More Than This

The movie-watching golfer’s lament: There’s no way that actor actually plays golf. Rarely does a performer’s awkward lash match their character’s alleged talent. But some cinematic swings do pass the eye test, and my nominees for the best include Kevin Costner’s ever-grinding Roy McAvoy in Tin Cup, Shooter McGavin (played exquisitely by Christopher McDonald) puring it off a spectator’s impressively large foot in Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler’s Happy clearing the hips just like Chubbs Peterson (in perhaps the best work of Carl Weathers’ career) taught him and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne guiding a Wayne Enterprises secretary through the finer points of the putting stroke in Batman Begins. And there’s just something about Cameron Diaz as Mary, dialed in at the range.

Good as they are, none of them capture the prize. My top spot goes to Bill Murray’s move. No, not Carl Spackler decapitating chrysanthemums during his Cinderella story at an imagined Augusta in Caddyshack. It’s for his two quiet cuts we see about halfway through Sofia Coppola’s 2003 charmer, Lost in Translation.

The story follows two displaced and disjointed Americans in, around and through Tokyo as they fall in with each other through chance and circumstance. Scarlett Johansson’s 20-something Charlotte is tagging along with her photographer husband on assignment. Murray’s Bob Harris is an actor whose best days seem behind him, in Japan to shoot an ad campaign and collect a $2 million check. As it goes, they’re both staying at the Park Hyatt Tokyo. It’s here that Bob and Charlotte begin to orbit each other. Like all hotels—especially those we inhabit half a world away—the place is marked by a sense of in-between. The movie vibrates with this liminality. Possibilities open around traditionally awkward places like hallway corners, the elevator and the hotel bar.

In the midst of their respective listless solitudes, Bob and Charlotte are threaded together in a peculiar, vaguely romantic yet somehow comforting kind of friendship. What attracts each to the other is tough to pin down. Though not miserable, each in their own way bears a certain sadness. Charlotte married young and is presently not sure what to do with her life or her Ivy League philosophy degree. A couple years into her puppy marriage, she wonders who her husband is anymore. Bob appears stuck and resigned, his face carrying subterranean burdens borne only by those on the other side of 40. Yet the desire for something more than this still flashes. It’s here that they meet, in this strange, disorienting space both physical and existential. They become unlikely companions in a foreign land, and, in the midst of their melancholy, they feel the tug of hope. The few fleeting days they share are charged, tingling with a delightfully odd and unexpected unfolding. Framing it all is the brevity of their time together, this shortness situating them on the border between tragedy and brimming fullness. 

And this is where the swing comes in. After a buzzing, kaleidoscopic, karaoke-filled jaunt around Tokyo with Charlotte and her friends late into the night before, Bob has a day off and takes to the golf course. As the scene—shot at Kawaguchiko Country Club, about 60 miles west of Tokyo—fades into focus, he approaches a tee box, dressed in all black, during what appears to be a solo morning round. The framing is steady and still, with Mount Fuji presiding in the background, unmoved and uninterested. Bob pegs the ball, takes a practice swing, then casually makes his address. There is no soundtrack but birdsong, the crunch of turf underfoot and the club moving through both space and the ball as Bob launches a pretty fade off the centerline tree in the distance. The finish is held just long enough to betray some satisfaction. The scene takes but one minute of our attention and closes with Bob sauntering after his tee shot, club slung over shoulder. 

A golf swing is the reverse of a camera aperture in that it opens and reveals rather than captures. It’s also like a Magic 8 Ball, with uncertain revelations always emerging from its murky depths. In the story’s unfolding, Bob’s time on this tee box displays a certain quiet, rhythmic vitality pulsing through him and in concert with the world about him. Though the scene is spare, there is something deep down that I trust most all of us have felt during some simple but spellbound times on the course. 

And yet the swing finishes and the ball comes to a rest. The golfer knows the next shot is something entirely different and comes closer with every step. In this in-between span, the tap can get turned and the flow interrupted.

Whatever it is between Bob and Charlotte is fraught. The abiding truths of their time and lives and marriages and flight plans conspire to break the spell. 

It couldn’t be otherwise. It’s all—all of it, through and through—inescapably fleeting. Yet, for a stretch of moments, life was simple and full and clear and pulsing with potential. So it is for happenstantial—yet nonetheless meaningful—encounters, and for golf.

Bob’s swing is fluid and technically sound, and he will no doubt have a nice lie for his second. It’s a good rip! But it’s the best one in movie history because it’s got within it what we seek: a gorgeous morning, an open fairway, a smooth swing. Sometimes we hold these moments, briefly, palms up. It’s these unexpected, partial epiphanies that capture us. That’s what a swing can let out and show and even celebrate, even if it all remains as incomprehensible as a hushed mouth-to-ear message tenderly delivered mid-street in Tokyo.