You Can Almost Hear the Gears Grinding in Her Head
I remember really liking Lost in Translation when it came out. You know, like everyone else. Rewatching it for the first time since then, it’s easy to spot just how many things the film has wrong with it. Everyone in the supporting cast is horribly two-diminsional–from Anna Faris’s pathetic starlet to Giovanni Ribisi as Charlotte’s nebbish husband to the voice of Bob Harris’ cold wife, they all seem to serve the sole purpose of making the two main characters come off as better than everyone else. (Note: The twist of having Faris’s character secretly be a lounge singer does not make her three diminsional. The arrogant actress is one diminsion. The pathetic lounge singer is number two. And that’s where it ends.) Scarlett Johansson spends the entire movie flashing puppy dog eyes at Bill Murray and biting her lower lip, as if we wouldn’t get the film’s subtext without her help. The moments I remember as Bill Murray’s standouts–the commercial shoots, his karaoke version of “More Than This”–are pretty bland in retrospect. And then there’s all the “hey look at how different the Japanese are!” Which is basically the film’s only subplot.
Of course, I can’t say that it really bothers me all that much. It’s an “indie” film that’s as hopelessly condescending as a studio picture, sure, but it also doesn’t really set its sights all that high anyway. The simplicity of the story–attraction between Bob and Charlotte, attraction, attraction, brief repulsion, back to attraction, attraction, and then they go their separate ways–is endearing and heartbreaking, even with Johansson’s need to map it out for us emotionally every step of the way. And all the Japanese stuff is shot gorgeously enough to make the “spot the freak” aspect of it secondary. If anything, it’s a lesson in how little actually needs to be done right to make a compelling film… in the short term at least; Sofia Copola’s absolute lack of craft hasn’t helped her at all in the long run.
Music’s still great too. Maybe even better, now that Phoenix has finally blown up and “Alone in Kyoto” is provably Air’s last truly great song, and the JAMC and MBV have reunited, I guess.
