Movie Review: The Beguiled

The Beguiled **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Sofia Coppola.

Written by: Sofia Coppola based on the novel by Thomas Cullinan and the screenplay by Albert Maltz and Irene Kamp. 

Starring: Colin Farrell (Corporal McBurney), Nicole Kidman (Miss Martha), Kirsten Dunst (Edwina), Elle Fanning (Alicia), Oona Laurence (Amy), Angourie Rice (Jane), Addison Riecke (Marie), Emma Howard (Emily).

 

The Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood version of The Beguiled is a fascinating movie – a Southern Gothic horror film really about a group of Southern women in the Civil War who take in a wounded Union soldier, nurse him back to health, project their own feelings onto him, and then torture him when he doesn’t live up to their standards. From the start of that film, you know that Eastwood’s character is a liar and a conman – but it’s not like the women in the film are all that much better, as they gleefully head towards the climax. For the most part, Sofia Coppola’s film follows the same sequence of events – it excises an incest backstory of one character, an interlude that felt rather rape-y and eliminates a slave character altogether (a move that some have criticized Coppola for – but I don’t have much of a problem with, as Coppola herself has said, she isn’t the director to tackle a subject like that). And yet, it’s an entirely different film, with an entirely different tone. Coppola continues to be fascinated by groups of privileged women, hidden away from the world, and the havoc that can cause. The Beguiled is more of a genre piece than she’s done before, but it’s clearly a Sofia Coppola genre piece.

 

In this version, the Union solider, Corporal John McBurney is played by Colin Farrell – who is pretty much perfectly cast in the role. He has, at many times in his career, been cast as much for his physical presence as his acting abilities (in film like Terrence Malick’s The New World or Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, I’d argue, more for the former, than the later) – and he puts both to great use here. He is wounded in the forest, when young Amy (Oona Laurence) finds him, and brings him back to her school for young girls, where the headmistress Martha (Nicole Kidman) can nurse him back to health. Most of the young women have left the school – but there’s a few left, alongside their teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst). McBurney wants to know if there are men around – there aren’t.

 

Throughout the movie, McBurney subtly reads each of the women, and what they want from him, and responds accordingly. The Siegel/Eastwood version makes everything much more explicit through dialogue, where here, it’s mainly done through meaningful glances. Farrell wonderfully changes facial expressions – softens or hardens it, changes his tone of voice, depending on who he’s talking to. He says little to any of them – promises nothing until late in the movie, and yet they all read into him anything they want. The main female characters are Martha – the one with the complex backstory excises, although Kidman is a brilliant enough actress to suggest so much, with so little – the aging matriarch of the place, who sees McBurney as a potential man of the house. Edwina is the teacher, who is living out her prime “marrying age” with all the men off to war, who almost melts with a few kind words. The oldest student is Alicia (Elle Fanning – adding another great performance in a young resume full of them) – whose teenage sexuality is dying to get out, but doesn’t have an outlet – who sees McBurney as a potential plaything – and a way to turn the rest of the women – both younger and older – into playthings as well. Young Amy may see McBurney as more of a father figure than anything else.

 

The film was shot in a large house in New Orleans, and is the type of film where you can feel the humidity coming off every frame, The cinematography by Philippe Le Sourd (stepping in for the late, great Harris Savides, who shot Coppola’s last two films) is superb. Coppola doesn’t quite go over the top like Siegel did (most notably in a strange montage) – but she walks up to that line. The film is wonderfully fun – especially watching the women as they exchange so much information between them without saying a word. The film works as an extension of themes that Coppola has always explored, and at the same time as a thriller, and at times even a comedy (not a laugh out loud comedy per se – but I did have a smile plastered on my face the entire last act). I said of the original Beguiled that it raises more questions than it answered – and the same is true of this film, which doesn’t really seek to answer anything. In both cases, that’s a strength of the film, not a weakness.

Movie Review: The Bling Ring

The Bling Ring
Directed by: Sofia Coppola.
Written by: Sofia Coppola based on the article by Nancy Jo Sales.
Starring: Katie Chang (Rebecca), Israel Broussard (Marc), Emma Watson (Nicki), Claire Julien (Chloe), Taissa Farmiga (Sam), Georgia Rock (Emily), Leslie Mann (Laurie), Carlos Miranda (Rob), Gavin Rossdale (Ricky), Stacy Edwards (Marc's Mom), G. Mac Brown (Henry), Marc Coppola (Mr. Hall - Marc's Dad), Janet Song (Rebecca's Mom), Annie Fitzgerald (Kate from Vanity Fair).

