Review

Review Date: 23-January-11
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Somewhere (2010)

Sofia Coppola's fourth movie, Somewhere, might leave some viewers feeling that it goes nowhere. Built around a nugget of an idea, it follows a Hollywood movie star named Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) as he meanders through his strange, listless existence and then reaches a conclusion about it. There are long stretches when nothing happens, or nothing more than Johnny smoking a cigarette, Johnny drinking a beer, Johnny driving his sports car, or, most numbingly, Johnny sitting in a make-up artist's chair waiting for a face mold to dry. He goes where his agent, a disembodied voice over the phone, tells him to go. His needs are taken care of by willing others. Women throw themselves at him, and sometimes he hires exotic dancers to entertain him in his hotel room (the only home he has), but sex seems as routine to him as everything else. He experiences bursts of life only when his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) comes to visit, bringing a child's energy and affection. These visits finally point him towards his conclusion.

Although the molasses pace of Somewhere unnerved me, it didn't take long before I felt immersed in the atmosphere of the story. Watching Johnny's ennui, well expressed by Dorff's attractive but vacuous face, I was able to appreciate the irony of his situation. Here he is, doing nothing that holds meaning for himself or anyone else, while the rest of the world envies or adulates him as a rich and famous star who has it all. Coppola finds humor in this, as when a reporter asks Johnny how he keeps fit when we know he has a beer gut and exercises only by bedding women whose names he doesn't know. Yet Coppola also likes her subject enough to allow him a good look at himself. And through witnessing this process of self-reflection, however slow, I came to like him too.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.