Somewhere

Sofia Coppola's 2010 film Somewhere begins with a sports car doing laps around a circle, an apt metaphor for the driver, a movie star named Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff). He travels a lot, but he doesn't really go anywhere. Most of the time he lives in a fancy hotel, barely alive, seemingly without a hint of introspection.

Somewhere is an attractive but unsatisfactory film. It's really a movie about ennui, which is tough to pull off without putting an audience to sleep. I didn't fall asleep, but I was amazed at how slow-paced it was, and how long some of the takes are. The film is 97 minutes long, but there's only about 3o minutes of actual action. Coppola, in the supplemental materials, said she was unconcerned with such things as story line. Well, that's brave, but bravery alone is not enough.

The film lacks other things besides a plot. Dorff's character is really a non-entity, who has almost nothing interesting to say. Perhaps he's based on someone Coppola knows, but it's clearly not on someone with any special wit or charm. Most of what we see Dorff doing is staring off into space, or deciding whether to bed a woman. We get not one but two scenes of him watching twin pole-dancers perform for him in his room (if this were really a Hollywood story, they would have been naked).

The only thing that gives this film any juice is when Dorff's daughter (Elle Fanning) arrives for visits. She gives a guileless, absolutely winning performance. The plot doesn't really advance--we see them play Rock Band, she makes eggs Benedict, they go on a trip to Milan and attend an awards show, they go to Las Vegas, but it all doesn't add up to much. They care for each other, but there's no real conflict involved. Fanning's mother, who has some sort of problem, leaves her in Dorff's care for a while, and the girl is concerned her mother isn't coming back, but that's about all the drama this film has.

This is Coppola's third film in a row about someone who essentially lives in a hotel (Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, and Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, where Versailles was a special kind of hotel). Clearly that interests her, and the hotel here, the Chateau Marmont, which sits atop the Sunset Strip like a sentinel of old Hollywood, is almost a character in the film. The concept of living in a place like that, where everything is available with just a phone call, must interest Coppola, but Dorff's character is so blank a slate that it's hard to get involved. Only at the end of the film does he have any insight, and at that stage it's too late.

Given Coppola's pedigree, I imagine there's a lot of verisimilitude in this film, but that doesn't make it gripping. A movie about an interesting bad-boy actor, like Robert Downey Jr., would have been far more interesting.