It's not a movie for everyone, you have to be in the mood for an understated, arty movie, but for what it was, it was absolutely perfect.
Bill Murray plays an over-the-hill American actor who is in Japan being paid 2 million dollars to endorse a Japanese Whiskey. He doesn't know the language, has no friends there, and knows nothing about the culture. His wife calls him and faxes him constantly, but its about carpet samples and how his kids don't really miss him much, nothing to anchor him back home. He's a man who's been cut adrift, floating in a sea of an alien society.
Scarlett Johansson is in Tokyo with her husband, a big-name photographer who is doing a photoshoot for a new up and coming band. She is young and worried that her marriage was a mistake.
Both of them end up in the hotel bar, and eventually they connect, and these too emotionally lost people find a connection to each other, although not in a way I've ever seen in a movie before. They talk, they have fun, but they never move beyond those kinds of late night philosophical conversations that you can only have with people you've only just met. You really get the feeling of giddiness and endless possibilities you can feel only when you're with someone new. But they both have their own lives, and they both realize trying to make their relationship anything more than that may only kill it. The greatest loves are always the ones that could have been.
it's a beautifully shot movie, too; a love letter to Japan, and Sophia Coppola takes her time, often spending time showing us slices of life in Japan.. lovely visual haikus. Bill Murray swinging a golf club, Scarlett Johansson tying a prayer to a tree in a monastary. So many great scenes where nothing really happens, but they'll affect you all the same.
I really can't recommend it enough. If you love movies, you just need to see it.
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