Age and the state of affairs

Two of last year’s most acclaimed movies, “Something’s Gotta Give” and “Lost in Translation,” address the same immutable fact of human nature: that beautiful young girls exert an indescribably strong erotic pull on middle-aged men. Further, they lay bare a truth that is the cause of anguish for many women: Some of these older men find women their own age (no matter how accomplished or worthy) not only lacking as objects of desire but even repellent. However, from here on out the movies diverge. “Lost in Translation” -- dreamy, funny, unsettling -- is a work of art; it explores these themes fearlessly and with passion. “Something’s Gotta Give” is a message movie, intent on persuading its audience -- at any cost of comedy or plausibility -- that older men will be happier (sexually as well as intellectually) with their age mates.

“Something’s Gotta Give” unfolds from a wickedly promising premise: a lonely divorcee (Diane Keaton’s Erica Barry) finds herself attracted to her beautiful daughter’s boyfriend, an engaging old cad (Jack Nicholson’s Harry Sanborn) notorious for dating only girls several decades his junior. This is a situation so rife with sexual anxiety and emotional aggression that it could have been the foundation for something audacious and memorable.

But filmmaker Nancy Meyers’ intentions lay elsewhere. As she has revealed in articles and interviews, the end of her marriage caused her to become “part of the story of single older people.”

Indeed, the movie is so nakedly a projection of every aging divorcee’s favorite fantasy that I forgave it much. In Meyers’ fairy-tale world, Erica not only snatches her daughter’s fellow but also gets treated to the sexual ministrations of Keanu Reeves, playing a dopey, love-struck doctor. (Keaton and Nicholson have been rightly praised for their performances; they manage to wring real laughs out of some very thin material and to imbue the film with the genial, familiar feeling that old stars often impart. But it’s poor Reeves who ought to be lionized, forced as he is to chew over such lines as “How great is it for you that I’m not intimidated by your brilliance?” Fortunately for all concerned, we are spared a glimpse of his bedroom calisthenics.)

The movie wants to be hip enough to merit its sophisticated subject matter, but its director’s sensibilities are thoroughly (and touchingly) middle-aged. Improbably -- although not unappealingly -- Harry is the owner of a successful hip-hop record label. But you’ve never heard a more geriatric soundtrack in your life; the film ends with a Paul Simon song.

The grizzled lovebirds Instant Message each other like a pair of overheated sixth-graders, and they are forever fussing with their high-tech cellphones, which is kind of cute -- like watching a granny kick-start a Harley. We are given ringside seats to Erica’s sexual reawakening -- “I do like sex!” she cries after her first tryst with Harry. But the sensual pleasures she responds to most authentically are ones beloved of 50-year-old women everywhere: soft sheets and comfortable clothes and French toast with “the best maple syrup in the world.” Needy and awkward in the bedroom, she’s a woman in full command of her powers at the gourmet deli.

“Something’s Gotta Give” is propelled by a fuzzy-headed feminism, in which male desire (powerful and indomitable) is regarded not as a force of nature but as a social construct, easily corrected and reshaped with a bit of primly delivered rhetoric concerning the injustices faced by middle-aged women. The lecturers are Erika and her sister, who -- lest anyone fail to grasp the point -- is a women’s studies professor at Columbia. (She is played by the sublime Frances McDormand, who transubstantiates a thankless role into the best part in the picture.) The sisters issue these diatribes in the name of sexual parity, but their effect is detumescent: You can’t badger someone into arousal.

“Lost in Translation” is an entirely different animal. The opening shot is of Scarlett Johansson’s ample and attractive bottom encased in the world’s filmiest pair of panties, and the movie unfolds with the happy promise that before too much time has passed, those panties will come off. It is an entirely unrealized promise.

The pace of a love affair

In the wake of the sexual revolution, the notion of a love affair brought to the brink of consummation but no further is always an intriguing proposition; it’s what kept workhorses like “Moonlighting” and “The X-Files” in harness for so long. The trick here was to make this conceit work dramatically in the absence of a more explicit plot device like crime solving or alien-hunting. Indeed, on purely dramatic terms the movie does not succeed; it’s a mood piece and no more. But no matter: The film succeeds so strongly on emotional terms that the audience willingly abandons all hope of traditional narrative structure.

“Lost in Translation” captures perfectly the pace of a love affair in its newest and tenderest stages. The principals (Charlotte, an unhappy young bride, and Bob, an aging, married movie star) meet up in a series of encounters that occur half by chance and half by intention, often late at night when they are propelled toward each other by insomnia, loneliness and desire. They can’t sleep because of the time change and jet lag, but then again, who can sleep in the thrall of this kind of passion?

The movie drifts along from one sultry, erotically charged moment to the next, the audience experiencing rather than merely witnessing the combination of languor and alertness that are the hallmarks of this kind of attraction. Bill Murray does the impossible: If he weren’t so funny the movie would collapse in on itself. A friend of mine told me he couldn’t stand Johansson’s character, whose only beef seemed to be that she was stranded in the best hotel in Tokyo while her husband has work to do, but I had more sympathy for her. It’s hard to be a young woman making her way in the world, especially in the context of an ill-advised and souring marriage. What is needed, often, is a bit of guidance, wise counsel, some fatherly reassurance -- which Johansson’s Charlotte gets in spades.

The reason this movie lingers and unsettles, the origin of its appealing strangeness is that it deals not just with the nature of old men’s attraction to young women (so much a part of the natural order that it hardly merits consideration) but with the under-explored and far more interesting nature of young women’s attraction to older men. “Lost in Translation” addresses the underlying and deeply taboo element of most May-December romances, as they are experienced by the girls involved in them: father fixation.

Charlotte knocks around in schoolgirl clothes: sweater vests and untucked oxford shirts and running shoes. Bored out of her mind in her hotel room one day, she draws on a big lipstick pout, the effect as artless as that of a 5-year-old who gets into her mother’s makeup. She has an adolescent’s sulky mien, and like clever girls everywhere, kids her own age just don’t get her. Often when she meets Bob in the hotel bar after hours, he is still wearing the dinner jacket he wore on the day’s shoot (he has come to Tokyo to make a commercial). Charlotte finds him drinking scotch, smoking a cigar, lost in weary rumination over another long day at the office: Dad.

He lights her cigarette like a Hollywood lover, but after a late night on the town, he carries her to her bed like a sleeping child, wrapping her in a spotless white comforter and closing the door softly behind him so as not to wake her. His primary ministration to Charlotte is emotional: at last someone who knows more than she does, who can match her manque jadedness with the real thing.

While their conversation is emboldened by their attraction to each other, his physical dealings with her are not only chaste, they’re prim. What is holding him back? He sleeps with another woman amid his affair with Charlotte, so compunction about his marriage vows certainly isn’t the problem. The two attempt to kiss good night at one point, but there was a flinching, resisting awkwardness to the moment not lost on the audiences with whom I saw the movie, who squirmed right along with the characters: Don’t. The most mesmerizing moment of the movie is their first successful kiss, on which the movie ends -- for where could it go from there?

“Something’s Gotta Give” is apparently supposed to be right up my alley: I’m 42, I own thousand thread-count sheets, and just yesterday I made Dutch apple pancakes that were out of this world. But upon becoming a grown woman, I did not abandon my critical faculties, nor did I become so sexually insecure that I am unable to watch movies that include beautiful young women and the accomplished men who desire them. “Lost in Translation” is a movie constructed of perfectly realized moments, made powerful by their suggestion of forbidden and secret ground. If this isn’t great filmmaking for the adult sensibility, nothing is.

Caitlin Flanagan is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She is writing a book on modern motherhood.