Murray loses himself, finds love in 'Lost in Translation'

The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, Lost in Translation, thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's Brief Encounter, Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Wong Kar-wei's In the Mood for Love. All three movies are, in their way, about a moment of evanescence that fades before the participants' eyes -- as is Translation. (Translation also exhibits the self-contained, stylized lonesomeness found in post-punk, like New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle.)

Coppola's movie also happens to be hilarious -- a paean to dislocated people discovering how alive they are when they can barely keep their eyes open. The sexiness comes from the busy, desperate need-to-impress heat of a flirtation, an unrequited love communicated through a filter of sleep deprivation.

Translation, which opens today in Taiwan, is also one of the purest and simplest examples ever of a director falling in love with her star's gifts. And never has a director found a figure more deserving of her admiration than Bill Murray. He plays a vodka-and-bitters version of himself and the persona that made him famous. His character, Bob, is an American movie star who is in Tokyo to participate in the celebrity not-so-secret shame: he's picking up a boatload of dough to perform in commercials for Suntory whiskey. He arrives in Japan just in time to gaze, slightly embarrassed, at the sullen billboards of himself that are starting to appear there. While blinking sleeplessly around the lobby of the majestically hermetic Tokyo Hyatt, he meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), who has been abandoned by her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi); he's off shooting a band.

The movie follows the twists and connections in Bob and Charlotte's relationship -- like some trans-Atlantic phone calls, their feelings reach each other on a five-second delay. The lag time only embellishes the comedy, and the heartbreak.

It's the first grown-up starring part that Murray has had and he inflects every facet of public awareness of Bill Murray with a sure, beveled determination. That may be because he has never really had a leading role that has asked him simply to pay attention to the other actors instead of guide the scene or save it.

Lean and physically witty -- because he has dropped the awareness of the audience's demand for mainstream comedy -- he even seems to be standing taller, perched on Bob's courtliness. Generally, Murray has given performances worth paying attention to in movies that no one sees, like his physical inhabitation of Hunter S. Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam, perhaps the only film example extant of Murray's ability to depict vulnerability and threat simultaneously.

Here he supplies the kind of performance that seems so fully realized and effortless that it can easily be mistaken for not acting at all. The corollary of this is that . Coppola's direction is so breezily assured in its awareness of loneliness that the film could potentially be dismissed as self-consciously moody rather than registering as a mood piece. But it's bound to be recognized as a movie worthy of the kind of Oscar attention occasionally given to films that challenge audiences subtly. Murray could collect the Academy Award that he didn't get for Rushmore.