There’s No There There

Many have criticized Sofia Coppola’s latest directorial effort, Somewhere.  In this film her flaws as a director have become too magnified, too blown up.  They are Godzilla-sized and they are taking over the film, knocking down buildings; so that it is no longer its own entity, but rather, an extended study of the mistakes Sofia Coppola makes.

This is not so much a movie as it is a long commercial for isolation, just as Marie Antoinette was little more than a two-hour photo shoot for VOGUE.  A.O. Scott offered an extremely forgiving review of Marie Antoinette as “a tableau of mood and atmosphere.”  He called the film “highly theatrical and yet also intimate and informal” and suggested it “lets its story slink almost casually through its lovingly composed and rendered images.”  See? Forgiving.

All of the same may be said for Somewhere, though, in this case, I forgive nothing.  Coppola relies too heavily on the environments that she selects to do her work for her.  A place can play a character, but it cannot create atmosphere or plot out of buildings and fauna.

Marie Antoinette was little more than a moving sketch of Bernard Sumner’s Versailles.  Scott wrote: “Like Hollywood – which it resembles in some interesting and hardly accidental particulars – Versailles is a place with an aura and power of its own, with an almost mystical ability to warp the lives of those who, by accident or choice, come to dwell on its grounds.”

Yes, yes, Hollywood is potent.  It can do all these things, but it cannot compose a script, it cannot set up a shot or give line-readings.  No, that is the job of a filmmaker.  Yes, Sofia, did you hear that?  Making a film is a job – it takes work.

If Somewhere possesses any merit, it’s as a delicate, pitch-perfect portrait of the Chateau Marmont, the quintessential Hollywood icon: a ghost of the past, an effigy of the present, and a mirage of the future, all in one.  Somewhere’s few-and-far-between entertaining bits come when Coppola winks at those of us familiar with the hotel’s debauched legacy: a car wreck in the driveway is a tribute to Helmut Newton, Benicio Del Toro’s cameo strikes a chord of hilarity if you remember the rumor that he schtupped Scarlett Johansson in the elevator.

The history and heartbeat of this hotel are fare more interesting than Coppola’s adolescent stabs at movie magic make-believe.  Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay McInerney have all slept in its shabfest beds.  Nathanael West actually wrote every single word of “Day of the Locust” at the Chateau Marmont. Two words: Lindsay. Lohan.

One of the most brilliant authors writing today, A.M. Homes, wrote an entire book about Chateau, titled Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill.  About it she says, “Being at the Chateau is like being in a place that exists out of reality, a sacred place, like a church.  And it is like not just any church, not just another California mission, it is the church – Our Los Angeles Lady of Creativity.”

If you are curious about Chateau, as you should be – it is the source of endless fascination, speculation, and paparazzi flashbulb pops – read the book, don’t go see the movie.

Somebody needs to tell Francis that Take Your Daughter to Work Day is over.