This film is a director's film. It is a film created from tone and imagery and the way they combine with the characters to form a visual story. It's not a perfect directorial effort for Sophia Coppola, but a fascinating one. She meticulously watches her characters and brings us into their world. It's a world we think we might know, but this is not the glamorized version. It's a Hollywood story told from an insider who does not have Hollywood sensibilities.
Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff, BLADE) is an international movie star. He lives at the Chateau Marmont, the legendary hotel hideaway of Hollywood stars. He is lonely and lost. He goes to parties. He gets drunk. He breaks his arm. He hires twin strippers to come to his room and perform pole dances. He sleeps with random women. He passes out. It all receives the same blank reaction. The only thing that seems to make him even break a smile is his tweenaged daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning, SUPER 8). But then he doesn't really know her at all.
Cleo's mom needs to disappear for a while, so she dumps the girl on Johnny. He takes her to her ice skating class, which he didn't know she had been doing for the last three years. When he needs to go to Italy to receive an award, he drags her along. As he talks to reports, she gets dumped off in the lobby. She takes it in stride even though she is hiding fears deep inside.
Johnny is like a boat without a rudder. If someone else weren't pushing him in various directions he would run up among the weeds and just stay there. Publicists wake him up and send cars to take him to press conferences where he can barely muster a few words to answer the questions. When an aspiring actor asks him about his acting method, he just says he got an agent and got some parts and that's it. It's hard to see anything that he cares about.
Coppola sees Johnny clearly. She is not interested in ramping up the drama. She is interested in attempting to tell the truth. This isn't a cutesy fairy tale where the precocious young girl changes her selfish dad's life. There are good moments and then a bad moment can happen the next morning. Even good moments have bad moments.
Coppola lets her camera linger, sometimes too long. The opening shot has Johnny racing his expensive sports car around a track again and again. It reminded me of the endless opening scene in Vincent Gallo's self-indulgent BROWN BUNNY. Not a great film to have your film compared to, I know, but unlike Gallo, who purposely obscured his point till the very end, Coppola presents her characters and doesn't try to hide her intentions. The meaning is to watch a depressed soul, which every outsider would say has everything, walk through life like a zombie. Fame is not all it's cracked up to be.
Johnny's sports car serves as an interesting metaphor for the actor. He drives around L.A. paranoid that the paparazzi is following him. I say, "Drive a Honda then." Despite being expensive, the car breaks down and we fear that is where it's owner is headed too. Like the opening shot, Johnny is driving in circles, going nowhere. By the end of the film we hope that he finds somewhere to go.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
