Last night I watched the
latest entry in Sofia Coppola’s “poor-little-rich-girl” oeuvre, “Somewhere.”
Throughout the movie, we watch a presumably talented (although we are never
given an example of that talent) movie star named Johnny Marco (played by
Stephen Dorff) as he traipses around the world, staying at trendy hotels like
the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles (or a hotel suite in Italy with its own
private swimming pool), having beautiful women throw themselves at him and
hotel concierges and limousine drivers accede to his every command. The only
source of conflict here is that Johnny’s daughter shows up in the middle of the
movie and Johnny then has to drop her off at summer camp while he goes back to
the Chateau Marmont. This makes Johnny very sad. Boo fucking hoo.
At the end of the movie,
Johnny is seen driving off into the desert and then he gets out of his car and
starts walking along the highway. Roll credits.
What?!
What is this love affair
that film critics have for movies with no script? This isn’t a movie so much as
a series of seemingly improvised vignettes.
If you recall, “Lost in
Translation” was another variation on this theme, this time starring Bill
Murray as the movie star that people throw themselves at and Scarlett Johannson
as his love interest who is married to another man with a fashionable career (a
fashion photographer). There is almost no dialogue in this movie and yet it won
the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Has the Best Screenplay Oscar become the
Best Independent Film Oscar? And, if so, why did it go to “Lost in Translation”?
“Marie Antoinette,”
Coppola’s last “poor-little-rich-girl” story, actually did have some dialogue
as well as some other things to recommend it: great costumes and locations
(Versailles) and an anachronistic rock score. And, unlike the other two movies
I mentioned, there are actually some consequences for this unsympathetic
character’s behavior, although I suppose we’re supposed to feel sorry for her,
too.
I suppose the die was cast
when Coppola made her first movie, a segment in the omnibus “New York Stories”
about a poor-little-rich-girl who lives at the Sherry Netherland hotel.
At this point you might
say, “Wait a second. Wasn’t Sofia Coppola a poor-little-rich-girl herself? Wasn’t
she the daughter of film director Francis Ford Coppola and didn’t she spend her
childhood being chaperoned from one hotel to another and shouldn’t you write
about what you know?”
Yes, but that
doesn’t mean we should have to watch her home movies.
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