Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation is very good. If not for Bill Murray's subtle, funny performance in the lead, it would be an hour and a half of almost insufferable whining.

Coppola's story, semi-autobiographical, is about a young American married to a photographer on a short assignment in Tokyo. It should be easy for a rich American visiting one of the world's great cities for the first time to enjoy herself for a week or two while staying with her husband in a grand hotel. Instead, all the young woman can do is feel sorry for herself while she mopes around the city and the country visiting beautiful sites such as the temples in Kyoto. Or while bumping into a character reportedly based on Coppola's own encounter in a Tokyo hotel lobby with Cameron Diaz.

Watch the face of Scarlett Johansson (Coppola's stand-in) in the clip "My Favorite Photographer" at http://www.focusfeatures.com/. She can barely stand to be in the presence of Diaz's enthusiasm and spirit, and silently makes faces to show her condescension and superiority.

It’s funny that Coppola chose Johansson to play her as a married woman,  because Johansson is a teenager who, while beautiful, has little experience or depth in her face. And she plays the character as though her full, pouting lips actually make it painful for her to smile.

A cover story on Coppola in the New York Times magazine extravagantly praised the writer / director. On the basis of two movies, one barely noticed and the other not yet released when the article came out, the article proclaimed “It is perhaps not too much to say that she is the most original and promising young female filmmaker in America.” Surprisingly, the story treated Coppola’s privileged upbringing as both a handicap and a personal achievement of Coppola's.  When in fact, that is just the way things are. Children of privilege meet other children of privilege, particularly in nepotistic Hollywood. And Coppola is 32, not 23.

Inordinately impressed by all of Coppola’s famous friends, many of them also the children of privilege, the author of the article quotes the friends at length. Coppola’s best friend is Zoe Cassavetes, the daughter of “the groundbreaking director” John Cassavetes and “his wife and star” Gena Rowlands. Cassavetes’s pronouncements on how fabulous her friend Sofia is are passed on as though they are the assessments of the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize committees.

None of this may be Coppola’s fault. She is a talented writer and director and for all I know a wonderful person. But in the old establishment, childred were taught that with privileges came responsibilities. Coppola is recently divorced from the director Spike Jonze, who changed his name from Spiegel, apparently so that people wouldn’t know he is a part of the mail-order catalog family. Like Coppola, Jonze is a no-longer-young child of privilege who makes good movies that are short on optimism and long on adolescent navel-gazing. I would like their movies more if Coppola and Jonze were contributing more  to the world than their own dyspeptic visions.

Quoted from Lynn Hirschberg, “The Coppola Smart Mob” (New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 31, 2003):

This is where the Coppola all-cool-worlds-collide element kicks in: most video directors aren't friends, the way Coppola is, with the owners of the Mercer. They haven't known Kate Moss since they were both teenagers, as Sofia has, and they don't pour champagne on the set from the family vineyard, which Coppola was doing now. The champagne, named Sofia, was created by her father, and the label reads, in part: ''revolutionary, petulant, reactionary, ebullient, fragrant, cold, cool.'' ''Her dad wrote that,'' said Zoe Cassavetes, Sofia's great friend, as she poured herself a glass.

Cassavetes -- the daughter of John Cassavetes, the groundbreaking director, and Gena Rowlands, his wife and a star in some of his best films -- met Sofia about 12 years ago, when they were both in a Vogue photo shoot. ''She was so quiet,'' Cassavetes recalled, ''that I thought she might be a jerk. My family lived at the Wyndham Hotel then. I grew up there -- Zsa Zsa lived on my floor. Sofia and her family were living up the street at the Sherry-Netherland. I said, 'Do you want to have dinner?' She said, 'O.K., do you want to go to Jean Lafitte?' -- which was a bistro on 58th Street, where I went all the time. When she said Jean Lafitte, we had an instant bond. We spoke the same language.''

After meeting Zoe, Sofia told her she was going to appear in a video for the Black Crowes, and Zoe ended up tagging along. They have been on sets together ever since. Around the same time -- the early 90's -- Cassavetes and Coppola met Marc Jacobs. Jacobs, in turn, had just met Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of the seminal New York post-punk band Sonic Youth. They, in turn, were working with Spike Jonze, who was shooting skateboard footage for a music video of theirs. There was lots of hanging out, Jonze met Coppola and the rest is history: Coppola had found her network and her husband (she and Jonze married in 1999), who would become, with ''Being John Malkovich'' and then ''Adaptation,'' a celebrated young director himself (with some help along the way from the Coppola family and network). ''My first impression of Sofia,'' Jonze recalled recently, ''was that she was quiet and graceful. And that she had taste, and when I say taste, I mean judgment in really subtle things. She always knew the feeling she wanted to convey in everything she did. And that's true taste.''

The extended Coppola clan likes to work together. A couple of years after their marriage, Jonze cast Sofia's cousin, Nicolas Cage, in ''Adaptation.'' A few years earlier, Sofia had suggested another cousin, Jason Schwartzman, for the leading role in Wes Anderson's film ''Rushmore.'' In turn, Anderson helped Sofia get Bill Murray for ''Lost in Translation.'' And so it goes, like a chain letter you are happy to receive. …

As it is with Coppola, the hot-wiring of disparate cultural references -- Broadway jazz choreography mixed with the grainy, improvisational feel of Warhol plus Kate Moss and a bluesy version of a classic Bacharach song sung by Dusty Springfield -- resulted in something original. ''You have to be Sofia to make this work,'' Cassavetes said as she watched Moss dance on the pole. ''If you're not Sofia, it's too obvious, too self-conscious or just, somehow, not quite there. Unless you're Sofia, the elements don't mesh. Where other people get stuck on a trend or a look, she can create a world.''

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company