Literature In Review

Kick-Ass

The Lives of Others

The recent film “The Lives of Others” is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long, long, time. So often my experience with films that have “buzz” is that all the praise being heaped upon the film is so much flim-flam. I remember a number of years ago hearing all about Quentin Tarrantino’s films. Each time one came out, much of the movie-viewing public always went wild. The films were always so entertaining and clever everyone said. When I finally decided to get around to seeing Mr. Tarrantino’s movies, I always came away with the feeling that what everyone had been saying was right—his movies were just that—clever. They were also pretentious and insecure in the worst way—they used violence, juvenile humor, and oblique references to make a kind of pastiche. In the end Tarrantino’s movies, like the worst of Woody Allen’s are all about himself. Oooh…Tarrantino is so cool.

“The Lives of Others” is nothing like this. I don’t remember the name of the director or the star. Few or none of the actors are brand names. It’s a German movie! No one in North America sees foreign movies anymore. And Americans are allergic to learning anything about life from elsewhere. So all the more reason why “The Lives of Others,” is so important. The movie is finally a love story of the highest order.

In recounting the conversion of an East Berlin Stasi (The East German secret police) agent from obedient functionary to romantic rebel the film shows the extraordinary power of art to change our lives. Captain Wiesler is an interrogator in the Stasi assigned by his superior to bug the home of a theater director suspected of dissident tendencies. Wiesler sets up an elaborate bugging system that records all the conversations of Christa-Maria Sieland and

Lost In Translation

America has always had a myth of itself as large and unruly. In this myth men are always cowboys or Jedi knights who ride off into the sunset or whiz across the sky at supersonic speeds. Alternatively the male hero is an entrepreneur or mad scientist who uses his ruthless business acumen or technological wizardry and not a small amount of dumb luck to gain power. Mostly, the women of our American imagination are pretty and demure, but when they rebel they do so like the men, with noise and bravado, like ever so many clones of Princess Leia shooting her way out of a tight spot.

American film has long fed and nurtured these fantasies of power. Our film icons are rough and tumble men like those played by John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, hard-bitten tough guys who administer the American way of justice at the point of a gun. The nerds among us are force fed our American role models through the likes of Christopher Lloyd who plays Doc Brown, the crazy scientist in “Back to the Future,” and is able to make everything come out right in the end. Either way, in the American myth that Hollywood so loves, the American is nearly always the winner. Even when he fails, the American fails spectacularly, on a grand stage.

For many American and mostly male critics the greatest of all American movies is Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” trilogy, a cinematic stage-play that wraps up all the elements of American fantasies of power, violence, and tragedy into a single epic-length package. The extraordinary success of these movies, both with critics and audiences, speaks volumes about the predominant values of our society. Thus it is a surprise and almost a shock to see the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, Sophia Coppola, make a movie for American audiences that in so many ways challenges these predominant values, and indeed neatly flips them on their head.

Her latest movie “Lost in Translation” is everything her father’s films are not. Where he spoke of power, anger, and violence his daughter speaks of equality, love and unexpected tenderness. Where he drove home his points with the force of bullet into the brain, she quietly opens a page on human life and lets us draw our own conclusions. While his focus was always on the overtly dramatic, she chooses moments of quotidian life and imbues them with a gentle poignancy. As a storyteller of domestic discord and the subtle pangs of love she reminds one more of Eric Rohmer, an avowedly European (gasp!) director, than anyone we’ve ever produced in America.

Bill Murray, who’s never gotten the credit he deserves for being able to be both dramatic and wryly comic at the same time, plays Bob Harris, a washed-up, down-on-his-luck actor who arrives in Tokyo to shoot a series of whiskey commercials. While there, he develops a friendship with Charlotte, (Scarlett Johansson) a young American woman who spots him sitting alone in the hotel bar. Together they walk the streets of Tokyo, with all its frenetic lights, noisy pachinko parlors, and incomprehensible street signs. And from a plot standpoint, that’s really all that happens. But no plot summary can begin to communicate the emotional nuances that are the real substance of this film.

In fact, it almost seems pointless to talk about the movie at all, for although Bob and Charlotte do speak, words here are far less important than actions and their meaning. Johansson, who gives a luminous yet astonishingly understated performance, conveys more of the fierce intensity of her evolving sentiments for Bob through gesture and body language, than she does by anything she says. And this may well be Ms. Coppola’s point, that when it comes to matters of the heart, what we say in words is nearly always lost in translation. What really matters is feeling.

In her willingness to confront head-on the problems of loss, disorientation and misunderstanding Ms. Coppola is doing something largely unheard of in American film. For true powerlessness, the sense that all of what you’ve done up to this point may be wrong, and that the future you planned may not turn out to be any better, and may quite likely be worse, is the very opposite of Americans’ hegemonic dreams of glory. In her placement of two Americans trying to negotiate and navigate in a strange and foreign land she is also, perhaps unwittingly, creating a metaphor for American behavior in a world after September 11th—a world that seems not to make sense, but that we had better try to understand, for that is all we have.