Sofia Coppola (2010)
The film opens with a car (a Ferrari, according to Ryan Gilbey) doing repeated laps in an otherwise empty landscape – somewhere. Although only five or six circuits are completed, the routine becomes so insistent that you quickly get into a state of mind of wondering if it will ever end, or why it should. When the car stops and the driver gets out, it comes as a surprise. He walks a few yards from the car and takes in the view. He appears not to know what to do or where to go next. The man is a film star called Johnny Marco. We next see him drunkenly crash down some stairs in the Hollywood hotel where he lives, then watch him, steeped in ennui, watching two pink-clad pole dancers doing a routine in his bedroom. It might sound from this that the writer-director Sofia Coppola is telegraphing the listless luxury of Johnny Marco’s existence: sex is as easily available as room service drinks to this tired hedonist but maybe he prefers alcohol. Yet Coppola animates these sequences with shards of originality: the noise of the Ferrari’s engine works on your nerves to strongly claustrophobic effect; Johnny’s inebriated fall downstairs does nothing to reduce the perky sycophancy of his entourage; when the pole dancers have completed their performance, they dismantle their equipment neatly and leave the room discreetly. Somewhere is full of beguiling and pregnant images – like the one on the film’s poster, with Johnny and his daughter Cleo stretched out on sun loungers by a swimming pool, the hotel (the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard) above them and:
‘… beyond it the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.’
There are some charming and funny moments too – supplied by, among others, an unconventional masseur and an elderly hotel waiter, who serenades Johnny and Cleo with ‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear’. (It’s touching that the waiter must have been a young man when Elvis first sang the song.) The mysteriously abusive texts that Johnny receives on his cell phone (‘Why are you such an asshole?’, ‘You think you’re hot shit, don’t you?’, ‘What is your fucking problem?’) are obviously messages from his self-reproachful conscience yet Coppola manages to make them sinister. Johnny goes for an elaborate, protracted make-up session: we see his head encased in plaster – he can do no more than breathe. Then the make-up artists remove the mask and Johnny has been turned, most convincingly, into a geriatric. It’s another symbolic moment that’s hardly original but still arresting. But none of these things can disguise the thinness of the material. Perhaps if Coppola were a less gifted film-maker she would take longer to express the themes of Somewhere. If she were less incisive and succinct, she might avoid the frequent arid stretches the film contains. (The aridity of Johnny Marco’s life is no excuse for these.)
Nick James in S&S suggests that an audience’s sympathies towards a character whom they envy are necessarily limited. This seems wrong at two levels. First, it begs the question of whether one envies Johnny Marco. (I’d be surprised if much of the audience for Somewhere do: does Nick James?) Second, and envy aside, it’s surely not a given that sympathy for a fabulously wealthy protagonist in a movie (a monarch, a film star in a biopic?) only goes so far. The weakness of Somewhere, what constrains engagement with it, is rather that Johnny Marco’s situation is generic and the actor playing him isn’t able to make him individual. That may be Coppola’s intention (she may want a synthetic film star) but, if so, she’s cast the role of Johnny so acutely it seems cruel to her leading man. I’ve not liked Stephen Dorff in either of the other things I’ve previously seen him in (Backbeat and World Trade Center). He’s better here but he doesn’t have a strong presence or even a distinct look – he kept reminding me of other people (Ewan McGregor, Kiefer Sutherland, someone else I’ve already forgotten). A more serious problem is that Dorff’s lack of charisma makes it hard to believe that Johnny Marco is a star, especially as he doesn’t look in great physical shape. Dorff, who’s thirty-seven, is a bit paunchy and has a punch-drunk quality. The figure of Johnny would surely work better if, because of the intensive pampering his status affords him, he still looked good – in spite of living a life that should make him look bad. Accepting the screenplay Oscar for Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola said: ‘Every writer needs a muse and mine was Bill Murray’. It’s hard to believe Stephen Dorff was her muse here: he’s what you expect the type that Johnny Marco is to be – but no more.
Elle Fanning is delightful as the willowy, eleven-year-old Cleo. Fanning was exactly that age when Somewhere was made. If she seems a little older (thanks to a quality of perceptiveness as well as her height), that seems right. It makes sense that Cleo is on the cusp of puberty. During a trip with her father to Italy, they have a midnight feast of ice cream (all four flavours available from room service) while lying next to each other on his bed. This is a strong moment because it’s innocent and affectionate – and poignant because those two things can’t co-exist much longer in their relationship. Cleo’s awareness of her father as a star is, for the most part, under the surface but she enjoys being his consort at the TV awards ceremony they attend together in Italy. When she emerges, dressed for the occasion, in a pale pink dress, the image works perfectly. The rest of Johnny’s entourage murmur ‘bellissima’ with amused, amiable condescension but her father sees Cleo poised between a child and a young woman. (This is one of Stephen Dorff’s best moments.)
I didn’t pick up how often Johnny, holed up in the Chateau Marmont, usually sees his daughter, who lives with her mother. Early on, he takes Cleo to a skating rink. He looks happy to see how accomplished she is on the ice – but pleasantly surprised too so we can only assume he’s not seen her perform for some time. The pair get thrown together when Cleo’s mother decides to leave town for a while and needs Johnny to take over before Cleo goes to summer camp. The while is indefinite and the mother’s motivation for taking off is of the I-need-space-to-find-myself-variety so that the father and child’s suddenly seeing much more of each other recalls Kramer vs Kramer. (Is it a coincidence that, when Johnny attends the Italian awards ceremony and the compere rattles off names of other Hollywood stars, the first two mentioned are Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep?) Sofia Coppola has too much taste to evoke Kramer vs Kramer in what develops subsequently but she struggles to come up with anything interesting instead. At the one point at which Cleo starts to cry and Johnny asks what’s wrong, the girl says she doesn’t know when her mother’s coming back and ‘You’re never around’. When Johnny eventually puts Cleo in the car that’s taking her to camp, Coppola rounds off the parting with him shouting to her ‘Sorry I’ve not been around’ but she can’t hear him. The fact that his voice is drowned out by the noise of the private helicopter waiting to return him to Sunset Boulevard isn’t enough to disguise the cliché. (And the film’s final image, when Johnny – this time driving on a freeway – gets out of his car and walks away from it, is not only a cliché but rhymes too neatly with the prologue.) Back on his own, when Cleo’s departed the scene, Johnny seems remorseful, to feel that he’s missed his chance of being a good father to her. Yet they get on well and she’s only eleven – why does he thinks it’s a lost cause?
Somewhere is structurally and thematically similar to Lost in Translation. A disenchanted, hotel-bound male, who performs for a living, is temporarily vivified by a much younger (but herself unhappy) girl. Sofia Coppola was born into a world of celebrity film-making (her first screen appearance, when she was a few months old, was as Connie Corleone’s baby in the baptism scene at the end of The Godfather); and the received wisdom is that Somewhere has autobiographical elements. (It also has a hint of the Life Without Zoe segment of New York Stories (1989), co-written by the teenage Coppola and her father, who directed the piece.) She succeeds here, with the help of her cinematographer Harris Savides, in creating some fine and troubling things to look at; yet she fails to convey what the material means to her personally, to bring out the aspects that might make it more thoroughly distinctive and excitingly alive on the screen. I liked Somewhere but I think that’s more because I’ve a lot of time for Sofia Coppola than because it’s a good film.
13 December 2010
