A Deep Movie For Shallow People

I should probably explain.

I saw Lost in Translation in the theater some months ago and was less than thrilled. The movie left me speechless, and I do not mean that in a good way. I had exactly one thing to say about the movie, and it didn’t seem like it was that inspired a thing to say. At least not inspired enough to write a full-length review over. What I mean to say, is, there’s only so many times you can point out that a) the movie is boring and b) nothing happens in the movie and c) yes, it really is that boring, and d) no, I’m serious, nothing happens, and e) no, I’m not kidding.

You see, I hope, that this is not the stuff from which great reviews are written.

There were several factors that convinced me that I should give Lost in Translation another chance. The first is personal. I am not, by profession (lawyer/movie critic) or by persuasion (Republican Party, Atilla-the-Hun Wing) or by personality (take my word for it) inclined to be what you would call charitable at all times. I recognize this is something I need to work on, and re-looking at Lost in Translation through a more charitable mindset seemed like good practice. The second is collegial; at least one of my movie-review associates has chided me for not reviewing Lost in Translation, and challenged me to look at it again and write a real review. And the third is introspective; maybe I’m wrong about this. Lost in Translation did, after all, win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for writer/director Sofia Coppola. It has been honored time and again with laurels, taking home the Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Awards. Might I be wrong? Could my critical skills be lapsing? Was it possible that this was, in fact, a great movie? And I just didn’t get it for some reason?

And then there was the stack. 2003 was, of course, the worst year for screeners that there has ever been, no thanks to Handsome Jack Valenti and the MPAA Legion of Doom. But I had a few (thanks largely to the fine, upstanding people at Focus Films) stacked up on my TV, and Lost in Translation was at the top of that particular stack. The stack had been there since December — I’ve been busy getting my novel finished, too busy to see a lot of flicks lately, as you may have noticed — and if I was ever to get through it, I’d have to start with Lost in Translation.

And so this is what I did. I went to the gym. I did the lat pulldown and the chest press and the leg curl and the back extender and the arm curl and the shoulder press. (I hate the shoulder press; I have weak shoulders for some reason.) I came home and changed clothes. I got in my car and drove to Decatur, where I went to a barbecue restaurant I’d heard of. I ordered the baby back ribs with baked beans and potato salad. The ribs were very good but a little dry. The baked beans were horrible. The potato salad needed a little mustard but was OK once I had put some salt on it. I paid my bill and realized that I wasn’t quite sure how to get from the restaurant to where I was going, so I backtracked and ended up back home. It was 7:30. It was too late to make the 7:35 showing of David Mamet’s Spartan at the UA Tara on Cheshire Bridge. It was also too late to make the 7:45 showing of Spartan at the Madstone theater in Sandy Springs. I drove over to the Landmark Midtown theater, but all the shows had started already, unless I wanted to see The Triplets of Belleville,, which I was not too crazy about.

Time to see Lost in Translation.

And since I was seeing it at home, this meant that I could take notes for once, and write the review from the notes. This sounded like a promising approach, so I got my legal pad and my trusty Bic Clic pen and put the tape (yes, they sent me a tape and not a DVD; the piracy thing) in the VCR/DVD.

8:00 pm - The famous opening bit, where we’re treated to a long, lush view of Scarlett Johansson’s butt behind a diaphonous pair of sheer pink panties. I liked this a lot for prurient reasons but that’s about it. I had remembered this particular scene (obviously) and had remembered thinking that the way to start the review was to talk about Scarlett Johansson’s butt in and of itself, as a thing of beauty, but to metaphorically imply that what we were seeing was really (in a metaphysical sense) Sofia Coppola’s butt, and that she needed a spanking, but good. (All things considered, I think it’s best that we don’t know what Sofia Coppola’s butt looks like up close.)

