Daddy's Home: ON THE ROCKS

Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks could be called a sitcom farce if it had some more pep in its step. As it is, it’s slow-drip farce, a low-key look at a middle-aged married woman with doubts (Rashida Jones) and her rascally womanizing father (Bill Murray) who flies into town and encourages her doubts in order to spend time with her. It’s sweet, sad, and sentimental as the two of them tool around New York City trying to figure out if her husband (Marlon Wayans) is cheating on her. Like a minor B-side to Coppola’s great father/daughter picture Somewhere—where there a womanizing movie star father is slowly, potentially, pulled out of his ennui by taking care of his daughter for a while—this new movie finds the push-and-pull of a warm but contentious familial relationship a source of strength and consternation. Coppola is such an astute observer of human behavior, and finds a dreamy specificity in her pin-prick precise production design, so perfectly right it looks tossed off and casual. Because of this, her airy and breezy approach to a situational comedy of this sort looks easy. It has the cheery rhythms of repartee at half speed, a lived-in prickly warmth between a charmingly disappointing —or disappointingly charming—father and his slightly stressed daughter, whose insecurities surely must come, in part, from her dad’s approach to women. “You can’t live without them,” he says, “but you don’t have to live with them.” He says it not like a punchline, but as a bromide the old fellow has surely dusted off one too many times before. The whole project balances on this sparkling smallness, on subtle turns of phrase and shifts of mood. Here’s a portrait of love, aging, and family that’s sweet and sad. Without pressing down too overtly, it becomes a deceptively light domestic drama hidden just under the quotidian daily routine and dilemmas—drop offs and pick-ups, lunches and dinners, RSVPs and random catch-ups, babysitters and cabs—and the naturally paced development about what lesser hands would escalate to unreal crescendos. Coppola’s a sharp filmmaker, and here finds a generously slight picture of uncomfortably comfortable middle age, its discontents, and its pleasures. No wonder a key recurring image is that of a gifted watch, for the older you get, the more you realize the greatest present you can give someone else is your time.

It's a Wonderful Night: A VERY MURRAY CHRISTMAS

An obvious outlier in Sofia Coppola’s career, A Very Murray Christmas is her shortest (just under an hour) and simplest work. An unserious holiday special caught somewhere between experimental TV and indie trifle – a neither here nor there object appropriately debuted on Netflix, because where else would it fit? – the film finds Bill Murray playing a version of himself. Trapped in the Carlyle hotel in New York City during a Christmas Eve blizzard, he reluctantly trudges downstairs for a live broadcast set up by some barely competent producers. They want him to sing a few carols and grin out at a nonexistent audience. None of the guests have made it through the storm, though one glimpse at the place cards shows that the invites (Pope Francis?) involved more than a little bit of wishful thinking. Murray doesn’t want to go through with it, and gets his wish when the power conks out. This leaves the man free to hang out with Paul Shaffer and wander the hotel. That’s it. Told you it was simple.

Coppola, from a script she co-wrote with Murray and Mitch Glazer (Magic City), makes this her slightest, lightest portrait of loneliness and alienation. It helps that she has both sides of Murray, the public figure, to play with. Here he’s the sad sack clown (the side she used perfectly in her Lost in Translation a dozen years ago) and the unpredictable aloof feel-good meme. He’s almost, but not quite, enjoying himself as he quips and sings songs with people he meets in the hotel – wait staff, chefs, a bride and groom – cheering up their dreary holiday eve with a sparkling low-key charm and cozy impromptu party atmosphere. The joke is that the usual TV Christmas special is artificial connection, a faux-coziness between the stars du jour and the lonely saps at home. But what Murray does when the power goes off, and the few guests huddled in the hotel bar have to stay close for warmth, eat food before it goes bad, and enjoy a few songs together, is real holiday connection between strangers.

