Cast: Stephen Dorff, Michelle Monaghan, Elle Fanning, Chris Pontius
‘Somewhere’ opens with a fixed shot of our protagonist – fatigued film star Johnny Marco (Dorff) – driving his sports car round and round in circles in the middle of the dusty Californian desert, alone. The film goes on to show Johnny dealing with the trials and tribulations of being a world-famous single father living in a hotel with legions of ‘hangers-on’ and nowhere to go. But that simple opening shot haunts the entire film with its stripped-down purity… what is anybody doing in Los Angeles if not driving round and round in circles in the middle of the dusty California desert, alone?
The Chateau Marmont on Sunset Blvd. is the crumbling, nicotine-stained crypt of a bygone age… the perfect home for our hopeless hero. Johnny lives in room 59, a room with an unused kitchen and plenty of space in the bedroom for strippers to erect their mobile poles. His “best friend” Sammy (Pontius) organises exclusive get-togethers almost every evening; and to the vacuous socialites and desperate actors that gain entry, this lonely man’s hotel room is the coolest place in town.
The only person to whom our pampered film star has any responsibility is his 11-year-old daughter Chloe (Fanning). So when his ex-wife (Monaghan) takes off and leaves him to look after the girl, the scene is set for a classic tale where the “sassy-kid-teaches-her-useless-dad-a-thing-or-two-about-adulthood.’ But Coppola never even entertains this clichéd idea. Chloe is a nervous pre-teen who adores her father; he doesn’t have the sense to hide his drinking and womanising habits from her, and she doesn’t have the guts to call him up on it.
This is not so much a dramatic narrative as a portrait of an artist as a young(ish) man. It is a story reminding us that stories don’t really exist, and not even movie stars in Hollywood are living the fairytale lives we see on screen. “Nothing ever really happens to anyone, and nobody ever really changes.” This isn’t a hopeful or nuanced point – and it certainly lacks the poetry of ‘Lost In Translation’, where another hopeless actor found some form of spiritual enlightenment through his relationship with a younger female – but it is a point well made by Coppola.
There aren’t many filmmakers who can embrace silence and inactivity and somehow imbue it with a mischievous sense of ‘saying something’. Michael Haneke is the indisputable master of leaving a camera staring at nothing and yet never allowing our senses to calm down. When our senses are starved of the barrage of information they come to expect while sitting in a darkened room with popcorn, they suddenly become alive to the possibilities of silence, the exciting ambiguity and anticipation of ‘nothingness’. Coppola is comfortable doing the same thing; the opening shot is a clear statement of intent, but another excellent example is a painfully slow zoom-in on Johnny as he sits in a make-up chair waiting for the mould that covers his entire head to dry. Encased in a waxy mausoleum, entombed with his own thoughts, the viewer eventually happens upon a terrifying possibility… what if Johnny isn’t thinking anything at all? What if too many years of stardom have switched his brain to standby mode?
‘Somewhere’ opens with a fixed shot of our protagonist – fatigued film star Johnny Marco (Dorff) – driving his sports car round and round in circles in the middle of the dusty Californian desert, alone. The film goes on to show Johnny dealing with the trials and tribulations of being a world-famous single father living in a hotel with legions of ‘hangers-on’ and nowhere to go. But that simple opening shot haunts the entire film with its stripped-down purity… what is anybody doing in Los Angeles if not driving round and round in circles in the middle of the dusty California desert, alone?
The Chateau Marmont on Sunset Blvd. is the crumbling, nicotine-stained crypt of a bygone age… the perfect home for our hopeless hero. Johnny lives in room 59, a room with an unused kitchen and plenty of space in the bedroom for strippers to erect their mobile poles. His “best friend” Sammy (Pontius) organises exclusive get-togethers almost every evening; and to the vacuous socialites and desperate actors that gain entry, this lonely man’s hotel room is the coolest place in town.
The only person to whom our pampered film star has any responsibility is his 11-year-old daughter Chloe (Fanning). So when his ex-wife (Monaghan) takes off and leaves him to look after the girl, the scene is set for a classic tale where the “sassy-kid-teaches-her-useless-dad-a-thing-or-two-about-adulthood.’ But Coppola never even entertains this clichéd idea. Chloe is a nervous pre-teen who adores her father; he doesn’t have the sense to hide his drinking and womanising habits from her, and she doesn’t have the guts to call him up on it.
This is not so much a dramatic narrative as a portrait of an artist as a young(ish) man. It is a story reminding us that stories don’t really exist, and not even movie stars in Hollywood are living the fairytale lives we see on screen. “Nothing ever really happens to anyone, and nobody ever really changes.” This isn’t a hopeful or nuanced point – and it certainly lacks the poetry of ‘Lost In Translation’, where another hopeless actor found some form of spiritual enlightenment through his relationship with a younger female – but it is a point well made by Coppola.
There aren’t many filmmakers who can embrace silence and inactivity and somehow imbue it with a mischievous sense of ‘saying something’. Michael Haneke is the indisputable master of leaving a camera staring at nothing and yet never allowing our senses to calm down. When our senses are starved of the barrage of information they come to expect while sitting in a darkened room with popcorn, they suddenly become alive to the possibilities of silence, the exciting ambiguity and anticipation of ‘nothingness’. Coppola is comfortable doing the same thing; the opening shot is a clear statement of intent, but another excellent example is a painfully slow zoom-in on Johnny as he sits in a make-up chair waiting for the mould that covers his entire head to dry. Encased in a waxy mausoleum, entombed with his own thoughts, the viewer eventually happens upon a terrifying possibility… what if Johnny isn’t thinking anything at all? What if too many years of stardom have switched his brain to standby mode?
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