8:01 pm - The first spoken words of the movie, a heavily-accented female Japanese voice, welcoming us to Narita airport. We then see Bill Murray, asleep in the back of a cab, being driven down some street or other in Tokyo. (Is this the Ginza? I am not sure that is what the Ginza looks like, but I suppose it could be.) It’s nighttime, and all the garish neon lights are on, bright enough to wake Murray up from his slumber, and he stares slack-jawed at the incomprehensible Japanese symbols.

10:44 pm - Parenthetical retrospective bit here. I was curious just exactly what time Murray’s plane landed. This involved a bit of research on Orbitz - which research revealed that Delta’s idea of flying first-class from LAX to Tokyo Narita involves stops in Cincinnati and New York, and which having seen the Cincinnati airport, I cannot recommend. Anyway, Singapore Airlines will take you to Tokyo for (when I checked) $857, round-trip, with a flight which leaves at 2:40 PM Pacific time and arrives at 6:00 PM the next day, Tokyo time, which sounds about right for when Murray arrives, once you take baggage claim and customs into account, and it turns out that the Hyatt is 90 minutes away from Narita airport.

8:03 pm - What kind of music is that playing when Murray is being driven through town? Is it Japanese? Some of the music in the film is Japanese, but this repetitive techno-thingy could be from just about anywhere. I don’t think much of it. It’s terribly annoying.

8:04 pm - Murray in his green Japanese robe, staring mutely at the strangeness of Japanese television. This gets referenced a lot, but I’m surprised to see it so early in the film.

8:05 pm - We’re in the hotel bar now. The lounge singer makes her first appearance, and we notice that her hair is dyed the same color as her dress. (She wears black throughout the rest of the movie, which matches much better with her hair.)

11:25 pm - Parenthetical retrospective thingy here, too. It turns out that the lounge singer (we never learn her name in the movie) is named Catherine Lambert, and that she is really a singer, and that she is from — who knew? — Quebec, and she recorded an album of medieval French folk songs in 1998 that is ranked 145,792th on Amazon at the moment.

8:05 pm - So Murray was in his robe, trying to get to sleep, and he got dressed, went to the bar, and got a whiskey, and now he is dressed in a gray T-shirt. He’s still not asleep, after an enormously long flight, and a huge time change; I would be totally flaked out by now. But I can’t sleep on airplanes, or at least not very well.

8:07 pm - Murray is awakened at the crack of dawn by automatic curtains which open and let in the light at some pre-arranged hour. Who wants this? Who would ever want this? I have no clue. It is very strange. I mean, if I had this in my apartment… well, better not think about it. I don’t have curtains anyway, I have… well, this is getting too personal here.

8:09 pm - One of the funny scenes in the movie, where Murray is shooting his Suntory commercial. He is wearing a tuxedo, although he wasn’t wearing one previously. We don’t see him carrying any bags to the studio, so the tuxedo must have been waiting for him. Is it a rental? Is it just something in someone’s costume department? Are Japanese suit sizes metric?

8:12 pm - The bit where the director gives Murray a big harangue in Japanese on what he is supposed to do, and the translator tells Murray, “more intensity”. Cute. I didn’t really wonder what the director was saying, I was assuming — as Murray was — that it was just bullshit. But I am wondering if Coppola knew what he was saying, or if it wasn’t in the script. How much Japanese does Sofia Coppola know, anyway? Maybe the Academy should have found that out before they gave her the Oscar.

8:14 pm - Scarlett Johansson on the Tokyo subway. She sees a “salaryman” reading a “manga” comic book. Is the Tokyo subway system safe for unattached women? I seem to remember reading an article that suggested that women riding on the subways tended to get groped on a semi-regular basis, and that there were supposed to be “grope-free” cars on some subways. Would this happen to a Western woman or not? I don’t know. The scene isn’t long enough for me to wonder, though, and Johansson makes it to her Buddhist shrine unmolested, apparently.

