Critical Reception and Legacy (Lost in Translation) Lost in Translation (2003)
Lost in Translation opened in limited release on September 12, 2003, after a Telluride premiere on August 29, and expanded wide in October. It made about $44 million in the United States and another $74 million internationally on a $4 million budget. The American critical reception was nearly unanimous; the international reception was more mixed; the cultural-criticism reception, especially from Asian-American writers, was sustained and pointed. Twenty years on, the film remains, depending on which critic you ask, either Sofia Coppola's masterpiece, the high point of mid-2000s American art-pop cinema, or one of the most-cited examples of an Orientalist American film about a contemporary East Asian capital. It is widely regarded as all three at once.
The American critical consensus, autumn 2003
The major American reviews were rapturous. Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and called Murray's performance the work of his career.
"Murray gives the performance of his career, in the rare way that screen acting at its most exposed is given. He doesn't act sad. He is sad. The camera meets him where he is." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2003)
A.O. Scott in the New York Times described it as one of the year's most accomplished pictures.
"Lost in Translation is, for all its quietness, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year — a small, almost weightless object that turns out, on inspection, to weigh more than it looks like it should." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2003)
David Denby in the New Yorker called Coppola's confidence the rarest kind. Manohla Dargis in the Los Angeles Times called the film the right movie for the moment in which it arrived.
The film took the Best Original Screenplay Oscar (Coppola) and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. Coppola became the first American woman ever nominated for Best Director and the third woman ever nominated in that category.
The Japan-representation critique
A second strand of criticism, present from the first reviews and gathering force through the 2010s, has argued that the film's portrait of Japan and Japanese characters is unkind, condescending, or actively racist. The most-cited single piece is E. Koohan Paik's 2003 essay in Reimagine!.
"Lost in Translation is a film whose entire emotional architecture depends on the assumption that Japanese people are inscrutable, ridiculous, or both. Bob's loneliness is constructed against the backdrop of a country whose inhabitants exist in the frame as set dressing — as the funny short businessmen, the funny incomprehensible director, the funny prostitute who can't pronounce her R's." — E. Koohan Paik, Reimagine! (2003)
The "lip my stocking" sceneb11, the variety-show sequence with Matthew Minamib28, and the Suntory shoot's interpreter jokeb4 are the most-cited single moments. Defenses of the film have generally argued that the comedy is at the protagonists' expense, not at the Japanese characters' — that Bob is the foreigner whose inability to understand is the joke — but the critique has not gone away, and has been picked up in subsequent waves by Asian-American writers including Walter Chaw, Inkoo Kang, and others. The full discussion is on its own page: Cultural Reception in Japan and the Race Critique.
The reception in Japan
Japanese critical reception was muted and tonally distinct. The film was a modest commercial success in Japan but not the cultural event it was in the United States, and a number of Japanese commentators specifically objected to the variety-show sequence's portrayal of Matthew Minami, widely understood to caricature the actual Japanese television personality Takashi Fujii (who plays the role).
"The film treats Japan as wallpaper. For us this is a strange experience — we are accustomed to being either invisible in American films or a problem in them, and Lost in Translation is the rare film that makes us scenery in our own city." — Yoshio Tsuchiya, Eiga Geijutsu (2003) (translated)
The legacy
The film has been routinely cited in best-of-decade and best-of-century lists since the late 2000s. The BBC's 2016 critics' poll of the best films of the twenty-first century placed it at number 22; the Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll listed it at number 95.
"Twenty years on, the film looks neither dated nor settled. It has aged into something more contested than it was at release — the formal achievements have not gone anywhere, and neither has the question of what the film owes the country it was shot in." — Justin Chang, The Los Angeles Times (2023)
The film's specific stylistic influence — handheld available-light foreign-city cinematography, dream-pop and shoegaze soundtracks, women in luxury hotels, the bounded experience as plot — is visible in Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010), On the Rocks (2020), and the broader lineage of mid-2000s American art-pop cinema. See Lost in Translation and Slow Cinema for the genre-positioning argument.