Sofia Coppola is uncommonly gifted at depicting the empty lives of the super-rich. This has led to some critics to say she glamorizes the materialistic lives her characters lead, or worse, ask why they should care about the lives of these empty people in the first place. This probably wouldn’t be as much of an issue if her last name wasn’t Coppola (or she wasn’t a woman – I’ve never heard anyone claim nepotism in the case of Jason Reitman) and it is an easy way to ignore the differences in each of Coppola’s five films. Yes, they are all about rich young women who often see themselves as ciphers – incomplete people who find themselves watching their lives instead of living it. But Coppola doesn’t offer blanket sympathy to all of them (remember Anna Faris’ merciless skewering of Cameron Diaz in Lost in Translation?). The Bling Ring, while not quite at the level of her best films, is once a fascinating little film – effortlessly entertaining and amusing throughout, but one that stays with you for long after the end credits. Shallow, superficial movies don’t do that – but good movies about shallow, superficial people can.

Based on the true story of a group of rich kids in and around Los Angeles who for a year or so in 2011 robbed numerous celebrities of cash, jewels and stuff valued at over $3 million in total (and which, some of the victims at first didn’t even realize was missing), Coppola has crafted a movie for our celebrity obsessed times. I’ve already read comparisons of this film to two other 2013 movies – Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, another movie about out of control young women, and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, about a group of lunk headed body builders who want their American Dream. The three films are wildly different in all ways except one – the feature characters who want the lifestyle they think they deserve, and are willing to rob, cheat and steal (and in the other two movies, kill) their way into that lifestyle. The strange thing about The Bling Ring, is unlike the girls in Spring Breakers, who have to rob the Chicken Shack just to have enough money to go on Spring Breaker, or the lunkheads in Pain & Gain who work menial, low paying jobs – the characters out of control in The Bling Ring are already wealthy. They live in mansions, they drive fancy cars, they party at the hottest clubs in L.A. – and they haven’t had to do a damn thing to earn any of it – their parents did, and just give them everything. These kids aren’t robbing to live the life they want – it’s about getting the stuff they want, from the people they like. It isn’t enough to have a Chanel bag – you need to have Paris Hilton’s Chanel bag.

 

The main character and sometimes narrator of The Bling Ring is Marc (Israel Broussard), who has to go the “drop out high school” for rich kids, after being thrown out of his old school for not going, and spending a year being home schooled. He talks to the camera – in the guise of an interview for Vanity Fair (the resulting article being the basis of the movie) about how he never thought he “fit in” – didn’t see himself as “attractive” as everyone else –which is absurd, since Broussard has the perfectly tousled hair of many a hipster. His is clearly portrayed as gay, without every saying the actual words, so maybe that had something to do with his feeling “ostracized” – although one would think the safest place for a gay teenager would be in the rich homes of L.A. More likely, like most of the other characters in the movie, he just sees himself as a victim because he’s been babied his whole life – given almost everything he could ever ask for, so not getting that extra little bit feels painful.

When he meets Rebecca (Katie Chang) he finally feels like he “has a best friend” – and is immediately seduced by the life she lives – with her beautiful friends like Nicki (Emma Watson), her live in best friend Sam (Taissa Farmiga), who are homeschooled by their mother (Leslie Mann) in the ways of The Secret – and Chloe (Claire Julien, looking and sounding like a Scarlett Johansson clone). They are all beautiful, sexy young women – and know it – and use that, along with their money, to get whatever they want. But it’s still not enough for Rebecca – who starts small, robbing unlocked cars of their wallets, and then building up to the houses of vacating classmates, and finally to the homes of celebrities. It isn’t hard – the can look on TMZ to find out when the celebrities will be out of town, and none of them ever set their burglar alarms, and often leave a sliding door unlocked (or a key under the mat). Soon, their inside the house of Paris Hilton – which unsurprisingly is a shrine to Paris Hilton – and other celebrities, using their closets as their own. It isn’t just about getting designer clothes and jewels – they already have that – but they want to exact clothes they’ve seen the celebrities wear to different events.

The Bling Ring moves effortlessly throughout its first two acts. Yes, it’s fun to be in the company of these rich, beautiful people who party hard and don’t really do anything else. While I don’t think Coppola glamorizes these empty lives as some have claimed - the most ridiculous being one critic who said Coppola shoots the celebrities houses like an episode of MTV’s Cribs, proving they have never seen an episode of the show – a more apt comparison to the show would be James Franco’s now infamous “Look at all my shit” scene in Spring Breakers. Her characters start off nearly interchangeable, but like the movie itself, they gradually become more defined as the movie goes along. The performances are all spot on – especially Emma Watson’s, who delivers yet another brilliant performance, this time as the most spoiled of all the Bling Ring crew, who sees herself as a victim of everyone, takes no responsibility for her own actions, and talks about all her “humanitarian” works, although she has no idea what they actually are (if you think Watson’s performance is an exaggeration, go back and watch last week’s edition of NBC’s Dateline with the performance who inspired Watson’s character – her performance is dead on).

