![]() Sofia Coppola is a gifted director: she has clear and present control over mood and milieu she gets the performance she wants out of Dorff and a much more endearing and revealing turn from Fanning. The particular anecdotes Coppola chooses to spotlight, the filmmaking that makes us lean towards it rather than being battered by obviousness - these all lift the film above the usual Hollywood bummer. We sense a vague chumminess between them but not love it’s as if they’re both holding back because they both know Johnny can’t really love.įairly or not, I would classify Somewhere as interesting, yet boring. At some points in the movie, he hangs out with his eleven-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning), who already seems more developed as a person than Johnny is. But we felt that Murray’s Bob Harris, similarly adrift in a foreign land, had desires, however unacknowledged or unspoken. ![]() It’s possible, of course, that there’s more going on in Murray as an actor than there is in Dorff. This was not true of Bill Murray’s character in Lost in Translation, Coppola’s previous run around this track of celebrity disengagement. ![]() He’s the opposite of a diva - he doesn’t want anything. Sometimes eager women present themselves to him, sometimes not. Johnny just drifts through his days and nights. Dorff isn’t bad in the role, but Coppola’s conception gives him precious little to project. As Johnny Marco, a movie star wandering from his hiding place at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont to Italy and back again, Stephen Dorff is as much a zombie as any movie creature that ever munched on brains. Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere not only depicts a man in the throes of Antoniennui but suffers from it itself. “Antoniennui.” That’s the waggish term that Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris coined to describe the frozen alienation in the work of Michelangelo Antonioni.
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