8:16 pm - Johansson makes a panicky phone call to her sister. The phone call doesn’t make a lick of sense — certainly the sister feels that way, because from what we can hear of what she says, she’s dismissive. Johansson seems to be upset that her husband is using hair products. I would think that she should be concerned what kind of phone bill she’s running up. (This is based on painful personal experience which I’ll explain a bit later.)

8:16 pm - Scarlett is bored at this point. She is running around the room wearing those pink panties again, which is not a good sign. Her husband, Giovanni Ribisi, wanders in at that point, and we see them talking, and Scarlett points out a long blue scarf around her neck. We see that there are knitting needles in the scarf, and that it is very long. How long has she been in that hotel room, and how much knitting has she gotten done in that time? Long enough for anyone to go stir-crazy, seems to me.

8:18 pm - In the meantime, Murray is checking out the television again. Some kind of exercise show. Some kind of hard-bitten cop drama. An old Bill Murray SNL rerun. Uh-oh.

8:19 pm - This is the scene where the prostitute shows up, asking Murray to “lip her stockings”. Ha-ha! Japanese people can’t pronounce certain English words well! Isn’t that hilarious? I found myself wondering who the actress was — IMDb isn’t overly helpful — and if she was a good comic actress, the Carol Burnett of Japan, or who she was. Interesting. I probably should have recruited someone with some serious Japan experience and had them watch the movie with me — there has to be someone on campus, you’d think. Maybe I am just not getting this. Maybe if they had set the movie in Grand Prairie, Texas, I’d be rolling on the floor laughing.

8:22 pm - The commercial bit again, this time with a photographer, this time with Murray doing his understated Rat Pack / Roger Moore impression. This is probably the funniest scene in the movie, and probably a good bit of what got Murray the Oscar nod. But we still have a long way to go.

8:25 pm - This is the payoff of the tuxedo bit. We’re back in the bar of the Hilton, and Murray is wearing his tuxedo; he hasn’t changed since the photo shoot. He gets up from the bar, and we get the great sight gag of him still wearing the binder clips in the back of the tuxedo (to keep the front from wrinkling in the photo shoot, presumably). But this doesn’t answer the question from before. Is it his tuxedo? Is it the same one from before? Did he steal it?

8:27 pm - Murray on the out-of-control elliptical trainer. This was really funny when George Jetson did it the first time; not so much now.

8:28 pm - A key scene in the movie. Scarlett and Giovanni meet starlet Anna Faris in the lobby of the hotel. Ribisi is wearing a godawful green-and-gold polo. We learn that Scarlett went to Yale, and is a bit of a snob about it, and that she can’t stand airhead blonde starlets when they hit on her husband. More about this later.

8:30 pm - Scarlett is wandering around the hotel. She walks by the concierge. If she’s bored, you would think that she would, perhaps, ask the concierge just what there is to do in this town. Maybe he might have a suggestion or something. You never know.

8:31 pm - The press conference for Anna Faris’s movie, “Midnight Velocity”. You get the impression Sofia Coppola really doesn’t like blonde actresses. But it’s more than that. The Anna Faris character has only one role in this movie, and that is to make the Scarlett Johansson character look smart in comparison. The only way to do this is to make Faris’s character shallow — shallow enough that you could use her to breed mosquitoes. But the dirty little secret of Lost in Translation is just how shallow the Johansson character is — and, by extension, how shallow Sofia Coppola is. (Lost in Translation is a deep movie for shallow people, which explains the Oscar nominations and all that.)

8:33 pm - There is a lot of wacky television in Japan, apparently. But Coppola, coming from a country that has shown “The Simple Life with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie”, shouldn’t throw stones.

8:35 pm - We are thirty-five minutes into the movie before the first meaningful conversation between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. This is bad. What is worse that it is only about a minute or two before Johansson tells Murray that he must be going through a mid-life crisis. Keep in mind that Murray is supposed to be some sort of celebrity, and think about how you might think twice before going up to a celebrity in a bar, much less telling him he has a midlife crisis, which is about the most foolish and trite comment you can make to a middle-aged anybody. Keep in mind also that this movie won the Best Original Screenplay this year, which I would argue is a feat considering there isn’t one original line of dialogue in the whole movie.

