Starring Bill Murray in perhaps the best-fitted role of his career, the film is humorous, humane and deeply touching.

Coppola has in only two slight films (her last, "The Virgin Suicides," bracingly captured teen life and sexual panic in early-'70s suburbia) mastered tone and place. Her cinematic Japan is a memory scrapbook, a visitor's remembrance of noisy video arcades, whisper-quiet wedding processions and neon hipster bars. But she inhabits this landscape with two of the most engaging lost souls in recent film history, played by Murray and "Ghost World's" Scarlett Johansson (who with her searching quietude and long brown hair resembles Coppola herself).

Murray plays Bob Harris, a washed-up action film star who is in Japan to shoot a commercial for a brand of Japanese whiskey. We first see him in a cab, craning his neck to gawk at Tokyo's electronic dreamscape skyline.

As Bob navigates language barriers, short shower heads and chirping hotel room fax machines, he is completely alone — he's recognized by traveling Americans as "that guy" from the movies — estranged from those around him and from a distant, stagnant marriage back home. Though there's an undercurrent of sadness to these scenes, Murray plays them with absolute authority. He wrings laughs without seeming boorish in set pieces about miscommunication, including a hilarious scene with a Japanese masseuse. It's Murray's subtlety — as in "Rushmore," it never seems as if he's going for the easy laugh — and the unexpected complexity he gives to the character that keeps the film moving.

Enter Charlotte, an American in town with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi channeling the twitchy charm of Coppola's husband, Spike Jonze). Charlotte cocoons in her hotel room, playing with trinkets, listening to self-help books on tape and examining her new marriage like an itchy wool blouse she hopes she can stand to wear. It's only here that the film nearly stumbles — before Bob comes into her life, her moodiness seems self-indulgent. If she were Disney's eighth dwarf, she'd be Mopey.

When Bob and Charlotte finally do meet, "Lost in Translation" comes to exuberant life. They're both searching for something intangible, a way to live lives that, when viewed from another continent, suddenly look like bear traps. Their relationship, which tiptoes deftly between friendship and romance, is told at first in glances on an elevator, in small talk at the hotel bar. As it grows, we follow them on bleary-eyed club crawls, to late-night karaoke bars and to the houses of Japanese surfers and DJs who don't seem fazed by the middle-aged guy who can also be seen wearing a tux on huge billboards outside.

Contrary to typical film logic, Bob's years and experience can no more help Charlotte figure her life out than Charlotte's youth can salve Bob's world-weariness. But there are sweet moments — Charlotte's head on Bob's shoulder as they escape the private karaoke room for a breather, words whispered in resolution that we don't get to hear — that break through the film's inherent gloominess. Murray, who with this role cements his position as America's premier comic actor (sorry, Tom Hanks), never overplays or panders; he's the bruised, put-upon heart of the film.

For some, "Lost in Translation" will seem slow and unfocused — it's a pastiche of emotions and bright lights, like remembering a vacation that was all jet lag and stiff drinks. But Murray's sure-footedness in the material and Coppola's natural grace as a filmmaker (at least one Coppola is making great films today and it's not Sofia's dad, Francis Ford) elevate the film into more than the sum of its parts. It's a film that sticks, a trip you'll carry fond memories of.