Somewhere

Though very much of a piece with her previous films, Somewhere finds Sofia Coppola pushing her signature aesthetic of moody long takes and dreamy disconnection to even greater extremes than such earlier works as Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette. The camera lingers longer, and its gaze is sometimes harder—though not so hard that our ambivalence toward her protagonists’ self-destructive behavior overwhelms our sympathy for his drift into nameless ennui. Indeed, Coppola’s ability to find the emotional resonance in her verbally circumspect characters remains one of her great strengths as a filmmaker, attuning us to their fragile emotional wavelengths through a patient track-in or the perfectly-timed swelling of a pop song. Somewhere reflects a further blossoming of her reticent, observational style.

As with many of Coppola’s protagonists, Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) lives a privileged existence, an aging but still viable movie star shacked up at the famed Chateau Marmont. Though not literally displaced like Bill Murray’s sad-sack actor adrift in Tokyo or Kirsten Dunst’s eponymous French royalty thrust into a life of carefully-orchestrated luxury, Johnny nevertheless seems divorced from his own life: wiling away his days about town, heavily boozing at some nighttime party, and usually ending the evening in bed with women whose names he will probably not recall in the morning. Coppola has been accused by some of wallowing in her characters’ moneyed indolence, more concerned with décor than depth. There’s no denying that her camera often comes to rest on the sights and sounds of the good life, but she almost always draws a distinction between the spontaneous pleasures of leisure (more on those later) and the well-appointed but hollow spaces that so often define her characters’ state of melancholy indecision.

Largely foregoing more fluid handheld work for a stationary camera, Coppola frames the Chateau Marmont as a kind of manicured purgatory. She and her terrific DP Harris Savides (who brought a wonderfully hazy, laid-back look to Noah Baumbach’s LA-set Greenberg earlier this year) give these early scenes a slightly harsh look, with hotel rooms lit by single yellow bulbs and empty hallways darkened by mid-afternoon shadows. Coppola views these spaces with a cool eye, and the same can be said of Somewhere’s depiction on Johnny, so indolent in these early scenes that he appears to be sinking into the furniture he regularly plops himself down on out of boredom or inebriation. His casual womanizing, too, is seen through a tartly skeptical lens, no more so than in the twin sequences of two blonde pole dancers performing a serviceable if pedestrian routine in Johnny’s hotel room as he listlessly watches from his bed. We watch the entirety of both acts, our laughter marinating into something sadder and more desolate. (Never one to miss the memorable detail, Coppola ends the first scene with the women breaking down their portable poles and placing them carefully into travel bags.)

But once Johnny’s 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) comes for a visit, things begin to look up for Johnny. Like much of the exposition in Coppola’s screenplay, Cleo and Johnny’s relationship is revealed through elliptical glimpses rather than explicit dialogue. We sense an easy rapport between them, but also a cautiousness brought on by assumed post-divorce distance. (A brief look between Johnny and his ex-wife quietly reveals the lingering regret and ambivalence that has leaked into his relationship with their daughter.)  But Cleo’s presence also brings out a playfulness and warmth in Johnny, beginning in a remarkably tender sequence in which Johnny watches Cleo practice her ice-skating routine to the strains of Gwen Stefani’s “Cool”. Consisting of little more than pans to follow Cleo on the ice and reactions shots of Johnny gazing on with a mixture of pride and surprise, it emanates the kind of intangible yearning that marks the best sequences in Coppola’s career.

Cleo ends up staying for a longer-than-expected visit with Johnny while her mother briefly leaves town for unspecified reasons, and much of Somewhere simply shows Johnny and Cleo hanging out: playing Guitar Hero in his hotel room; traveling to Italy as part of his new film’s press junket; lounging in bed with a sampling of gelatos. Like Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s adventures around Tokyo in Lost in Translation, these vignettes don’t lead anywhere in particular but are written and filmed with an eye for the small delights of wasting the day away. And just as we are aware of Murray and Johansson’s imminent return to their respective lives (and, on a more macabre note, what awaits Kirsten Dunst’s doomed monarch in Marie Antoinette), the finite amount of time that Johnny and Cleo have together lends these sequences a very specific kind of poignancy: the small ache you feel when the sun starts to set on a perfect summer afternoon. The element of divorce adds a further wrinkle to these days of lay-about fun. There’s always the sense that Johnny is attempting to make up for past sins, hoping that one more dip in the pool or video-game romp might right a relationship that is full of affection but will always be shadowed by inchoate hurt.

It’s one of Somewhere’s great strengths that Cleo and Johnny’s relationship doesn’t fall into predictable patterns of bickering and making-up, but rather settles into a more nuanced depiction of parental failings and childhood acceptance. Occasional blips pop up, the most touching being Cleo’s look of silent disappointment when Johnny’s one-night stand joins them at the hotel breakfast table the following morning. But Coppola steers away from cooked-up conflict to a remarkable extent, eschewing contrived drama for the quiet accumulation of character detail and emotional complexity.

Indeed, if there is a flaw in Somewhere, it lies in the film’s third-act turn toward a somewhat more standard-issue character arc for Johnny. To say more would be revealing too much, but let’s just say that the car that Johnny is seen driving in aimless circles at the film’s outset returns as a none-too-subtle visual metaphor for his own emotional state. Yet if these developments disappoint on some level, they also satisfy because of how skillfully Dorff and Fanning have sketched this complicated father-daughter bond. Fanning possesses a quiet thoughtfulness that never overshadows the adolescent gawkiness that makes her Cleo so endearing. Dorff, meanwhile, has probably never been better than he is here. With a haggard face and eyes filled with mystified regret, his depiction of a good-hearted man lost in a morass of bad decisions is moving precisely because he never elicits your pity. Their on-screen chemistry is among the richest of any two actors this year, never more so than when they are sitting together peacefully, not saying a word. Lucky for us, Coppola knows that it’s these moments of silence and stillness that speak volumes.

                                            Matt Connolly