Murray’s newest film reawakens lost romance

In theaters

LOST IN TRANSLATION, Written and directed by Sofia Coppola, 102 minutes, rated R.

In frenetic, jittery Tokyo where neon skyscrapers thrum and the air is alive with electric heat, Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a washed-up movie star, arrives dazed and drawn, looking nearly dead beneath the cartoon fluorescence.

He’s in Tokyo to shoot a humiliating series of Suntory whiskey commercials, a gig that will make him millions, none of which, you can sense, will be enough to offset what little pride he has left.

A lonely insomniac in a city too alive to sleep, Bob is lost, wavering just this side of giving up on everything – his marriage, his life, his career. Then he meets young Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a lonely insomniac and recent Yale grad who’s stuck in Tokyo with her inattentive husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi), a sketchy photographer shooting a rock band.

In their hotel, Bob and Charlotte first connect in an ascending elevator; the only Caucasians aboard, they share a knowing smile over the sea of black hair. Later, at the hotel bar, they meet and share a drink while mediocre American lounge singers belt out love songs behind them.

What spills from this is the heart of director Sofia Coppola’s moody second film, “Lost in Translation,” a movie about two lives intersecting just as they’re about to burst apart.

The film, which Coppola also wrote and produced, joins her first film, “The Virgin Suicides,” in that it’s more content to observe than it is to meddle.

Her script is especially spare, allowing for the sort of silences that tend to frighten today’s contemporary American directors, but which, when handled as well as they are here, say more than a mouthful of the most carefully chosen words.

Perhaps taking a cue from her father, Francis Ford Coppola, Coppola refuses to rush a moment, her movie has the languid intensity of a dream. As Bob and Charlotte grow close and the sexual energy between them rises, they aren’t hurried into the sack in an effort to find out what they could mean to each other in bed – that would be too easy. Instead, Coppola sends them out of their hotel and into the city, where they find in the clashing disconnect of another culture an undeniable connection between themselves.

With its Pachinko arcades, karaoke parlors, strip clubs and dance clubs, Tokyo is a major force in this movie, but what’s remarkable is how this vibrant city, with all its flash and chaos, fades beneath the power of performances by Murray and Johansson that border on greatness.

The last scene, less urgent but just as unforgettable as the final scene in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” is actually more powerful for what it leaves unsaid. Words and tears are exchanged between Bob and Charlotte just when all seems lost, but by not allowing us to hear what’s being said, Coppola pulls the movie out from under us, turning her study in romantic reawakening and disillusionment into one of romantic mystery.

Grade: A-

On video and DVD

DOWN WITH LOVE, Directed by Peyton Reed, written by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, 96 minutes, rated PG-13.

The romantic comedy, “Down with Love,” stars Renee Zellweger as Barbara Novak, a blond puff of good cheer who leaves the family farm in Maine for the concrete cornrows of New York City.

There, in the film’s Technicolor dream world of 1962, she and her hot-to-trot editor, Vikki (Sarah Paulson), plan to publish Barbara’s new book, “Down with Love,” a pre-feminist dictum that outlines how women can become just as successful as men. To do so, Barbara suggests they forgo romantic love, focus on their careers and fulfill their sexual needs by eating chocolate or by limiting themselves to sex “a la carte.”

You know, as some men do.

Before you can say “make your own dinner,” the book has made Barbara a star. Soon, she’s everywhere, the biggest thing since the Pill. This catches the eye of Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), a roguish magazine writer who, with the encouragement of his editor, Peter (David Hyde Pierce), tries to fool Barbara into falling in love with him so he can expose her as a down-and-out fraud.

As directed by Peyton Reed, “Down with Love” wants more than anything to be as fluffy as the down filling in Michael Gordon’s “Pillow Talk,” the 1959 sex comedy with Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Reed certainly has the look down, but unfortunately his movie is self-aware to the point of distraction – a poseur trying to pull off a parody – winking so broadly at itself and at the audience, you fear it might develop a tic.

Complicating matters is the premise – it’s tough to be down with a movie that wants to warm you with deceit. It’s tougher still to like characters maneuvering at every turn to stab each other in the back.

Hudson and Day were able to create a formidable sexual snap not just because they looked good together onscreen, but because both were fighting against something real – the sexual limitations of the times, Hudson’s closeted homosexuality, the sheen of virginal innocence Hollywood demanded from Day. They turned those roadblocks into tools.

Zellweger and McGregor, on the other hand, have only their dimpled cuteness to get them through this movie, which you sense, at least from their overbearing mugging, that they believe is enough. It isn’t.

Grade: C+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He may be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.