Of course, the even bigger joke is that, for all the quiet, hipper-than-the-usual-holiday-variety-show atmosphere, it’s totally a Christmas special. Coppola has smartly cast it with a parade of guests stars playing it small and natural, some in funny cameos as themselves, others playing characters like dotty producers, smarmy agents, sweet assistants, random hotel employees, and the like. (I’d list off a few of the familiar faces, but they’re to a person such lovely surprises and delightful charmers I’d hate to spoil them for you.) There are also plenty of musical numbers, from old standards – “Jingle Bells,” “Let it Snow” – and classic carols – “Silent Night” – to a rousing and moving group sing-along to The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.” The performances are full with eccentric vocals and authentic communal spirit. Cinematographer John Tanzer’s warm photography captures a fireplace glow, and Coppola blocks the performers like she’s finding a close moment in a cozy party. She concludes the film with a few gently silly hallucinated production numbers, then a pleasant breakfast, and one last song. It’s nice.

The project exudes offbeat warmth, curled up with the deep melancholy that can arise when the holidays don’t go as you’d hoped, but content with the excuse to find human connections in unexpected places. The result is the emotional equivalent of the Yule Log video, steady and comforting with only minor variations on its theme throughout. (It’s not too far removed from A Charlie Brown Christmas in affect.) You could throw it on your streaming device and let the soft sounds wash over you for the hour. But it’s also such a lovely bit of filmmaking, simple and yet evocative, a sustained mood piece of people isolated on Christmas slowly building a fleeting sense of holiday community, a fine unassuming bit of whimsy from one of our finest filmmakers. It’s Yuletide magic in a minor key.

Rich Girl Gone Too Far: THE BLING RING

The true story of L.A. teens from comfortably affluent families burglarizing the homes of celebrities is a big fat satirical target, but Sofia Coppola is too empathetic a director to get too savage with her filmmaking. In The Bling Ring she approaches the subject with tenderness and understanding, creating a vivid look into vacuousness. No frivolous froth or hysterical cautionary tale, this is a film that's concerned deeply about shallowness without condescending. (Well, okay, it's more like "rarely condescending.") Even if Coppola takes shots at their societal surroundings, she doesn't knock the kids themselves or the celebrity targets, some, like Paris Hilton, making brief cameos playing themselves. It’s a film that’s often very funny, not because it’s mean-spirited, but because it acknowledges the inherent seriousness of the silliness in which the characters find themselves, a fact that escapes them for much longer than you’d expect.

The film focuses on a group of stylish high schoolers who conflate brand worship with aspiring towards celebrity. They see the kind of famous represented by being a socialite in a dubiously real reality show like The Simple Life or The Hills and access to prestige brands that can be gained by it. Not actual prestige, mind you; the brands are all they’re after. These are kids who live in a town of celebrity and glamour of one kind or another. They spend their lives so close (and yet so far) to the lifestyles of the rich and famous. We see they’re frequently at a club Hilton, Kirsten Dunst and "a producer of Entourage" frequent. This group of kids takes advantage of the proximity of celebrity and the ease of information access to do something so simple it’s amazing no one had thought to take advantage of it before. They’re pioneers of a sort. The addresses of the stars are a Google away, as is news of the celebrity travel plans and social engagements.

At the core of the film are the ringleader (Katie Chang) and the boy (Israel Broussard) who has a crush on her and is drawn into her world. First, she opens unlocked cars and lifts money. Then, she moves on to wandering into the mansions of vacationing classmates. Soon, she, he, and eventually a small group of friends, go on riskier, more frequent trips, loitering in empty homes of Hilton – she’s a favorite – and Lindsay Lohan, Audrina Patridge (a star of The Hills), Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, and Rachel Bilson as well. There’s a sense of mob mentality slowly bubbling up out of group dynamics as the crime escalates with more and more brand-name purses, dresses, shoes, and shades lifted from the target mansions. They’re showing off for each other, grabbing talismans of cultural currency and imagining they have the lifestyles they feel they deserve.

