Somewhere

Studio: Focus Features
Sofia Coppola

Dec 21, 2010 By Lauren Barbato

There's a familiarity about Sofia Coppola's Somewhere that's both intoxicating and exhausting. Days spent behind a pair of Ray Bans at the hotel pool, nights wasted away smoking on outdoor balconies, and one neon billboard after the next hovering over the wide streets of Los Angeles—the grainy sequences that play on repeat form a listless freedom that manifests, at some point, in most adult lives. Routine is what Coppola is going for here—the metaphor in place from the opening frames of a sleek Ferrari zooming around a desert track devoid of a pinpointed start or end—and routine is what we get.

A quick glance at the film's synopsis raises the eyebrows of Sofia skeptics: A-list actor Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff)—a womanizer who leads a lifestyle tailored for tabloid fodder at his permanent residence at the famed Chateau Marmont, a West Hollywood hotel that has housed the likes of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe in its glory days—is handed a reality check when he must take on his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) for an indefinite amount of time. Johnny's profession, the hotel setting, and the "two people trying to figure life out" premise bear close resemblance to Lost in Translation, Coppola's 2003 sleeper hit that garnered the auteur an Oscar of Best Original Screenplay. It's not an entirely lazy assumption, especially when several scenes—Cleo swimming laps in an indoor pool, Johnny accepting an award at an outlandish foreign award show, and an awkward morning-after breakfast that has Cleo shooting Johnny the same sharp-as-daggers looks that Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte directed at Bill Murray's Bob after his night with the lounge singer—seem lifted entirely from Lost in Translation. One can't help but think we haven't seen this all before.

But Coppola doesn't so much tell a story by conventional means as much as she creates a mood for her audience to ingest, and in her fourth cinematic effort, the atmosphere is at once her most dormant yet poignant. Unlike Lost in Translation, which had a comedic touch that lingered throughout, the humor in Somewhere is sparse, saved for several gags, such as Johnny passing out between a woman's legs. In its place is a haunting sense that connection is fleeting and intangible, clearly embodied in Cleo, who's neither a co-pilot or catalyst for Johnny but merely another peripheral player that passes through his life. They only connect on the most shallow levels, whether through rounds of Guitar Hero or carefree drives on Sunset Boulevard, yet it's evident Cleo has years on Johnny when it comes to balance and order. Her wealth of maturity is continually unappreciated, hitting Johnny only when his life spins further into the ground; Johnny's emotional beats are always—and unnervingly—a little too late.

Despite their minimal dialogue, Johnny and Cleo are great studies in acting for Dorff and Fanning, providing them with the chance to explore the subtleties of their characters through glances, activity, and the rare scenes that unfold in real time. The dialogue, however, is desperately underwritten at times where the visuals are the most vivid in color yet hollow in substance. These characters have more to say rather than feel, but Coppola is just not letting them.

But the thing about Somewhere is that it reads as a personal poem—both a love letter and an elegy to a privileged life led in the great, white light of Hollywood. It's commentary without the message, a splice of an empty life that has a desire to be filled but no direction or energy to do so. As a movie, however, the audience feels as disengaged as Johnny.

Perhaps this is because Coppola focused on the wrong character. The young, hopeful light in Cleo is the essence of the film, and it's most intriguing to watch it wane as she struggles with the fickle love from her mother, vies for her father's attention, and strives to make sense of this world on the verge of her womanhood. Johnny might be too stagnant to keep the film adrift, but Cleo instills a sense of purpose in the aimlessness. She's the life less inspected, but the one worth the examination.

Somewhere is a striking mark of Coppola's deft filmmaking, but she has become a slave to her relentless vision. She's at a crossroads of sorts, attempting to reconcile her recycled ideology with her stunningly refreshing style, and whichever road she choses will have her most devout fans and passionate critics on edge until her next project.

It's with that same uncertainty that we stick by Johnny: We're not sure where Johnny's heading at the end of the film, but we'll join him on the ride just because that's sometimes the unfortunate circumstance of life: a series of moments, neither memorable or regrettable, that never truly find their meaning.