Celluloid Heroes

People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.

Three of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous films, Rope, Lifeboat and Rear Window, work around a very restricted geography, two New York apartments and a lifeboat. Of the three, Rear Window is the most successful as a film. It takes place almost entirely with the Greenwich apartment of globetrotting photographer L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart), marooned for the last six weeks with a broken leg suffered on his last assignment. His only human contact has been his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and Stella (Thelma Ritter), the nurse from the insurance company. Stella hounds him to finally marry Lisa, but Jeff is reluctant. Apparently, he suffered a head injury, too. Reluctant to marry Grace Kelly? Inconceivable.

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Can you keep a secret? I’m trying to organize a prison break. We have to first get out of this bar, then the hotel, then the city, and then the country. Are you in or you out?

Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation has been a frustrating little movie for those of us who have championed it. I saw this movie in the theater when it first came out and loved it. I recommended it to friends and family members, most of whom saw it on video. Their response was almost unanimous: it sucked, nothing happened, the two main characters were a couple of passive lumps who never did anything. First I checked the obvious alternatives. Either my friends and family had all seen the wrong movie or they had been replaced by alien pod people. How could such intelligent, rational people take such a passionate dislike to this little gem of a movie.

The only thing I can guess is that there is something about Lost in Translation that requires the big screen to fully experience. Neither of the two lead performances are broadly emotional, depending on quiet nuance instead. This is not a film about explosions but about two people in danger of imploding.

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