Lost in Translation - Sweet But Not Sticky

my rating:

Lost in Translation is the story of the friendship that developes between Bill Murray (as a past-his-prime actor in Tokyo to shoot some wiskey adverts) and Scarlett Johansson (as a young college grad tagging along with her husband who is there for an unrelated photomarketing assignment). I wasn't blown away by it, but that's some of the charm of the film: it's low-key. Or at least as low-key as downtown Tokyo can be.

Some of the critic blurbs about this call it a "breakthrough" performance for Murray as if this were his first good "serious" or "dramatic" role, but I think maybe they're confusing him with some of his more manic cohorts on Saturday Night Live. When teamed with other comedians, he's always been the low-key subtle one, and when he plays the comic relief he's always brought as much depth to it as the script allows. He's never needed to wear bunny ears or do pratfalls to be funny. So I wasn't surprised by his acting here.

I was pleasantly surprised by how the relationship between the two characters develops. The two are drawn together, not by the allure of his celebrity or her youthful beauty, but by their mutual alienation both from the incomprehensible culture in which they're immersed and from their (for the most part) absent mates. Although I've never been anywhere I couldn't at least read the alphabet or without a generally "Western" culture, I can relate a bit to the cultural disorientation of being alone in a strange place, and being drawn at times to the sound of a familiar accent or the sight of familiar facial features... or even taking brief comfort in glimpsing an icon like McDonald's "golden arches". But they have more than just homesickness that draws them together, and their May-September friendship - note that I don't call it a "relationship" or "affair" - seems quite natural.

One problem I had with the movie is that it tends to caricature Japanese culture. Some of the bits - such as a picture menu where every item looks exactly the same, or the translator who clearly is not conveying the whole message - detracted from the realism of the story. But since the film is trying to capture the perception of the stranger in a strange land, where the ideosyncracies stand out and the commonalities aren't noticed, this is excusble. Especially since it doesn't look down on the eccentricities of Japanese culture, but rather presents Tokyo as "differently weird" from America.