storytelling

This is a quiet, thoughtful and ultimately rewarding love story, but it isn't a romance. Two people, very different in every way except one, meet in a Tokyo hotel. Charlotte is a Yale philosophy graduate, a young woman in a faltering marriage, ignored by her photographer husband and adrift in her own life and of course, in Japan. Bob Harris is an over-the-hill action movie star with a faltering twenty-five year marriage held together by interior decorating and ballet recitals. He's there because the Japanese are willing to pay him two million dollars to endorse Santori whiskey.

The casting of Bill Murray as Bob Harris was inspired. He brings a gentle self-mockery and a sadness to the role which are palpable. In his hands the character is likeable because he knows that he's teetering on the edge of the ridiculous. His lonliness is all the more real because of that self-awareness.

So these two people are thrown together by their insomnia, and they provide for each other a way out. Out of the bar, out of the hotel, out of the bubble they have each been inhabiting as they float through a neon lit, frantic Tokyo. Out of preoccupation with disappointment to a place where each of them comes to understand better where they want to be.

There is no sexual encounter, and in fact the lack of that encounter is the turning point in the story; Bob Harris turns to a lounge singer (there's a very funny bit where the woman is doing her rendition of Scarborough Fair, ala Murray's recurring lounge lizard character on Saturday Night Light so many years ago). I had the idea that he did it in part to establish a certain boundary between himself and Charlotte. She reacts badly ("I guess you two have a lot in common. You both grew up in the fifties. She probably remembers you from the seventies, when you were still making movies.") In negotiating this crisis, their friendship is solidified.

The ending of this movie was especially fine. Neither of them know how to say goodbye, and so they settle for platitudes and half gestures. But in the end that's not enough, and the scene where Bob gets out of his limosine to hug a trembling Charlotte was one of the most understated and powerful I've ever seen.

Posted by at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many people find their way to this blog by plugging some words into a search engine. Mostly the things they are looking for are predictable: Donati, Sara; Into the Wilderness; saralaughs. Lots of people end up here because they are looking for information about something I reviewed -- in fact, twenty-nine people came knocking because they wanted to see the screenplay for Love, Actually. Which I hated. I wonder what they made of the review.

At any rate, recently people who have been wandering the web for information about perfectionist disorder landed here. Oh dear.

Posted by at 12:17 AM | Permalink

There's an interesting article on the adjective here. it's by Ben Yagoda, who has a book called The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing which will be out in June. Based on this dense, almost chewy article, I think I might have a nibble. So there.

Yagoda quotes Twain, always worthwhile: "When you catch an adjective, kill it." Twain was, of course, the master of hyperbole and of adjectives, too (from Tom Sawyer):

He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while -- plenty of company -- and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn't run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

My point? All this quibble about adjectives can be summarized in a short rule:

Go forth and be profligate no more.

Posted by at 12:05 AM | Permalink