DVD OF THE WEEK: Somewhere

DVD OF THE WEEK: Somewhere

by Vadim Rizov

The big epiphany in Somewhere comes during a slow zoom out from Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) and daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) tanning poolside at West Hollywood's Chateau Marmont. The low-ebb plot?vacant action star Johnny takes care of his daughter for a few weeks and realizes he's been a lousy dad, or maybe a waste of space?reaches its climax here, with the two naturally bonding and experiencing a new kind of mutual contentment. As a viewer, you could ignore that obvious intent and get annoyed by the context: you're watching a Hollywood star hang out in an expensive locale, cocooned by unnaturally perfect California weather and accompanied on the soundtrack with a Strokes demo, a band?like writer-director Sofia Coppola?often accused of having inherited rather than earned success.

Coppola's self-consciously unpresumptuous films have been attacked for being solipsistically oblivious to economic and class tensions. Defenders will reply that the amount of vitriol directed at her alleged obliviousness seems to be potentially sexist, since male filmmakers are rarely flagged for repeatedly picking at their first-world concerns/neuroses on-screen (cf. Noah Baumbach or Wes Anderson). Both sides generally have a lot of evidence: the sheer wispiness of Coppola's work and the modesty of her interests seems designed to deflect strong antipathy. Typical IMDB comments-board redux on Somewhere: "How F'ING STUCK UP!"

Coppola's The Virgin Suicides is about young women whose knowledge of the world is forcibly constrained by overprotective parents, while Lost in Translation strands two people in Tokyo. Both films are more than a little self-pitying in presenting scenarios where fragile people end up, through no fault of their own, isolated and misunderstood. Marie Antoinette and Somewhere seem funnier and more relaxed in contrast, partly because they embrace privilege and comfortable, unapologetic materialism head-on. American celebrity culture/journalism generally involves a complicated mixture of adulation and economic envy (and unsightly glee) at public breakdowns. Coppola's recent work has approached the territory with all the toxic connotations taken out: Marie Antoinette and Somewhere are calm insider's notes.

That pure, unmediated point of view (sympathetic to the point of ridiculousness with the overprivileged, but also carefully observant in normally sensationalized milieus) is an asset. Her sense of humor helps too: Marie Antoinette was stuffed with anachronistic comics like Molly Shannon and Jason Schwartzman, who couldn't play period to save their lives. Antoinette (to my mind, Coppola's best film) has little to do with history, but it's pretty funny on its own terms and no more anachronistic than the 1938 Hollywood spectacular on the same subject. Coppola fetishizes fashion, frivolity and sketch-comedy moments, while the '30s version fetishizes a now-dead Hollywood idea of how to make respectable middle-class period movies. Coppola's just more honest about how her view of the past is distorted.

The Chateau Marmont is a step down from Versailles, so Somewhere's comic relief is accordingly more slight: Chris Pontius, of MTV's Jackass and Wildboyz. Here, he's apparently playing someone named "Sammy," Johnny Marco's best friend. Pontius doesn't appear to be acting at all in his scenes with Elle Fanning: he seems to just be an inherently decent guy who has no trouble hanging out with his friend's precocious daughter, quickly establishing a more natural rapport with her than her dad while recounting anecdotes about their youth torturing Johnny's picture.

Coppola and cinematographer Harris Savides used lenses left over from dad Francis' 1983 Rumble Fish, meaning the unusual levels of grain seem like a subliminal throwback. The hotel?an A-list celeb favorite for 80 years?and cocooned world where father and daughter move through seem slightly amber-preserved. (Johnny's brief trip to Italy to promote his new film seems like it could've happened anytime in the last 30 years, crassly, vaguely Fellini-esque awards ceremony and all.) As for Dorff, there's almost zero evidence here that he can act. He is, however, a suitably vacant presence, which is pleasingly frank: voids deserve empathy too. Somewhere is an inherently righteous film: it's about a father waking up to his parental role without being overly scolding, which is hard to argue with.

But the film really presents a surprisingly low-key cross-section of the fortunate and bored, the textures of which outweigh the minor-key story. At one point, poor Johnny is forced to do a press conference for his new blockbuster, where the actor is forced to answer questions like "What do you think of the underlying postmodern globalism in the film?" Empty-headed Johnny has no retort for that one, and it's a dead-on recreation of that kind of gathering. Coppola's observant nature trumps whatever she's ignoring about class or privilege: she's shrewd at observing the out-of-touch and increasingly unsentimental. Having gained access to film at two of the world's great landmarks of luxury, she has likewise given us access to what her lifestyle might feel like.

Posted by ahillis at April 20, 2011 1:57 PM

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