Neil Young's Film Lounge

Sofia Coppola’s SOMEWHERE [5/10]

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Low-key to the point of noodling inconsequentiality, slow-moving, small-scale character-study Somewhere sees writer-director Sofia Coppola recover some ground after her over-ambitious Marie Antoinette misfire – but nevertheless confirms her status as one of the most bafflingly overpraised, overhyped, over-rewarded of today’s film-makers.
   After its success at the Venice Film Festival, Coppola now has a Golden Lion to go with the Oscar she won for writing Lost In Translation. And expectations raised by the Venice award may work to this slight, somewhat innocuous film’s disadvantage – the trophy resting like a gilded paperweight on a wispy filligree of a movie.
   Of her four features, Coppola’s most satisfying effort remains her 1999 debut The Virgin Suicides - not least because it’s her least obviously autobiographical effort, and the only one that doesn’t explore the lives of public figures caught in gilded cages of luxury and celebrity. The focus this time is on thirtysomething Hollywood star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), who in between publicity work on his new movie – a rather cruddy-looking caper entitled Berlin Agenda - lazes and hazes away his days and nights in the quasi-bohemian comfort of Los Angeles’ much-chronicled Chateau Marmont hotel.
    Johnny’s life of excess is one that, we detect, is starting to yield diminishing rewards – which is why it’s very timely that his 10-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning), who usually resides with her mother, should turn up for an extended spell of father-daughter bonding. This includes a wildly opulent trip to Rome for a garish awards-ceremony – the duo are put up in the fanciest suite of the city’s fanciest hotel – Coppola evidently drawing on her own memories of accompanying her dad Francis Ford Coppola on similar adventures.
   As an analysis of how the jaded rich and famous can suffer from ennui and anomie, Somewhere isn’t particularly persuasive in establishing a valid raison d’etre: Johnny never comes across as a particularly engaging or complex protagonist, partly because Dorff is, as so often in the past, a somewhat undemonstrative and underwhelming screen presence. He’s regularly upstaged not only by Fanning – whose Cleo has no shortage of youthful energy and not-quite-brattish “attitude” – but by sparkily charismatic Jackass refugee Chris Pontius as his down-to-earth longtime best pal Sammy.
   But putting Fanning or Pontius closer to the centre of the movie would negate Coppola’s intention – Dorff/Marco is supposed to be a bit of a bushed-out blank, as this is a character encountered at a low spiritual/emotional ebb. Interacting with Cleo forces him to gradually grasp the error of his decadent, self-indulgent ways – not that his behaviour is ever particularly transgressive in Hollywood terms (Marco boozes and smokes to excess, but drugs don’t seem to feature in his world at all).
   The film is at its strongest in dialogue-light sequences – several musical interludes, featuring reflectively gloomy modern pop, or in uneventful two-hander scenes of Dorff and Fanning enjoying each other’s company in and around the hotel. Indeed, a major plus is that Coppola wisely refrains from the kind of melodramatic confessional/breakdown stuff one might have expected from the basic premise.
   But Somewhere is much less convincing in terms of sketching in Marco’s professional life. We never really know, for example, just how big a name he’s intended to be – an individual of Pitt/Depp prominence, or an over-the-hill has-been whose glory days (we’re told he’s worked with the likes of Pacino and Streep) and behind him? He’s evidently known for action movies – at one point he remarks that he does all of his own stunts - presumably a nod to Coppola’s own Lost In Translation, where Bill Murray’s character was, somewhat implausibly, a veteran of the same genre.
   A press-conference for international media, meanwhile, sees Coppola - surprisingly given her own career path - at her least sure-footed: all the journalists shoot off questions without allowing the star a chance to reply, one of them even asking “Who is Johnny Marco?” It’s a query that stumps the man himself – despite 90-odd minutes of Somewhere‘s quasi-existential longueurs, we’re not much the wiser either. Like Dorothy Parker said in a different context, when you get there, it turns out that there’s really not much “there” there at all.

Neil Young
17th December, 2010

SOMEWHERE
[5/10] : USA 2010 : Sofia COPPOLA : 98m
seen 12/Dec/10 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle : (£7.50) : {14/28}