Sunday night. Most people around here are asleep by 8pm, but we, intrepid movie goers, popped a few uppers and went to the 18 screen theater in Delray Beach to catch Sophia Coppola's new movie (film??) "Somewhere".
Surprisingly, uppers weren't really necessary to sit through "Somewhere", and the drug of choice, despite its setting in the once notorious now more quietly so Chateau Marmont, is Propecia along with a bit of booze.
The plot is so simple it isn't: an actor gets a visit from his daughter. What we have is a collection of types so well observed they are almost characters. There is the A-list actor, played by Stephen Dorff, and his exquisitely beautiful 11-year-old daughter, played by Elle Fanning. They are not characters, but the focus for the camera, the human subject for the setting. Around them are these characters: a collection of agents, service people, drivers, party people and hookers.
Nothing happens, as you may have heard. The A-list actor, Johnny Marco, is a genial cipher who spends his days killing time by driving around a duskily lit Los Angeles, mostly limited to Sunset and Mulholland. Sometimes he expands his world to the 101 and its environs. Cahuenga! When he's not driving around or having limp, uninterested sex with gorgeous women who permanently inhabit the Chateau Marmont as quasi hangers on he is doing what one might call "work", in this case the work of a Johnny Depp or Vin Diesel type mega star: half asleep press junkets, Italian variety shows, latex mask fittings. All of these activities are conducted around the actor: he is in the middle, swaddled and scheduled and chauffered around, while the real work is going on around him: the agents and planners and makeup artists who constantly tell the star he looks "great" and "awesome" though he appears to have not ironed his shirt or showered in weeks. When asked about his acting method by an eager young actor at one of the parties perpetually going on in his own room, the A-list actor replies that he got an agent and things just sort of happened. He's barely an actor in his own life, much less on the screen.
It's a vision of stardom we've seen, but here it is delicately shown by a lifetime insider who knows its language perfectly. Its interest to the audience is in its perplexing level of familiarity. The audience pays to watch actors enact dramas, and by extension the audience knows the actors are well paid and receive attention unimaginable to most people. To glimpse that level of attention in an hour and a half movie and then, of course, to see its pleasures undercut, to see the actor end up whimpering over a lonely phone call that he is nothing, is the story, the narrative comeuppance.
However, the movie is so contemporary, so deeply and oddly felt, that there is no compeuppance. The actor is a jobber with a lot of money. He doesn't appear to take a great deal of interest in his work, but he performs his job adequately: he doesn't do drugs, and whatever the temptations are at the Chateau Marmont he doesn't do drugs, fall out of windows (he does fall down the stairs, which is part of the small plot) and avoids crashing his car. He is a reasonably good father who likes spending time with his splendidly beautiful, accomplished but not overly precious or precocious preteen daughter, and usually manages to keep the half-naked women out of his hotel room while his daughter is with him. We see no indications that he deserves estrangement, and we can guess that many of the women who pursue him and are occasionally angry at him were using him.
But that is where the narrative will turn: he will be alone, at least for a few minutes at the side of a highway. Why? Well, that is what happens in movies about existential angst. There can't be an answer when the question isn't posed. It's a hard genre to take on, the post-Antonioni kind of blah blah. How to make a movie about nothing, and make it interesting?
Somehow, Sophia Coppola succeeds with "Somewhere". You don't get too many coal miners making movies about coal mines when they grow up, but there is the occasional Hollywood brat taking the audience inside that milieu, and in this case it works. It's much better than "Lost in Translation", which used Scarlett Johannson as an affectless stand-in for the director. One difference is the actual love object in Elle Fanning's Chloe. She is the eternal child who wears hipster clothes better than an actual adult woman, cooks eggs benedict in hotels without actual adult supervision as her somewhat childish father doesn't count, and skates as prettily as a doll in a snow globe. We can see she's taken advantage of what she has to take advantage of- she's rich and beautiful and talented, and uses all the education at her disposal to better herself. That she understands the adult world around her no better than the adults themselves do is a satisfying counterpoint to popular contemporary images of children.
The result of Sophia Coppola's insistence on well-observed surface over explicit emotional content through dialogue is a sweet ride around L.A. I don't know exactly where I went, but it's like someone else's dream which keeps coming back.
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