Coppola and her cinematographers Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt (who took over after Savides passed away) take a dynamic, but composed approach to shooting these antics. I particularly loved a static wide shot of a glassed-in home at night, rooms lighting up with the intruders scrambling in. There's little Ocean’s Eleven pleasing fizzle or Bonnie and Clyde tonal whiplash here. Their capers are coldly presented. What at first seems a surprising crime is drained of its surprise through repetition of the act - the home invasions are frequent and similar - and a camera that observes rather than sensationalizes. It’s all shiny surface, shallow, brightly lit by day, by night, vivid montage, the big houses cool oasis in humid darkness. The perspective from which Coppola views the events is easy and restrained, comfortable watching and cataloguing the goings-on. She’s objective, but hardly disinterested. The deceptive emptiness of the filmmaking sometimes makes this a hard film to enjoy, but a rich film to reflect upon.

The camera lingers on logos and representations of behavior. On laptop screens, gossip sites and Facebook converge. The Bling Ring is performing for each other on much the same playing field as celebrities in the public of the Internet. Their posts and their actions are both empty gestures representing tedious lives barely covered by the impression of activity. Even their break-ins lose the transgressive edge. They’re just as bored and purposeless anywhere; burglarizing and partying is all the same to them, shiny surfaces with which they can hide their emptiness. For the most part, the celebrities they rob exhibit similar shallowness, celebrity and lifestyles built solely around conspicuous consumption and living out tabloid fantasy, where what got you famous or infamous isn’t as important as the trappings of fame itself. (Though poor Bloom, Bilson and Fox, working actors, get roped into the mess as well, throwing off the pattern.)

The Bling Ring itself is made up of characters who seem like real kids, with some of the dialogue sounding so true in a you-couldn’t-write-something-so-perfectly-oblivious way that it could be plucked right from depositions and the reality show that a few of them would in real life end up on. The acting is loose and natural. Especially good are Taissa Farmiga, who played the troubled teen in the first season of American Horror Story and Emma Watson, Harry Potter’s Hermione. Used to playing smart young women, they prove themselves more than ever to be smart performers as well. Playing these rich California girls, they let their eyes go blank and accents drawl into Valley Girl stylings. They, as well as the other girls (Claire Julien and George Rock, in their debuts), blend together in the crowd scenes, all of them aspiring to stand out by fitting in. (That old chestnut.) The group is full of performances impressively inhabited. All the kids have a kind a vacant babbling, but it’s not limited to them. A mother played by Leslie Mann, the only one we more than glimpse here, has a pop pseudo-philosophy Secret-inspired homeschooling curriculum built around dream boards, wishful thinking and Adderall.

Coppola's film is an empathetic critique, even when the walls of justice, as represented by cops, lawyers, and judges, close in on the group. What felt consequence free for so long is suddenly not. The character played by Watson gets the last word, her character shamelessly promoting herself right up to the credits, claiming the crimes were a great “learning lesson,” and trying to put in a plug for her website. It had me thinking of Repo Man’s famous death scene of a white suburban punk in which the teen says "I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am." The Bling Ring doesn't allow its characters this satirical insight. Society made them what they are and they'd greedily lap up the attention as long as society would mention them in the same breath as the people from whom they stole. They’re kids for whom being famous is to have your face on TMZ and so infamy gets you just as far.

Lost in Luxury: SOMEWHERE

Johnny Marco lives in a gilded cage, an alienating, distancing prison of wealth and acclaim that creates a glittering backdrop that makes it hard to tell just how big of a celebrity he is. Women throw themselves at him. He attends fawning, vacuous press junkets. He gets a trip to Italy to pick up an award of some kind. And yet there’s the sense that he’s not quite an A-lister. He has all the trappings of fame with all of the consequences but little of the pleasure. His life is a void of true feeling covered over by cheap exhibition. In his hotel room he is visited by strippers with portable poles that they assemble from out of duffle bags, but he falls asleep before they can even get their clothes off.