11:48 pm - We are told that Scarlett Johansson’s character got a degree in philosophy from Yale. I am quoting from the curriculum of the Yale Philosophy Department website:

• A technical exposition of Gödel’s first and second incompleteness theorems and of some of their main consequences in proof theory and model theory, such as Löb’s theorem, Tarski’s undefinability of truth, provability logic and nonstandard models of arithmetic.
• Discussion of the relevance of the science of color vision and color illusions to the metaphysics of color. Topics include opponent process theory, metamerism, spectrum inversion, phenomenal sorites, sense data theory, dispositionalism, type-identity theory, and eliminativism.
• This seminar explores different views of the concept of analyticity and a priority since Kant. After understanding Carnap’s project for the analytic/synthetic distinction, we will focus on the Carnap-Quine debate on the issue.

Scarlett Johansson’s character admits at one point in the movie that she has taken photographs of her feet. I will leave it to the individual reader to determine whether she studied very hard at Yale or not.

8:37 pm - I would like to try the air-guitar video game.

8:43 pm - I think part of what makes people really like Lost in Translation is its value as a travelogue. The scene where Johansson stares for what seems like hours out of the Park Hyatt window out at the Tokyo skyline is lovely. But it would be lovely anyway, and the Japanese shrines that she visits in the movie would still be lovely. Coppola is fortunate primarily in her choice of settings, but filming pretty vistas is no substitute for, you know, making an interesting movie where things happen.

12:05 am - The Park Hyatt Hotel in Japan is 52K yen a night, which is about $483 U.S. The regular Crowne Plaza is more like $130. I thought you should know.

8:45 pm - The note I have written down here asks, “Does Scarlett Johansson say one intelligent thing in this movie?” She reminds us that Evelyn Waugh is a man at one point, but everyone knows that, you’d think. One intelligent thing? Anything? I wrote this down, I think, at the point where she tells Murray that the hotel has a nice pool.

8:46 pm - Murray and Johansson go out on the town. Johansson is meeting some friends. I wonder what would happen if I went to New York and met some of my friends there, but I brought Bill Murray along for the evening, because he was feeling kind of lonely. I’d kind of like to find out, although I don’t think it would involve karaoke, or I hope not.

8:50 pm - We have celebrity poker, why not celebrity karaoke? I really want to know. We have American Idol, which is basically karaoke pros trying to become famous; I want to see famous people doing karaoke. Don’t make me keep talking about this until it happens. Because it’s going to happen. You watch.

8:54 pm - I really should have gone to the store and gotten some popcorn. Or some pudding. I forgot to get the fat-free tapioca when I went to the store. It would taste good right now. Or some butterscotch. Yeah.

8:55 pm - Hey, I never said I wasn’t shallow.

8:56 pm - Murray must be working out a lot to carry Scarlett Johansson back to the hotel like that; she’s asleep and must be a dead weight. I bet his back is really going to hurt in the morning.

8:58 pm - Another one-sided phone conversation. The good thing about watching the movie at home is that you don’t have to sit through one-sided phone conversations to the audience. The bad thing is that I’m too cheap to buy good speakers for my TV, so I can’t hear as well what Murray’s wife is trying to tell him. I wonder if I can get better speakers on ebay. Maybe I should get up and check.

9:03 pm - Scarlett is giggling a lot at this point in the movie. She shouldn’t do that. It sounds horrible, and underscores how shallow her character is.

9:05 pm - This is the scene in the strip club.

12:15 am - I learn that the person singing the song that we hear in the strip club is named “Peaches”, but I will not release any further information, including the name of her CD, because, eeeewwwww.

9:09 pm - I have been looking at my watch a lot. Come to think of it, that’s what I thought when I saw this the first time. I wonder when something interesting will happen.

