This Audient Outliers series required fudging of the rules right from the very start, when I chose Jonathan Glazer's filmography for February -- even though I had not yet seen The Zone of Interest, so I couldn't truly know if Sexy Beast was the only of his films I didn't like. The loose interpretation of the rules has continued throughout, as re-examining Frank Darabont's The Mist required not only factoring in his TV show The Walking Dead as a point in the win column for him, but having not seen one of his films either, The Majestic.
So it wasn't a perfectly conceived series. So what. I am not trying to please some outside body that judges my adherence to the rules. I'm trying to create a reason for revisiting films that gave me pause.
And so in October I have now watched Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, even though it is conceivably only my third least favorite Coppola film.
If Somewhere and Priscilla came up side-by-side in a duel on Flickchart, I'd probably pick Priscilla -- or would have before I rewatched Somewhere, but I won't reveal yet whether that viewing changed my choice in this duel.
But if that duel were between Somewhere and On the Rocks, there is no doubt that Somewhere would win hands down -- before that viewing, after that viewing, and always.
So why, you might ask, did I not choose On the Rocks if I wanted to finally break my string of four straight white male directors to start this series?
Simple: I knew there were no hidden depths to On the Rocks that would be revealed from a second viewing. Beyond featuring Bill Murray and the music of her husband Thomas Mars, On the Rocks is so little like what we would expect from a Coppola film that I suspect it will always seem like the outlier in her filmography -- objectively for us all, not just subjectively for me -- even after she has made her final film, which hopefully won't be for another 30 years.
Somewhere is probably nothing but hidden depths.
But how would they play for me on this viewing?
First a little background on Somewhere. In my family, it is most remembered for the funny circumstances of our original viewing.
When my wife and I first watched it in January 2011, our first child was only about five months old. So we weren't going to the movies together much, if at all. This was the closest we came, but it took some humorous logistics.
Basically, I went to the first showing of Somewhere at a theater relatively near our house. After it ended, my wife met me in the parking lot with our son, who was asleep in his stroller, while she went to the very next showing. I transitioned him back to my car and drove home while she went to the movie. So he went to sleep with mummy and woke up with daddy. I can't remember whether or not the expression on his face was particularly reflective of that surprise.
I wish the whimsical circumstances of this viewing had made me more favorably disposed to the movie, but they did not. (Maybe if I'd been the second viewer, rather than the first. At that point, I hadn't yet done the whimsical exchange of our child.) I recognized the filmmaking skills of the director, on a personal hot streak with me after she scored my #1 spot in 2003 with Lost in Translation and a big favorite with Marie Antoinette in 2007, which I did not see until 2008 so I couldn't rank it to determine where it would have landed in my year-end rankings. I just didn't vibe with what she was trying to accomplish.
The movie felt like 97 minutes of repeating the message that celebrity has hollow comforts and hollows out your sense of humanity. Stephen Dorff's Johnny Marco puts a rather fine point on this very near the climax of the movie, on the phone with his ex, when he says he is "not even a person." While each little vignette demonstrating this hollowness is compelling its own right, their collection adds up to less than the sum of the parts.
I still basically feel this way about the movie after my second viewing. I see on Letterboxd I retroactively gave this movie 2.5 stars (I added all my movies to Letterboxd around 2013), and that would probably get bumped up to three today. But that could also be because I am becoming a softie in my old age and I hand out three stars to movies as long as they did not offend me. (A little bit of an exaggeration, but maybe not as much of an exaggeration as I would like.)
Although the movie is fundamentally "boring" -- in other words, that's sort of by design -- I did not specifically feel bored while watching it. However, this might be a good time to mention the funny coincidence to this viewing. When I had not yet decided what I was watching on Wednesday night, tossing up a couple options including Somewhere, our family watched an episode of The Simpsons from 2011 over dinner, in which Lisa creates a social media service called Springface. (Probably not the show's only riff on The Social Network, but definitely the first.) In this episode, Homer talks about how he can use the site -- I can't really remember the relevance in the context of the episode -- to watch a Sofia Coppola movie on double speed, so it seems like a normal movie.
Homer's comment was almost certainly intended in relation to Somewhere, which came out the same autumn as The Social Network, meaning the Simpsons writers had just enough time to write it up and animate it for air about a year later. That's the sort of "universe telling you what to do" moment that pushed me toward Somewhere as my viewing that evening.
Homer is right, of course, that Coppola's pace is purposefully slower. That doesn't bother me in films like Translation, Antoinette, The Bling Ring or The Beguiled, which are my four favorite Coppola films. It bothers me a little here because there is something inherently navel gazey about following a movie star who attracts the attention of every woman who crosses his path and has landed for a long-term stay at the Chateau Marmont hotel, almost by accident because it represents both the freedoms and the indulgences afforded by his position in the world. It is clear from the first moment of the movie -- the rather metaphorically obvious scene where Johnny drives his Ferrari in a circle in the desert -- that we are not meant to find this lifestyle as appealing as it would seem on the surface. But the fact that Coppola errs on the side of presenting, rather than commenting on, Johnny's life certainly does allow a viewer to dream themselves away into it, if they wanted.
In reality, Somewhere would be a weaker film if it damned Johnny's life choices in no uncertain terms, or if it showed him being truly neglectful of his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning, great even from this early age). Johnny is actually a pretty good parent when he's around. But he's also prone to sneaking in a quickie with a random woman in the hope that Cleo doesn't notice.
There is probably a core truth to the depictions of the layabout movie star, though the actual truth, from Coppola's own life, is her perspective on being the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, and traveling with him to movie premieres. (The section of Somewhere set in Italy is probably my favorite.) The star's behavior is something she could easily glean from being in that world, and perhaps Johnny Marco is also a continued processing of the character based on her former partner, Spike Jonze, who exists in the form of the cameraman played by Giovanni Ribisi in Lost in Translation.
So none of this rings false, and it does look like a peek behind the curtain at eccentric things that seem apocryphal, which only makes them more likely to have happened: the male masseuse who strips naked while massaging Johnny, because it's part of his process; the nearly twin dancers performing for Johnny on portable stripper poles they bring to his hotel room; playing Guitar Hero in the Chateau Marmont room that has become essentially permanently his, room #59.
I think we don't realize the full strength of what Coppola is doing here until the end, when Johnny has left Cleo at camp, and we realize just how comparatively empty his life is once the spark she brings is no longer there. That father-daughter bond is retroactively reinforced in the final ten minutes of the movie, when we are left with only Johnny, and see what a lonely place that is.
So am I talking myself into liking Somewhere a little more than I did previously? Maybe even a little more than boosting its rating by a half-star, which I already said is a sort of inflation, based on my changing temperament as a critic?
Maybe I am. But I can tell I am not that interested in watching Somewhere a third time. I still think it is a little less than the sum of its parts, still missing something that would steer it more firmly toward ... something.
It occurs to me that it is very hard to define what keeps a Coppola movie on the right side of this line between consequentiality and inconsequentiality. Lost in Translation is the clearest example of getting this ineffable balance right, even as it has some moments that feel like dead spots -- clearly more by design in that case, representing the vicissitudes of this connection between Bob and Charlotte. Marie Antoinette, my second favorite, gets huge points for the production design and the way Coppola uses modern music in a manner that was quite new back in 2007.
I can see that Somewhere would land on the right side of this line for some people. It doesn't quite for me, but that hardly makes it without virtues.
Okay, I will wrap up this series in December with an as-yet determined final title. All I can tell you for sure is that if it doesn't involve another cheat, I will be surprised.
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