After all, Sofia Coppola's delicate, assured film about two Americans who find themselves — and, for a brief jet-lagged moment, each other — has earned the sort of media acclaim that invites a backlash. "Whoever thought she would become one of our most promising directors?" a recent cover of The New York Times Magazine asked.

Fortunately, for Coppola and us, she cast Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray as those lost Americans. The two wander the halls and warm the barstools of a ultra-sleek hotel in Tokyo in a sleep-deprived state.

Charlotte, a recent Ivy League graduate, has tagged along with her young photographer hubby to Tokyo. While he snores, she sits staring out a huge window high above the vast city. The hotel, one of those luxe affairs that offers flower-arranging classes and water aerobics to guests, only accentuates Charlotte's aimlessness.

Bob Harris, a '70s action-flick star, is in Japan to pick up a nice chunk of change hawking Suntory Whiskey. When he and Charlotte have their first real conversation, in the hotel bar, he tells her with faint bitterness that he's making $2 million shilling when he should be doing a play.

Bob and Charlotte's dreamy, trippy camraderie intensifies when her husband goes out of town on a photo shoot.

Did I mention that "Lost in Translation" is a comedy? The scenes of Harris interacting with a translator and the long-haired director of the whiskey commercial is wry and wicked fun.

Funny here, however, does not mean that Murray falls back on his fabulous smirk.

There will be debate about whether this is Murray's best performance to date. Certainly, Harris is a different animal than his role as Phil Connors in "Groundhog Day," a brilliant role in a great American movie.

Bob Harris is more akin to Herman J. Blume in "Rushmore." Who can forget the painfully funny shot of Murray's disaffected captain of industry standing on a diving board, clutching a cocktail, while his spoiled kids and oblivious wife yammer poolside?

Trivia note: It was "Rushmore" director Wes Anderson who told pal Coppola (whose first film was her adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides") to pursue Murray.

One point that should not be disputed is that Murray should land an Academy Award nomination for his latest role.

Murray's Harris has a weathered, lonesome beauty. His exhaustion runs deeper than his jangled internal-clock.

When he gets a fax or a call or Fed-Exed carpet samples from his wife, you'll wince. When he makes a late-night call home to share his strange Tokyo night with her, you wince harder.

On the face of it, their interactions seem absurd. But, of course, they are the language of chores and duties that can replace more frank expressions of affection after 25 years of marriage. Talk about what gets lost in translation.

The beauty of Coppola's vision (she wrote the screenplay) is how well it depicts Bob and Charlotte at different ends of a continuum. His mid-life crisis is matched by her mid-20s woes.

Johansson's face is as seamless as Murray's is lived in. Although youth can flummox you, years of celebrity don't necessarily spare one shocks of humiliation.

Channel surfing in his hotel room, Harris comes upon a broadcast of a movie where his much younger self talks to a chimp.

This humbling is later trumped when Harris agrees to appear on a popular Japanese late-night TV show — the "Johnny Carson of Japan," his agent promises. The Richard Dawson of Tokyo is more like it. If we know Bob Harris better than we know Charlotte it is because Bob Harris has more self-knowledge than his twentysomething companion.

Lying atop a bed, Charlotte asks Bob if life gets easier. His answer to that earnest query touches our own pressure points. And it is just the most honest moment in a movie rife with detailed truths.

Giovanni Ribisi nails John, Charlotte's hipster-nerd husband. And, without ever imagining it possible, I've become a fan of Anna Faris (of "Scary Movie" fame). Here she plays Kelly, a dyed-blond starlette on a press junket for a movie called "Midnight Velocity."

Once Charlotte and Bob venture out of the hotel, Tokyo becomes a character too. Loud and busy with neon, the city is disorienting and utterly alien.

Early in "Lost In Translation," Harris gazes out of his limo, witness to Tokyo's visual cacophony. "Wow," he mouths. And when Charlotte takes a train to a shrine outside down, it might sooth us even more than it does her.

"Lost in Translation" is a rare American movie. Coppola — the daughter of Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola — melds deliberate pacing with cinematographer Lance Acord's gliding camerawork to create a sense of foreignness.

But the movie's wit is ours. And its two character's, swaying between alienation and ownership in a foreign land, are fundamentally, achingly ours, too.