Lost in
Translation surely has the year’s most puzzling title sequence. The three
sell words slowly materialize beneath a shot of a young woman’s ass sheathed
in pink pantyhose. Stuff magazine couldn’t have asked for more.
Perhaps director-writer Sofia Coppola is shrewd enough to know that this is
exactly the trendy stuff that garners one hype as an "original" film
artist. But what is it exactly about a delectable tush that gets lost in translation?
Wouldn’t it depend on who’s doing the translating? And what is the
correct meaning one is supposed to infer from such a shot?

Whatever.
It’s ambiguous, thus "cool."

There’s
no doubt that Miss Coppola has a self-serving interest in young women’s
soft spots. (Her first film was the enervating, filigreed yet somber The
Virgin Suicides.) That’s Scarlett Johansson’s rump we’re
invited to stare at, and the rest of the movie frames delicate close-ups of
her lovely pale face, strawberry lips and sunset hair. But below the surface
is a soul in turmoil. As Charlotte, Johansson plays a 25-year-old into the second
year of her marriage to a hip photographer (Giovanni Ribisi); she’s accompanied
him on a business trip to Tokyo, but there’s nothing for her to do except
feel lonely and look dewy. "Get her!" would be the normal, sarcastic
response, but Coppola obviously wants us to dig her–and take Charlotte’s
luxurious dilemma to heart.

Although
I defend Sofia Coppola’s performance as Mary, the cosseted Italian-American
princess in the criminally undervalued The Godfather, Part III, her recent
turns at film directing suggest that she wasn’t really acting. It’s
hard to think of other filmmakers who tried this hard to make a virtue of privileged-girl
petulance or other films by women that so evidently bought into patriarchy and
the male point of view. (If Coppola were any more erotically empathetic, she’d
shoot in Smell-O-Vision.) Coppola achieves this regression of sexual politics
in Lost in Translation by concocting a platonic May-December romance
between Charlotte and Bob Harris, a cynical, bored, internationally known American
actor also in Tokyo shooting a series of television commercials for Suntory
whiskey.

Coppola
understands that today’s young females have no use for the old-fashioned
feminist platitudes (thanks to Madonna and now Britney and Christina). Lost
in Translation sentimentalizes female dissatisfaction and avoids rooting
its causes in politics or social customs. Charlotte wears ennui like a wardrobe
accessory–or more precisely, as a flimsy foundation garment. She finds
a soulmate in Bob by recognizing his restlessness. It’s she who has to
tell him he’s having "a mid-life crisis." The irony works as
humor because Bob is played by Bill Murray, who is a good enough actor to even
make fatigue seem funny. Bob’s petulance perfectly matches Charlotte’s.
Although the scenes of Murray being snide and superior to his Japanese hosts
are decidedly unfunny (people laugh simply cuz it’s Bill Murray), his sympathizing
with Charlotte’s bratty discontent strikes a chord: American isolationism
is the essence of self-absorbed people with nothing but time and money on their
hands.

My interpretation
is not necessarily what Coppola’s intended (I’m still trying to figure
out that roseate buttcrack); her ga-ga theme is pathetically situated in the
spoiled personalities of her lead characters. Charlotte is a Yale graduate who
majored in philosophy, yet she finds nothing in Japan to stimulate her thoughts;
she just listens to self-help audiotapes. Bob has detached himself from his
wife and children back in the States and complains about work. "They’re
paying me $2 million to do a tv commercial but I ought to be doing theater."
He’s not just making the mortgage, he’s basking in privilege–and
resenting it.

Crazy thing
about Lost in Translation is that Coppola sees nothing wrong in her characters’
subjectivity. It’s replicated in the film’s s-l-o-w, unemphatic rhythms;
she must think we go to the movies to drift. Cinematographer Lance Acord (who
shot the first features by Spike Jonze, Coppola’s real-life husband) doesn’t
like light. He reduces Tokyo to neutral tones, shadows, vague glass reflections
and alienating neon. Perhaps this is how today’s affluent, advantaged and
successful youth really do see the world–through gray Ray-Bans. No doubt
Coppola seeks parallels with the early-60s alienation dramas of Antonioni (L’Avventura)
and Fellini (La Dolce Vita). That was the sly joke of her brother Roman
Coppola’s marvelous debut film CQ. But Roman Coppola had a firmer
grip on his own entitlement and resentment; he was able to convey it as palpable,
romantic, artistic longing while also plainly dramatizing his Oedipal
conflict with his famous father.

It’s
poignant proof of complex father-daughter dynamics that Sofia Coppola translates
her personal family tension into Lost in Translation’s very chaste
girl-to-father-figure rapprochement. Charlotte and Bob lying side by side (his
hand on her ankle) and later embracing are the film’s two most effective
moments, because they are pantomimes of a relationship the director probably
sincerely feels–although she cannot yet turn it into credible, compelling
drama. Right now, the media coddles the misadventures of bewildered young women
(note the hyperbole already heaped on Lilya 4-Ever and Thirteen)
without requiring that the characters (or the filmmakers) engage honestly and
fairly with the world. When empowerment goes unchallenged to this extent, it
reflects an unpleasant truth about Coppola and her generation of pampered, history-ignorant
slackers. (Charlotte and Bob never once reflect on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. They’re
more obsessed with pinball arcades and karaoke versions of New Wave pop.)

Not even
Mary Corleone was so pampered that being in a foreign country felt as strange
to her as it does to Charlotte and Bob. Who doesn’t feel strange in a foreign
country! Antonioni and Fellini understood that it was the alienation one felt
at home that shook the soul. Lost in Translation tells us nothing more
profound than that Sofia Coppola’s pantyhose are squeezing her brain.

Matchstick
Men

After years
of strain, Nicolas Cage has finally become a powerful, poignant actor. In Matchstick
Men, Cage’s tics and flamboyance are the basis of a man with a problem.
He plays Roy Walker, a con artist suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder
and an array of phobias–including religious superstitions about which he
chides his partner Frank (Sam Rockwell). If you’ve ever seen Cage in a
movie before, you’ve seen these mannerisms: But here they’re not just
showy–they convey all the character that is necessary to make the film’s
elaborate-sting plot feel somewhat more than formulaic.

Cage stirs
emotion when Roy is approached by Alison Lohman portraying Angela, the child
he abandoned in a previous marriage, now teen-aged and searching for acceptance
just like him. This part of the movie evokes Bogdanovich’s poignant 1973
father-daughter huckster comedy Paper Moon; though it’s not nearly
so good, Matchstick Men is the closest any Hollywood crime movie has
come to resurrecting the values of honesty and responsibility. (Neil Jordan’s
superior The Good Thief was made outside Hollywood.) Roy’s sessions
with an analyst explore his guilt about using his daughter in his scams (it’s
not just self-justification therapy as in The Sopranos). This perspective
is so unusual–and unexpected–that some people may be willing to go
along with the moral uplift enough to be moved by the ending. I think the ending
is hackneyed and unconvincing, yet Cage stands for Everyman’s response
to a morally compromised world.

This film,
and the disingenuous Adaptation, shows an actor making the best of a
bad situation–acting responsibly. Can’t say the same about Ridley
Scott’s directing: It’s as soulless as in the last three, unconscionable
films he made–Gladiator, Hannibal, Black Hawk Down.
My guess is that Matchstick Men’s humanism comes from producer Robert
Zemeckis (though it’s a long way from the tonal complexity of Catch
Me if You Can). Scott simply makes it undeniably pretty–as slick and
gloriously monochrome as Hype Williams’ new video Rain on Me for
Ashanti. That’s right, it’s a commercial–with "heart."