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Handsome middle-aged man, tired, just good-looking enough but definitely lonely, enters stage left and asks the audience to feel for him, to side with him, maybe even fall for him. It’s a bit of an entertainment trope of late what with the Hank Moody’s of the world uniting under one arching dramatization of the male mid-life moral and existential crisis, complicated by quotidian things like sex, drugs, family, and fame. Sofia Coppola’s latest filmic endeavor, Somewhere, is one of these attempts to present the audience with a story of someone a little bit distasteful, and make them palatable, even charming.
Somewhere’s story centers around Johnny Marco, an aging A-list movie star who, lucky for him, has maintained his boyish good looks despite an increasingly drained outlook. Tucked away in L.A.’s legendary Chateau Marmont, our protagonist is privy to a revolving door of superficial enjoyment and unfulfilling indulgence. Two pole dancers perform personal routines as he dozes off to sleep, hopeful, admiring actors sing his praises at parties, and the female guest downstairs offers him a mid-morning flash just because. But somewhere along the way – we never know when – all of it has lost its appeal.
What we don’t, however, understand is why Johnny feels this way. Since the slice of life we are presented with is Johnny’s slow-churning realization that his life has no meaning, we can safely assume he has been ambling along this empty path for a long time now. Despite this implication, he doesn’t appear to be a character with a particularly engaging story, notwithstanding the quietly brilliant performance by Stephen Dorff (perfectly cast by Coppola).
What the film does do quite well is paint us a picture of what life might really be like for this burnt-out celebrity. The film’s pacing – so consciously slow, even at times sluggish and strained – is hard to stomach but overall works to emphasize the content. “Form following content”: that’s a step in the direction towards artistic greatness, isn’t it? (At least that’s what my Fiction professors always said). For example, Coppola films Johnny showering, a scene which is long, drawn out, with no music, no flash, or style: just the water streaming down his head and his broken, in-cast arm held awkwardly out of water’s reach. The tedium is palpable – and at times, uncomfortable for the viewer – this is the point. The opening scene is of a sport car, driven by Marco, circling a racetrack over, and over again. We hear the roar of the car as the engine revs, and then the faded deceleration as he circles off around the far loop, only to repeat the pattern again and again. This happens upwards of five times – by the fourth, I had gotten the point. As a first scene – where the mood, tone, and attention of the movie traditionally ought to be set – it is effective, but difficult.
Throughout the film, there are no stylistic bells and whistles, no dreamy sun-flairs and beautifully diaphanous costumes like in Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), no foreign places to appeal to our wanderlust (like in 2003’s Lost in Translation). There is, however, the attractive cast, the almost startlingly current dialogue topics (which I’m having trouble remembering; maybe that says something? In any case, I do remember chuckling), and the California sunshine and celebrity-element. But to a fan of Coppola’s past work, Somewhere is without a doubt challenging. But no matter, I sat myself up straight, blinked my eyes a few times extra, and watched – and good thing, because it does get better.
To save Marco (and the audience a bit too) is his adolescent daughter, Cleo, played with wit and charisma by Elle Fanning. The ice-skating subplot is a bit odd, but ultimately works well to represent a different kind of beauty in Johnny’s life – a beauty of an introspective, quiet quality that has without a doubt been mostly absent. A surprise lift of the entertainment value is delivered by MTV’s Jackass alum, Chris Pontius, as Johnny’s brother. He is lovable in a sloppy dog kind of way, and his interactions with Cleo are some of the movie’s most pleasant and inviting.
Perhaps it is because our sense and understanding of Hollywood and celebrity is so over-swollen with association and expectation that Dorff’s subtle performance fails to pull at our heartstrings. We cannot help but place real-life celebrities in his place, and I even found myself wondering who this Marco guy might have been based off of. In the end, I was not able to fulfill that longing, which is I think a testament to Marco’s uniqueness, but maybe not his relevance. But the fact that I was searching outside of the film’s content for answers makes me feel that the story presented to us in Somewhere is not quite enough. Marco isn’t a flat character, but he is also not fully fleshed out. And when he stacks up against the developed, perfectly scaled character of David Duchovny’s Hank Moody in Showtime’s Californication, Marco seems a bit pathetic. Read: Poor celebrity with ruined marriage and disillusioned daughter realizes, without amusement or ensuing chaos, the fault in his ways, but is not sure how to change. In that simple storyline, the act that leads him to this realization, or maybe what he does once he has come to terms with the realization, is what might be the two most engaging threads. Instead, we are presented only with Marco’s slowly grasped awareness that he has no real purpose in life. It’s a genuinely heavy-hitting thought, a grown-up, widely applicable idea, but it does not quite succeed at delivering all the weight. In any case, Coppola’s art is without a doubt of a more understated slant, and it is easy to expect more when we are used to such an accosting of our senses at all times. I would say that Somewhere is a movie that will benefit from watching it a few times over, in your home, perhaps sitting on your floor, ruminating the scenes and interactions.
Throughout the length of the movie, Coppola focuses oddly on Marco’s car. To name a few scenes: that opening sequence at the racetrack, various shots that situate the camera inside the interior of the bumping vehicle as Marco stares ahead, and long shots filmed from behind the car as Marco drives passively in the right lane, behind a line of other drivers. As a metaphor, we are able to understand that for much of his life Johnny has been given all of the vehicles to get places, meet people, do things – and yet, he has failed to step out on his own, breathe it in, and take meaning from his undeniably lucky, albeit isolating, perhaps dissociative lot in life. The end scene is no question a bit melodramatic, but call me a sentimentalist when I say that it left a twinkle in my eye. Sure, we may not get it, but at least we have a feeling that Johnny Marco finally might.
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