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Lost and found
Three years ago, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola made an auspicious directoral debut with The Virgin Suicides. Translation is similar only in the younger Coppola’s interest in capturing life’s small, fleeting moments–the times spent blankly gazing out the window, lying awake at night or having a drink alone at a hotel bar. You could say that Coppola’s precious film is her version of The Royal Tenenbaums. In the same way that Wes Anderson wrote and directed Tenenbaums as a custom vehicle for Gene Hackman, so is Bill Murray (essentially as Bill Murray) the center of Coppola’s attentions. As Murray has aged, the former farceur has acquired a melancholy depth that stands him apart from his comic contemporaries. Murray plays Bill Harris, a Hollywood star in Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial for Japanese TV. (Japan has lured many an American and British celebrity to shoot commercials there, primarily those who refuse to do the same in their own countries.) Married with children, Harris has come alone to Tokyo, a Blade Runner-like monstropolis teeming with shimmering neon, skyscrapers and as many karaoke clubs as noodle bars. The city itself is the other Coppola preoccupation, and it’s been beautifully photographed by Lance Acord to stress its gaudily postmodern amalgamation of east and west. The other dislocated principal is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young New Yorker who’s tagged along on a work trip with her distracted photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi). Blessed with a face that’s wholesomely serene and inquisitive at the same time, Johansson has joined the front rank of promising screen actresses. After a series of close encounters, Bill and Charlotte strike up an unlikely friendship that’s somewhere between platonic and romantic. That may sound weird given the age difference, but Coppola and her leads handle the material with a maximum of delicacy and diffidence. Coppola leans on mood to an extreme to engage her story. She tugs at that feeling of weightlessness you get when you’re in a foreign country, the sense of discovery but also the solitude and the strangeness. The experience is exaggerated in a city like Tokyo, where consumerist technology has been embraced with all the reckless enthusiasm of a child tearing open Christmas gifts. Working from her own script, Coppola prods her camera and her cast to be tourists themselves. She skips into sushi bars, dodges pedestrians in busy thoroughfares and follows Murray and Johansson as they run together down streets like kids. As she eavesdrops on a noisy game parlor where one youth obliviously bangs away on an electric guitar, Coppola’s documentary instinct may be finer than her dramatic one. Lost in Translation is a jangly comedy of manners about two people, lost and alone in a strange city, who discover each other. They have little in common, yet they accomplish writer E.M. Forster’s dictum to "only connect." In one gorgeous sequence, Bill and Charlotte go out for a night on the town, stopping to sing a couple of karaoke songs in a high-rise bar. Mimicking his Saturday Night Live lounge act, Murray mouths Elvis Costello’s "What’s So Funny about Peace, Love and Understanding," followed by Johansson pretending on a Pretenders song. The plot evaporates like morning mist on a summer window, but what’s left is a simple epiphany. Or in Japanese terms, it’s mono no aware–the transience of things. Capitalizing on Murray’s famous deadpan doubletakes, Coppola adds a dash of comedy. But it’s mood that carries this movie, not mirth. In any language, Lost in Translation means much more as estranged feelings than as words. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
Take this movie… please
Of course, lack of material never stopped Allen from churning out such piffle as Celebrity or last year’s Hollywood Ending. The great, aging comic is like an impaired senior citizen who refuses to give up his driver’s license. Sooner or later he’s going to hurt somebody. Right now, he’s just killing his reputation. Anything Else is Allen’s transparent attempt to reach a younger audience. Not only that, but you might want to snidely tag it as Annie Hall: The Next Generation. American Pie’s tasteless Jason Biggs stars as Jerry Falk, an up-and-coming comedy writer involved in an up-and-down romance with a neurotic actress, played by Christina Ricci. Naturally, the film’s set in Allen’s Manhattan playpen, and, yes, you can describe Falk as a young version of Woody Allen in the 1960s. Allen writes himself in as David Dobel, a marginal comedy writer who’s Falk’s crackpot mentor. Dobel is the Allen nebbish in extremis, a paranoid Jewish survivalist who’s prepared for anything knocking at his door, including the Gestapo. So are Biggs and Ricci an updated Allen and Diane Keaton? It would be a crime and a misdemeanor to think so. Except for a few pungent punchlines, Anything Else is a sleeper. In a halting delivery that apes Allen, Biggs directly addresses the camera, telling us more than we want to know about his love affair with Ricci’s Amanda. In no way are Biggs and Ricci persuasive when they say they love Bogart, Billie Holiday records and read philosophy. And Biggs as a sketch writer and aspiring novelist? I’d sooner picture Robert Downey Jr. as a guidance counselor. This feuding young couple is just a repeat of dozens of others we’ve seen come from Allen’s self-absorbed imagination over the years. Amanda is flighty and unfaithful. Falk cracks jokes in flustered despair. "Look at her body language," he says, "all verbs." But Ricci is no great beauty, period, unless you are enamored with oversized heads on schoolgirl bodies. In the Anything Else department, Allen gets in a few signature zingers. "I thought of suicide, but I’ve got so many problems, that wouldn’t solve them all," sighs Dobel. But Allen’s material sounds as tired as he looks. He either needs a writing partner to perk up his plots, or, better yet, a whole new outlook on life. Despite the familiar setting and characters, Anything Else is anything but a return to the director’s 1970s glory days. Back then, he used to poke fun at pedantic pretenders who practice "mental masturbation." Right now, it’s Allen who’s stuck in the past. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Read between the lines in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and you’ll discover a tender mood piece about the lost and dislocated feelings that can envelop you as a stranger in a strange land.
Other than "Where’s the door?" the only question I had after seeing Woody Allen’s Anything Else is whether or not Allen has anything else left to say.
