Life is a dream told well by a Coppola

There are those movies that refuse to be anything but what they are: little slices of life. “Lost in Translation” is that kind of movie. At its heart, this work by Sofia Coppola is a love story. But instead of offering up a standard Hollywood tale, one with big moments and even bigger bits of melodrama, writer-director Coppola sticks with what’s real. And life, to most of us, is one long array of small moments, each as rich as a Buddhist shrine, as complete as that first sharp sip of an excellent whiskey .

All of which means, of course, that “Lost in Translation” isn’t for everyone. The why is this isn’t coincidental. We’ve been trained to like quick-cut editing instead of gradual sequencing, broad farce instead of comic subtlety. And so we prefer Bill Murray of “Caddyshack” instead of the Murray here, one so low key that he might be auditioning for a role in a film titled “Narcoleptics Anonymous.” Murray plays an American movie star, in Tokyo to film a whisky commercial, who meets a woman (Scarlett Johansson) young enough to be his daughter but close enough in temperament to be his soul mate.

You can guess what Hollywood would do with this scenario. Coppola, to her credit, goes nowhere you might expect, even as she portrays the obvious feelings that these two characters have for each other. She plays the story out over an hour and 45 minutes, allowing the characters to come slowly, gradually, to an understanding of the other as well as of themselves. And Coppola has such confidence in the material, not to mention her actors, that she allows the biggest moment to be a bit of dialogue that we can’t even hear.

But we don’t need to hear it. All we require is right there on the screen. The meaning is something that we can find on our own, drawn from moments that, even if we have long forgotten them, still exist inside us somewhere as dreams. All we need do is provide our own translation — and not depend on Hollywood to tell us what we already know.