#32 — Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
For all the time I spend pondering movies, I find I don’t often retain my specific first impressions, even when I feel very strongly about the film in question. For example, despite initial viewings that happened relatively more recently than most of the offerings on this list, I can’t tell you what my first thoughts were walking out of either last year’s best movie, Rachel Getting Married, or last year’s worst movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. So it’s personally noteworthy that I remember exactly what I thought when emerging from the multiplex auditorium where I watched Sofia Coppola’s second feature film. My mind locked on a simple lament: “Bill Murray is going to get robbed again.”

A few years earlier, when I still took Oscar slights seriously, I was bitterly disappointed that Murray didn’t receive an Academy Award nomination for his stellar turn in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. I was sure history was poised to repeat as Murray’s equally ingenious performance in Lost in Translation seemed a likely candidate for dismissal. It is subtle and deeply considered, delicate and sly, conveying the low, deep ache of a discursive soul with a measured efficiency and a sad-eyed honesty. Where other portrayals of sadness and uncertainty tie threads to moments of impotent rage (or raging impotence), Murray sidles up to his discontent and leans on its shoulder, surveys it quietly, takes it in with the forlorn patience of a man who’s given up on the very idea of change, much less improvement. It is a performance that it not just lived-in. It is living before us. You feel you know this man in ways that he perhaps does not know himself, perhaps does not let himself know.

He can let another person onscreen know him that well, gradually, cautiously, and finally with a moving openness. That young woman is played by Scarlett Johansson. Like him, she is an American temporarily navigating her way through Tokyo. She is an aimless twenty-something, waiting in a hotel room while her photographer husband heads out on jobs or indulges in necessary industry mingling. Murray plays a movie star who’s journeyed to Japan to film lucrative whiskey ads, chipping away at his own loneliness with fragmented, awkward phone calls home. Both sleepless, they find each other and begin connecting, finding that the best way to make sense of this discombobulating foreign city buttressed with walls of corporate-promoting light is to hold tightly to each other’s familiarity and sensibility as they venture out into it. Separated, they face unpleasant challenges and vexing confusion. Together, it’s pure adventure before them.

Through this all, Sofia Coppola is remarkably evocative in capturing mood, feeling and sensation. Besides the unfamiliar culture, both of the main characters are suffering from jetlag, battling sleeplessness and fatigue. As they encounter the deepest hours of the night with extreme weariness and unwanted alertness, Coppola somehow conveys the simultaneously sluggishness and vividness that accompanies such an existence, as if you’re moving forcefully through a crystal-clear underwater city. Everything seems leaden, permanent, unmovable, and precarious, diaphanous, on the very edge of devastation. The whole world is an impervious eggshell, and you’re ricocheting off it’s arcing sides. These feelings inform every frame, every bit of Coppola’s film. They make the little achievements more moving, the unexpected slips into momentary happiness all the more special. Coppola and her characters have earned the shimmers of hope because of a willingness to acknowledge that they are distant, fleeting. Maybe, just maybe, those blips of redemption, those hiccups of grace are the best we can hope for. Maybe they’re not compromised forms of contentment. Maybe they’re worthy of wonderment, instead. Maybe a secret whisper, shared by only two people, is a genuine treasure. It’s something to aspire to, not settle for.

In the end, I wasn’t quite right about Bill Murray. He was included among the Best Actor contenders, his first and, to date, only Oscar nomination. He lost to Sean Penn, who brought admirable gravity to his role as an anguished father in Mystic River. Penn had scenes of wrenching pathos giving his outlet to literally wail at the sky, far easier emotive athleticism for Academy voters to grab a hold of and declare great. Murray’s work is quieter, shrewder and, in its own way, more confident. He may not have a statue of a golden man to show for it, but he does have a performance worth remembering in a movie with a moving genuineness that sneaks up on you.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)