9:11 pm - I do not have long to wait. We have the scene where Murray and Johansson are sipping sake out of those weird wooden boxes. We have the scene where they’re shot from above, lying in bed together, separated from each other by an invisible wall of fidelity and fear, talking about marriage and children and experience. Johansson tells us that she tried to be a writer, but she doesn’t like what she writes, and so she quit, the same way she quit taking photographs of her feet. This is my chief objection to the movie other than the fact that it is so boring.

You see, it’s like this. I had the same experience that these characters had last summer. I wasn’t in Tokyo, mind you, but I was in Vancouver, which is still a foreign country, and I was stuck in a big hotel downtown where I didn’t know anyone. I ran up a big phone bill, for one thing, and spent a lot of time wandering the streets, shopping, and eating a lot of really good Chinese food. I had a great time, but I was jet-lagged, and I couldn’t sleep. But I had my laptop with me, and when I couldn’t sleep, I wrote. I got through four chapters of my novel, and sketched out the next twelve. I don’t know that I could have finished the first draft of the novel (four months later) if I hadn’t been to Vancouver. I wasn’t lost in translation or anything (unless you count the occasional French bilingual signage) but I was in a different place, and it sparked my creativity.

But being in Japan doesn’t do much of anything for Murray and Johansson; it drains them, ennervates them, makes them acutely aware of what they lack in their own lives. Japan, for Murray and Johansson, does nothing more than serve to highlight just how unhappy they are, as though an entire culture and people exist only to provide the proper existential background for their private, personal pain.

R. Ebert, in answering a question about why so many people actively dislike Lost in Translation suggests that the fault is not in the movie, but somewhere in the makeup of the critic — in other words, if you don’t like the movie, something must be wrong with you. In other instances, I might dispute this blithe assertion, might point out the inherent smugness and condescension in this position, except with me it happens to be true. What I’m feeling when I watch the movie is stark, staring envy. You probably feel it too. I’d like to go to Japan; I’ve never been any closer to Japan than the Point Loma park in San Diego. More than that, I’d like to have somebody else pay for it; round-trip airfare is only about $725, but that’s more than my rent payment, and double what I have budgeted for groceries this month, and let’s not even talk about what I’d spend to eat in Japan. I’d like to be a movie star, and if I couldn’t do that, I’d love to have a degree in philosophy from Yale and not needing to work to pay for it. I’d like to visit ancient shrines and hang out and drink Suntory whiskey in hotel bars, or at least get to watch Scarlett Johansson parade around in those flimsy pink panties. Instead, I’m in a basement apartment in Atlanta, writing movie reviews, and R. Ebert is telling me that I’m a “a passive receptor for mindless sensation”. Lovely.

Am I envious? You bet. But the message of Lost in Translation isn’t the instigation of envy. It’s worse than that. It is that all the things its characters have — everything that makes me envious — doesn’t make them happy. And the idea that material goods don’t insulate you from depression is more depressing than the movie itself. What you have here is what scholar Gregg Easterbrook called The Progress Paradox, about why people in the West are so unhappy despite having so much material wealth. The Murray and Johansson characters aren’t happy, despite material comfort, if not wealth. (Murray is making two million for one commercial, and we never hear Johansson complain about student loans.) Travel and experiencing new cultures aren’t enough. (Murray and Johansson seem to eat at some really bad restaurants; haven’t they seen Iron Chef?) Their relationships aren’t making them happy, and may be causing them more unhappiness than they’re worth.

9:23 pm For that matter, luxury hotels aren’t making them happy. We see Murray on a cell phone, talking to his wife, unhappiness written on each line of his face, but he’s sinking into a large, heated, luxurious bath, which he doesn’t seem to be enjoying. This is the movie in a nutshell, and I will leave it up to the reader at this point to determine whether he or she should watch any farther. (Hint: not much else happens.)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 10:21 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.