So what is the point of a movie like The Bling Ring? And why should you care about these people, who live empty, entitled lives, awash in materialism with little to no self-awareness? The answer is you probably shouldn’t care about them – they barely care about themselves. But Coppola sees them with such clarity that it’s impossible to look away from them. If you’re like me, you’re likely to be equally drawn into their world and repulsed by it.

Movie Review: Somewhere

Somewhere ****
Directed by: Sofia Coppola.
Written By: Sofia Coppola.
Starring: Stephen Dorff (Johnny Marco), Elle Fanning (Cleo), Chris Pontius (Sammy), Michelle Monaghan (Rebecca), Benicio Del Toro (Celebrity).

Somewhere is the perfect title for Sofia Coppola’s new movie. It is about a movie star, Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) who spends all of his time somewhere. He lives in hotels, wakes up every morning to a phone call from his publicist telling him where he needs to be that day. Pretty much every women he sees has some sort of sexual reaction to him - even though sex has lost its thrill for him - he even falls asleep in the middle of it one time. He has no real home, no real friends - although he does have a childhood friend who is essentially a hanger on at this point. He leads a hollow existence where he drinks too much, smokes too much and really has no idea who he is and what he is doing.

Things get more complicated for him when his ex-wife drops off their 12 year old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) because she “needs some time by herself”. Johnny and Cleo have always had a good relationship - but it’s never been much of a father-daughter one. In reality, the life of a movie star and a tween girl are very similar to each other. They both think the world revolves around them, both self conscious of their image, both want a lot of attention, but also fear being over exposed. They are both awkward and unable to communicate with each other or anyone else for that matter. For the first time, thrust into a real parent-child relationship, they really do not know how to behave.

Somewhere fits right in with the films Coppola has made so far - which in one way or another have all dealt with celebrity. The girls in The Virgin Suicides are observed from a distance by the boys that narrate the story - they do not really know them, but watch them so much that they think they do. Lost in Translation is about another movie star, isolated from those around him, making lonely phone calls to his family back home that he barely knows. His only connection is with the wife of another celebrity, who is ignored by her husband. And of course Marie Antoinette with its title character portrayed as a sort Paris Hilton type spoiled brat. Dorff’s Marco resembles the movie star played by Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, except that he has gotten there decades earlier. He barely knows his daughter, although he loves her in his own way.

Somewhere is a slow movie and some have complained that nothing happens in it. But, what happens in Somewhere is more subtle. The key is the performances by Dorff and Fanning. I’m not sure what made Coppola think of Dorff for this role, but it was a stroke of casting genius. Dorff knows the routines of movie stardom, the long meaningless photo sessions, the trips to film festivals, the paparazzi, the loads of down time with nothing to do. The fact that you never really have to grow up. And he plays Johnny just about perfectly. Fanning is perhaps even better as Cleo - a girl whose needs have always come behind those of her parents (we see first hand Johnny’s lack of parenting ability, and while we barely see her mother, you can assume that someone who would just take off on an opened ended trip with barely a word to their daughter is not going to win mother of the year any time soon). She has compensated by perfected being quiet - fading into the background. She doesn’t quite know how to react when her father’s friend jokes around with her. When she wakes up one morning to find a strange woman having breakfast with them, we expect a tantrum - but instead a look between them says more than a tantrum could. By his look back, we know he gets it, and when a similar opportunity presents itself later, he turns the girl away because of his daughter. For him, this is a mark of personal growth. Coppola has many scenes like this in the film - where we think we know what is going to happen, but it plays out in a lower key than we anticipate.

Somewhere has been compared to the work of Italian director Michelangelo Antonnini - and I supposed stylistically there are some similarities, and the best work of his career is also concerned with people of affluence living hollow lives. This is particularly true in the first half hour of the film before Cleo enters the picture. There are two scenes in particular - where Johnny hires twin strippers to come to his room to do their routine and he simply sits there and watches them without passion. But this reminded me - thematically if not stylistically - of the ending of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, about a man who finally realizes that his glamorous life is empty.

Yet no matter what influences are apparent in Coppola’s film, it is very much her own work. I know the knock on Coppola is that all of her films are about spoiled rich kids much like herself. While that is true to a certain extent, what is also true is that she presents this world with honesty. She has said that this film is not autobiographical, and while I do not doubt her, this is certainly a world that she has known her whole life.

The ending of the film will likely anger people who want more definitive closure to the film - who want the two central characters to have some big scene where the profess their love for each other. But that isn’t the film that Coppola has made - she has subverted our expectations throughout the film, so why would she change that at the end? But the ending does represent growth of a sort for Johnny. He is never going to be a great father, but at the end, we feel that for the first time, he at least wants to be.