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In his Great Movies series for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert says there are basically two kinds of people when it comes to the 2003 film "Lost in Translation." Those who get the subtle relationship of empathy and loneliness between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, and those who "want to know what it's about." I'm in Ebert's column on this one. He discusses what Sofia Coppola was trying to do, and credits Murray with "one of the most exquisitely controlled performances in recent movies."
She has one objective: She wants to show two people lonely in vast foreign Tokyo and coming to the mutual realization that their lives are stuck. Perhaps what they're looking for is the same thing I've heard we seek in marriage: A witness....One of the strengths of Coppola's screenplay is that her people and everything they do are believable. Unlike the characters in most movies, they don't quickly sense they belong together, and they don't immediately want to be together. Coppola keeps them apart for a noticeably long time. They don't know they're the Girl and the Boy. They don't have a Meet Cute. We grow to know them separately.