Review: Somewhere is Sofia Coppola at her best
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 22, 2010 10:00PM
How interested are you in unhappy, bored, rich people? Sofia Coppola is dead set on convincing you that it's more than you'd think. Somewhere, the exquisite new third panel of Sofia Coppola's Celebrity Ennui Triptych (with Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette), may sketch familiar subject matter but does so with such style and facility that we find ourselves not minding.
Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a youngish Hollywood star, living the life we expect of him. He enjoys the privileges of celebrity nightlife and the attendant substance abuse. He has merely to poke his head out of his Chateau Marmont digs to find an attractive model or starlet eager to sleep with him. He's got an assistant to wake him every morning and let him now where the car waiting for him downstairs will be taking him. He's got a publicist to shepherd him through the international parade of banality that is movie promotion. He's even gets to play rock star dad to his 11-year-old daughter every so often, taking her to ice skating practice in the Ferrari. Yet Johnny is unhappy, and his life is empty. It takes his ex's dumping daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) in his care for more than a couple of days to realize this for himself.
The plot is as thin and trite as it sounds, but through Harris Savide's elegant cinematography and frequent long, intimate takes we find ourselves captivated. Coppola chooses just the right details and then allows them time to sink in. We learn about Johnny Marco not so much by what he says or does, but by what happens to him: unsure what to do with himself as he smokes a cigarette in real time, or sitting while two special effects artists bury his head beneath a blob of latex, or dozing off in a boozy haze during the private hotel room performance he has ordered from twin strippers.
If Coppola is judicious in her characterization, she is also charitable. We like Johnny despite his excesses because he's a nice guy. He takes some time to stack those silver room service trays neatly when he puts them outside the door. He's always polite to the valet. He lets a co-star's sotto voce barbs roll of his back, blithely smiling as the photographers kindly keep the platform he stands on to appear at her height out of frame. Given that there is never a good response to his ex's reaction to his lonely depression ("Why don't you try volunteering or something?"), the fact that we still root for the guy is quite a feat.
Elle Fanning nearly steals the show as the daughter, giving the convincing but measured performance Coppola's tone demands and playing the character as wiser than her years. Witness her disapproval of her father's one-night-stand conveyed with a devastatingly subtle narrowing of the eyes, or casually portioning out perfect dollops of Hollandaise sauce as she prepares breakfast for three. She is preternaturally self-assured, always easy-going, and virtually never in need of actual parenting. The father-daughter relationship is touching, and one can only assume new-mother Coppola has incorporated some of her own childhood experiences as daughter to a celebrity director.
Somewhere was a "surprise" winner of the Golden Lion in Venice, but we can't imagine what was so surprising. It is a film that is engineered for such an audience, like a 97-minute episode of "Entourage" filmed by Michaelangelo Antonioni. If it reexamines the celebrity navel, it does so with an accomplished grammar and a practiced bit of philosophical jujitsu. There is an emptiness at the heart of Coppola's work which we are meant to take as a meditation on emptiness, with transcendence merely implied. Coppola's films teach us that the coolest thing is not just to be a privileged celebrity, it is to be a privileged celebrity who sees through privilege and celebrity to the things that really matter: love, human relationships and some notion of authenticity. I suspect this film will be as polarizing as her previous two and the song remains the same: if you like Sofia Coppola's movies then you will like this Sofia Coppola movie, but the number of converts it will win her is negligible.
Somewhere opens tonight at Landmark Century Center theaters.