AnywhereBy John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
"The loneliness of a man entirely surrounded by women and children surpasses even the loneliness of a man isolated in the middle of the Sahara." Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion
Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a Hollywood star director Sophia Coppola follows with her up-close-and-personal camera in Somewhere: We can feel the loneliness of his life. This state is one Coppola captures with more dynamism (that's a relative term for minimalist Coppola) in Lost in Translation, where Bill Murray's depressive Bob is making a commercial in Tokyo with a few more people around but the same vacant feeling of life having been lived at the lowest emotional level with little promise of deliverance.
As it was with Bob finding Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte to accompany his stay, so Johnny has his 11 year-old daughter, Cloe (Elle Fanning), an athletic and sensible young girl who loves her dad but fears about an absent mother and a father who is rarely around. Their most exciting connection is playing Guitar Hero. His vacant response to explaining a new bed partner to her certifies his detachment from honest emotional connection.
Coppola's signature shot inside a car looking at her subject and the terrain is here, effectively showing that nothing in going on inside or outside, in this case a spiffy black Ferrari. The most action is tracking shots of the car as it accelerates to the expressway. Yet Coppola's a brilliant observer of the small detail that reveals the larger sorrows of the lonely life.
Lest we fail to catch the isolation, many young women come on to the star, but few are chosen. When Johnny does connect, he may fall asleep in the bed right in the middle of the action. Otherwise, he may invite blonde twins up to do some professional pole dancing, at which time he may fall asleep again.
Coppola's camera lingers on the arid dancing or the comatose Johnny, and it rarely moves so that the static life is translated through the inactivity of its protagonist and the medium. As he tells us, he is nothing; as we see, he is that and with no feelings.
The title is right for the film?Johnny and presumably anyone else a victim of popular culture vacuity may find himself somewhere, but not really anywhere. He's not even a person as Johnny says about himself to a cell phone contact who won't visit to help him through his anguish. Nothing much happens because, except for a junket to Milan where he can barely answer questions at a press conference, there is nothing happening. Even in a party he drinks alone and connects only when mechanical sex will result.
Coppola is a minimalist conveyer of the downside to celebrity and superficiality. Her selection of the Chateau Marmont for most of the location evidences a director who knows where the stars' hideouts and loneliness are (John Belushi died there of an overdose).
As the daughter of a famous director, she knows for a lifetime about what she's directing.
John DeSando co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com