My highest recommendation.

The best movie I’ve seen in a theater in a long, long time. Funny, hammy, smarmy and wry as Bill Murray has been over the years, I think this might be the role of his career, all the more remarkable in that it’s a role notable for its very lack of Oscar-calliber acting fodder.

He isn’t mentally deficient. This isn’t an epic. He experiences no death, birth, illness or major life milestones over the course of the film. He is an aging action film star. He’s in Tokyo for a series of ad shoots promoting a Japanese whiskey. And he befriends a woman in her early twenties while he’s there. That’s about the extent of the plot.

Sophia Coppola does a marvelous job, directing Murray and Scarlett Johansson in a movie that I ‘d have stayed and watched all night, had it gone that long.

She brilliantly moves along a plot that’s bathed in nuance and subtlety against the harsh, sensory-overload backdrop of crazy Tokyo. Even the grating urban debauchery scenes are beautifully shot, and oddly comforting, despite the neon, the concrete, the weirdity, and the mayhem. Coppola also wrote the film, and thankfully steers far clear of all the cliches and predictable Hollywood twists you dread are coming as you’re watching.

Murray is remarkably reserved, and you find yourself marveling at the way he extracts superb morsels of acting out of such mundanities as riding in an elevator, swimming laps in the hotel pool, or flipping through the channels of Japanese television.

Johansson is very good, but plays a role very similar to her role in Ghost World. Come to think of it, the two movies share some common themes.

Both, with Coppola’s flim work, do a fantastic job of conveying just how easy it is to feel alone, even when (or especially when) you’re in an urban jungle, where you’re stacked with dozens of your fellow man-beings, one on top of the other.

There are plenty of funny moments (Murray singing Roxy Music’s “More Than This” on a karaoke machine is a riot), but plenty more that are poigniant (your stomach sinks when he calls his inattentive wife from Tokyo, she blows him off, and he says to himself after hanging up, “Well, I guess that wasn’t a very good idea). I suppose the movie is techincally a comedy, but it certainly isn’t feel-good.

The true achievement here is how Coppola took a far-from-real-life character in an aging movie star, paired him with a budding starlet in Johannsson, put them both in another world — in this case Tokyo — and came up with one of the most accurate portrayals of real life Hollywood’s produced in some time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2003 at 4:17 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.