Thursday, October 27, 2011

Review: Somewhere (2010)

What should we make of Sophia Coppola's Somewhere (2010)? Is it anywhere that anyone sane would want to be? In the space between the lifestyle porn of Entourage and the maudlin, saturnine world of Funny People stands this moody, plodding existential tale. The film, the fourth in the director's canon, offers a stark window  into the enticing but largely empty life of our biggest celebrities (a secondary theme of Lost in Translation obviously). In this case it is Stephen Dorff playing the megastar Johnny Marco, so big he takes private jets to press junkets in Italy and stays at hotels with small pools inside the room. Johnny lives at the Chateau Marmont, sleeps with a lot of interchangeable blondes, goes to the occasional party, follows orders from a publicist and others without much enthusiasm (or spite to be fair) and, we find out, has an 11-year old daughter Cleo (Dakota Fanning). As the "plot" unfolds, we learn that his ex-girlfriend or wife has had some sort of break down and thus daddy has to take care of the daughter for several days before shuttering her off to summer camp. I put plot in quotations because there really isn't one, nor an arc to speak of. The daughter provides the closest thing as Johnny clearly grows a little as the two spend time together, before her departure and his call to a random girl telling her he is "nothing." The film ends with him heading away from his Ferrari and into the void of a hot, endless desert, while many filmgoers I imagine left the theatre wondering where their $12 and hour and 37 minutes went.

So is the film good, you might ask? A few critics, like A.O. Scott (NYT) and Roger Ebert (Sun-Times), loved it, a few others kind of liked it, but many others despised it (NY Post). Where do I fall in this continuum of taste? I'd have to say the film is largely a failure, while it's ambitions are admirable. It seems to largely follow the neurotic relationship we have with fame in the U.S. We treat our stars like gods (even the ones who are merely good at pretending to be other people), lavish them with untold wealth, celebrate their lives in magazines, films, television and the net, create shows around the mundane details of their daily existence and sometimes take them seriously as people we should listen to (including a President I wish had just stayed in the business). On the other hand, we love it when they fail; a whole cottage industry tasked with unearthing their darkest secrets and pictures of them without the makeup team in place. We have reality television shows that really make fun of them more than celebrate their lives. And we have a host of movies over the years from Sunset Boulevard to Celebrity to reminds us that fame isn't necessarily that great after all; even as the popular culture message to kids is largely get it at any cost.

What then do we make of a women who grew up in this opulent world and decides to take it down? Should we give her some credit for her nuanced perspective that neither celebrates nor condemns the lifestyle of the rich, famous and bored senseless? Is it the insider view we've been waiting for? These questions are really left to the viewer who has the patience to sit through the hour and 37 minutes of pure drudgery, with a deeper point that is really as banal as a 25 cent pulp fiction novel, without the action or lurid sexual detail. On the other hand, it has to be said that there is something inscrutably compelling in the performances of Dorff and Fanning. And there is something equally brave in creating a film that relies so much on the nuanced performances of the leads rather than any meaningful dialogue or plot structure. Like the much discussed 20-minute silent scene from P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), the entire film relies on the camera work and actors to tell us the tale. Yet Dorff and Fanning are not even in the same league as Daniel Day-Lewis and Coppola has a long way to go to even approach the brilliance of Anderson.

In the end, I believe the film misses the mark, even as I appreciate her attempt to bring back the moody, meandering technique of Michelangelo Antonioni or the French New Wave directors. The difference is they ultimately relied on some deeper narrative to bring their films to life, together with compelling filming and editing that brought the milieu's they were dissecting alive. They still had something more important to say than being famous is exciting but ultimately unfulfilling. The film appears really to be just the latest rendering of the age old biblical question, asked in an endless array of films from 1941's Citizen Kane to the 1990 flop Bonfire of the Vanities, for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he forfeits his soul. Somewhere left me with another related question in mind -- who cares?

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