run through a phantasmagoric
arcade. [Added 2/25/13: A little thing: The order of the pothead scene and the toy-gun scene is the reverse from what is said here.]
Eventually comes the famous
karaoke scene, with the party group in a high-rise singing room with a
fishbowl-like view of the outdoors. Murray
sings “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” the Nick Lowe
song made famous in a recording by Elvis Costello. Murray’s hoarse, hearty singing, done as much
for hammy play as in any serious effort at true singing, brings a jolt of fun.
How can you go wrong with this sort of treat from Murray? I don’t think you can.
Later, Johansson, sporting a coy
pink wig, sings the Pretenders’ song "Brass in Pocket" (which includes the refrain “I’m special”), and shows she doesn’t have the
singing voice Murray has, even if he varnishes it with hamming.
Still later, Murray—given a shot of more Hit Me Again by
someone (Coppola?) off-camera—sings Roxy Music’s “More Than This”—which was
interpreted by critics in 2003 as bringing home some of the meaning of this
scene.