Like in the suburban nostalgia of The Virgin Suicides, the bewildering tourists’ Tokyo of Lost in Translation, and the walled-off royal baroqueness of Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola uses the Los Angeles of Somewhere to explore the world of the uncomfortably well-off. Some find her detailed patience and quiet poetics misplaced, as if the privileged posses some innate quality that makes them beneath serious contemplation. Are they not people? Their problems may seem trivial – after all, so many in this world would love to suffer from such shimmering ennui – but the emotions underneath are anything but.

Somewhere is a film of closed loops, empty patterns of behavior in enclosed spaces. Though located mostly in and around Los Angeles, specifically in the famous Chateau Marmont, its hotel suites could be located anywhere. During that trip to Italy, Marco essentially trades in one suite for another. The biggest difference is in the native language spoken by the staff. The interiors of the film are often stifling in their lack of specificity and in the sense that the walls are closing in. Luxurious hotel rooms, heated pools, chilly ice rinks, molds for masks, expensive cars. This is a film that is physically about being enclosed yet travelling in endless circles, a motif revealed in the opening shot with a luxury car driving in wide, repetitive circles. The end of the film parks a car on the side of a highway somewhere. At least we’ve made some kind progress.

The biggest shift in Marco’s life during this film is the arrival of his eleven-year-old daughter, Cleo. At first their relationship proves to be lovingly stilted, but after a phone call from her mother, his estranged ex, Cleo ends up staying much longer than he expected. This is no cheap emotional journey to be sketched out, though. The appearance of an innocent into a world of casual decadence doesn’t so much soften Marco or immediately cause him to rethink his life as it provides a healthy contrast to the women in his life. Grown women reveal themselves to him, proposition him, flirt with him, and leave him angry text messages after their flings have long turned out to be just that. His daughter is not grown. She bristles at some of her father’s ways, glowering across the breakfast table at him after an unexpected overnight guest has appeared. But Cleo also views him with some degree of admiration, wants to impress him. She performs her ice skating routine. She shows off her swimming skills. She orders raw ingredients from room service to cook for him. In many ways she is more mature than his casual partners, but despite being both motherly and enabling, she is still just a child, immature, questioning, judgmental.

The big story here is not how father and daughter change each other but rather how they grow to feel at ease with each other. They grow comfortable together. When they are forced, by film’s end, to part ways, returning for some undefined period to life as it was before, there is a feeling of a fragile, lovely stillness slid suddenly apart. We had watched them interact with greater ease. They had collapsed into the backseat of an Italian limousine wearing matching stylish sunglasses. She rested her head on his shoulder while an Angelino hotel employee serenaded them, easing into a beautifully ordinary moment of familial connection. They sat side-by-side poolside, basking in the warm sun as the camera pulled back, revealing the perfection of their own still little world. What is to become of them now? The future seems to be half agony, half hope.

Coppola trusts her actors to sell such subtle material, to fit smoothly and seamlessly into her tone, her methodical cinematic poetry, and her beautifully arranged, delicately composed shots from the great cinematographer Harris Savides. As Johnny Marco, Stephen Dorff, best known for his roles in schlock like the mid-90’s Wesley-Snipes-fights-vampires movie Blade, gives a career best performance, a wonderfully expressive state of emotional openness. As his daughter Cleo, Elle Fanning (Dakota’s little sister) is luminous in a finely wrought and deftly displayed portrait of pre-teen precariousness. These two performers act a duet, carrying the film more or less by themselves, a feat especially moving amidst Coppola’s confident minimalism. The film is about stasis but it’s never inert; it manages to be about the emptiness of going in circles without ever feeling empty. It’s spellbinding, as precise and bewitching as a gorgeous, hushed, richly textured poem or a powerfully, closely observed trance of splendid, musical melancholy.