SOME 21 years ago, Sofia Coppola debuted with her script for the film New York Stories. It concerned Zoe, a 12-year-old girl who lived in the Sherry-Netherland; she was a Manhattan princess, like Eloise, lullabied to sleep by her father’s flute.
Nothing has changed in the decades since. Despite much lavish praise, the new Coppola film, Somewhere, is essentially a princess’s movie.
There’s no reason why the daughter of the man who made The Godfather should pretend that she’s ordinary. But after only three previous feature-length films, the director is repeating herself. Note how the scene of Bill Murray’s bemused gaze at a stripper in Lost in Translation is doubled up with two dancers in Somewhere. The notorious Shannon sisters play the dancers; I suspect they dance better in real life than Coppola lets them.
The twin blondes twirl before the sated eyes of Stephen Dorff‘s Johnny Marco, a Brad Pitt–level celeb cooling his heels at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont. Stubbled, tattooed, he’s a male version of the other pining semibored celebs in Coppola’s films: the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides (1999); the two sleepy people in her best movie, Lost in Translation (2003); and the shop-till-you-drop queen in Marie Antoinette (2006).
Marco is enduring the junket of the European opening of his latest film, Deadly Agenda. Michelle Monaghan has an incisive cameo as his co-star, who, it seems, had a lousy time with him off-camera. Johnny mutters his answers as a scrum of European critics ask him questions that are way above his pay grade—such as “Who is Johnny Marco?”
It’s a rough life. Women waylay him, flash him or wait topless in his bed. Makeup artists show him what he’ll look like when he’s old and wrinkled, and it’s like the latex mask of Dorian Gray. Marco is so exhausted that he falls asleep face first in a pickup’s crotch. Mysterious texts arrive on his private number, demanding to know why he’s such a pig.
Like a grumpus in a Shirley Temple movie, Marco has all that he can desire. It’s killing him, and only a little girl can help him find his way to happiness. That’s his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), who has been foisted on him by his ex-wife; he is supposed to mind her for a few days before she’s due at summer camp.
Eleven-year-old Cleo doesn’t resent her father’s promiscuousness. She’s a trooper, too, ready to accompany him to Milan for an award ceremony. The real star of the sequence is the Hotel Principe Di Savoia, with its private in-house swimming pool. Nothing more of Milan is seen; it’s airport-hotel-airport and back to the Chateau.
The sadness of a life spent in transit, sleeping with whomever and driving a sports car fast, is essential to the triste undertones of a Bond picture, but of course that sadness is only part of the buffet. And no one takes 007 movies as seriously as this wafer-thin portrait of anomie has been taken.
Dorff does project some humanity; he has a clue who Johnny Marco is. Unfortunately, this makes for sentiment that spoils Coppola’s picture of alienation—this, and the utter perfection and utter lack of moods in the prematurely mature daughter.
Why is Somewhere being looked at as anything but piffle? It must be Coppola’s eye: the way the giant figures on Sunset Strip billboards leer into the Chateau’s windows (an effect also seen in the 1998 live-in-Hollywood feature Hurlyburly), the wide Ed Ruscha–like storefront dwarfing Marco’s Ferrari, and those long, blank, neutral L.A. streets and freeways.
If there were more force and less upbeatness in what Coppola is saying, one wouldn’t feel like scowling at this visual wealth like a commissar. As in Marie Antoinette, Coppola faces the problem of trying to have her cake and critiquing it too. When you’re a filmmaker, and you love the sweet life and have a great eye, there’s a natural career for you: television commercials. Who couldn’t sell a suite at the Chateau Marmont with these images?
R; 97 min.
