Sofia Coppola’s new film, “Somewhere,” (David Denby’s review of which, in the magazine, is available to subscribers) is No. 3 in my best-of-the-year list. There, I call it “one of the most radical films ever made in Hollywood, if the root of the cinema is the conjuring of inner life through outer particulars.” The story concerns a dissolute movie star, Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), whose riotous life at the Chateau Marmont is disrupted by the arrival of his eleven-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning). Most of the drama, such as it is, concerns their fluctuating emotions and moods, and Coppola conjures them with a calm, clear, contemplative attention to their behavior, their surroundings, their very presence. The entire film seems internalized: at the same time as the shots show a reality accessible to all, they seem wrenched from the psyches of the characters.
Which is to say that it’s an intensely emotional film—a story of father and daughter that evokes a rare delight in ordinary togetherness that never yields to the maudlin. The emotion is evoked not by the actors emoting intensely but by exquisite, even preternatural, control of tone, mood, and detail. When Johnny takes Cleo to her ice-skating lesson, he sits alone in the stands and texts on his telephone until, looking up, he finds himself blissfully captivated by his daughter’s performance—which Coppola films, from Johnny’s perspective, with a visual composition that reveals the sport in a way that’s never done on television, and that conveys, in an utterly personal way, the tenderness and pride that, for all of its distinctiveness, is the happy lot of all devoted fathers.
It’s worth noting that the rapturous moment is set up by the wide shot, of Johnny and Cleo emerging from his car at the rink, that does more than to situate them in place—it conjures the tension of banality and wonder that is the essence of the movie. And that tension is, in its essence, comic: when Marco, injured and bored, languishes in bed and watches a pair of pole dancers performing for him in his hotel room, the scene is capped by the dancers folding up their clanking lengths of pole; when Johnny does a publicity photo with an actress, he’s seen standing on a little riser; when Johnny takes Cleo on his Milan junket and they’re put up in a hotel suite reminiscent of a royal palace, absurdity and delight blend in a way that restores them to a child’s vision—as proven, soon thereafter, both by the sweet moments that father and daughter share there and by the acerbic turn that follows, when Cleo meets the woman whom Johnny beds.
A child of the cinema, Sofia Coppola captures the ironies of the star’s life—the contrast between public persona and private life, and the distortion of the former by the latter. The calm and capable Cleo has learned to keep an eye out for cars that might be following theirs (and even to write down license plates); Johnny’s activities are sustained by a crew of studio personnel who seem, in effect, to be directing him even far from a set. A magnificent scene that, in other hands, could have proven blandly symbolic, here gains its full resonance from the audacious calm with which Coppola films it: the drying of a rubber mask base that covers Johnny’s whole head.
The strange thing about movie stardom—a fact that Coppola dramatizes better than anyone ever has—is that it isn’t due to study or training. No theatre actor was ever plucked from the counter of a drugstore; the face that the camera loves is a wonder of nature. Johnny’s appeal to an endless parade of women and adulation by fawning men owes little to his character and everything to his stardom, and he knows it—and he knows that whatever accounts for his stardom is a happy accident, and he appears, throughout the film, as more or less what he is: a winner of the genetic lottery, the recipient of a lucrative bounty that has had strange effects on his life, effects that he hardly has the analytically introspective qualities to cope with and that, perhaps most grievously, he hasn’t sought to channel into his work.
Coppola, however, has done so. Her film captures this sense of wonder and of estrangement from self; Johnny tools around town in a Ferrari, and the very views of Los Angeles that we get from the car have a floating feeling; I emerged from the theatre feeling as if I had just been cruising around in a high-powered vehicle for an hour and a half, experiencing a strangely original ride through familiar grounds, a peculiar and delightful blend of the grippingly concrete and the dreamily abstracted. More than any filmmaker in Hollywood, Coppola looks around and films what she sees; it’s that forthright affirmation of what a camera is made for that enables her to reach such heights of inner experience.
