It’s good to see Bill Murray back in an expensive hotel. The hour-long special, which is directed by Sofia Coppola, from a script she wrote with Murray and Mitch Glazer, is a kind of sad-merry coda to “Lost in Translation,” her film, from 2003, in which Murray plays a forlorn American actor stranded in the luxury of Tokyo’s Park Hyatt while he’s in Japan making easy money as a whiskey spokesman. In that movie, Murray, suffering from jet lag and ennui, haunts the hotel’s lavish bar, as the lights of the city flash below, and a lounge band turns out lousy cover songs. It’s there that he meets a young woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, equally disoriented and at loose ends, and the two form an invigorating, though fleeting, friendship.
This time, the conceit, lightly worn, is a show within a show: the real Murray is stuck in nice digs at
the Carlyle, in New York, where he’s scheduled to perform a special on Christmas Eve, also called
“A Very Murray Christmas,” live from Bemelmans Bar.
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