ON THE ROCKS Is On The Nose

In a pre-Covid world, my wife and I were fortunate enough to find ourselves on a lot more international trips than we currently do nowadays. Admittedly, there aren’t a lot of negatives to setting jets, but one of the most prominent drawbacks are the mammoth length of international flights. Five, six, seven, ten hours plus on an airplane is a long time, even when you’re going somewhere fun. To fill the time, we typically would identify a movie to watch by scrolling through the seat-back screen while still on the runway. Once we reached cruising altitude, we would order a glass or two of wine, fire up our selection, then promptly fall asleep after a bottle or two of wine.

Seems like a simple enough process. However, you learn quickly that there’s an art to picking a movie for an lengthy airplane ride. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is picking something so jaw-droppingly obnoxious that it makes your trip even longer than the half-a-day it’s already scheduled for. A few reels of SHAZAM: FURY OF THE GODS and you may be praying for a hijacking.

However, an arguably even bigger error is picking a movie that’s actually good. Directors have long argued against the wisdom of watching a film on the flat tiny screen that an iPhone provides, and it’s true. But watching something like WEST SIDE STORY on the back of a stranger’s plane seat may be even more dismal. You tell yourself you’re making an educated choice, but you’re not. It’s a feint. A lie. Don’t do it to yourself.

The real skill is identifying movies that are perfectly fine, maybe even functional, but are so devoid of stakes or consequences that the movie, and all memories of having ever seen it, stay 30,000 feet in the air long after you’ve returned to Biosphere 1. It’s not easy, but my wife and I have started developing a real sense for what makes a good airplane movie, to the point that when certain trailers unspool in front of us in an actual movie theatre, we tend to whisper “save this one for the airplane” to each other.

For context, some past airline viewings for us have included JUNGLE CRUISE, DATE NIGHT, SISTERS, WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT (Tina Fey is sadly a very common face in this type of movie), FANT4STIC FOUR (this one would have fallen in the “unwatchable” category were it not also about 65 minutes long), THE PEANUTS MOVIE, KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE and ZOOLANDER 2. All movies you probably knew existed at one point, but has since faded away, almost as if they were never really there.

The reason I bring all of this up is because in 2020, in the midst of a raging pandemic, as we all helplessly sat back and watched the few remaining threads of American society separate, possibly forever, Sofia Coppola gave me the greatest gift she could ever give me in a time of unbearable need.

She gave me an airplane movie.

ON THE ROCKS (2020)

Starring: Rashida Jones, Bill Murray, Marlon Wayans, Jenny Slate, Jessica Henwick

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Coppola

Released: October 23, 2020 (Apple TV)

Length: 96 minutes

Here’s the deal: this one isn’t going to be anything close to an in depth review. It’s not exactly how imagined the last entry of my Sofia Summer series to go, but frankly, ON THE ROCKS is not a movie that demands it. It’s fine! Honest and truly! There’s nothing really technically wrong with it. It’s functional and competent, the plot is simple but makes sense, it goes down quick and breezy. But, as a result, there’s no real meat to pick off its bones.

Laura (Jones) and Dean (Wayans) are a young married couple trying to make their way in New York. She’s an author, he’s a…tech entrepreneur of some sort (it’s a little vague). Together, they raise two daughters. The passion of their newlywed days seem to be over, and Dean is distant enough that Laura now harbors suspicions of infidelity. Not helping Dean’s case: Laura finds another woman’s travel bag in his luggage. Then there’s the night where Dean comes home in the middle of the night, starts making out with Laura, then abruptly stops once he recognizes her voice.

In order to end Laura’s worrying, her half-retired art dealing father Felix (Murray) enlists himself to help her follow Dean around, as he gathers intel on his wayward son-in-law, culminating in the discovery that he’s booked a mysterious trip to Mexico. However, a central question to the movie is whether Felix might be projecting his own lecherous past onto Dean’s actions. As it always seems to go between Laura and her dad, how much is he helping, and how much is he hurting?

For whatever reason, it took me until ON THE ROCKS for me to realize how just much of Rashida Jones’ stuff I’ve seen and enjoyed. Obviously, most people know her from either PARKS AND RECREATION or her season-long guest stint on THE OFFICE*, but I also remember the hectic weekend when TBS premiered her show ANGIE TRIBECA by running every episode over and over for 25 straight hours. As far as this movie went, I was at least invested in the outcome of her and Felix’s tailing of Dean. I have to chalk that up to Jones making Laura’s worry and anxiety feel real. She made me care. With her ability to project entire spectrums of emotion with just a facial expression or two, she turns out to be a natural lead for a Coppola feature, and you hope the opportunity arises for the two to collaborate again.

*In fact, she was kind of saddled with a thankless role on that show’s third season, playing the obvious third line in THE OFFICE’s big Jim Halpert-Pam Beasley-Karen Filippelli love triangle. Intellectually, you knew Jim wasn’t really going to end up with Karen, but it’s long been my belief that the only reason audiences entertained, or in some cases even supported, the very notion is off the back of Jones’ performance.

Bill Murray is perfectly fine here, although it seemed to me that he was sleepwalking through ON THE ROCKS more than a little bit. It also felt (again, at least to me) that this was a role expressly written in to cash in on Murray’s late-stage persona as an internet-adored eccentric (a persona I personally struggle with). It’s easy to forget now that he’s made a whole meal out of playing pranks on unsuspecting civilians and harassing coworkers or whatever, but his whole comedic sensibility used to be fairly detached, even slightly acidic. This went on years before stuff like GHOSTBUSTERS and STRIPES; just watch his old Academy Award predictions on SNL for an idea.

Now here he is, spouting off super writer-y sounding aphorisms and facts that I think are supposed to communicate color and goofball highbrow wisdom (“the celebration of the date of one’s birth was originally a Pagan tradition…” begins one of his little jags), but instead felt for all the world like Murray or Coppola (or both) trying to craft a “Bill Murray” character. Much like Jeff Goldblum before him, Bill Murray seems to have finally bought into his own shit, losing something genuine in the process.

The central issue facing ON THE ROCKS is that it’s nothing special. It tells a nice and relatable story that gets the emotional beats all correct. But it seems to lack that obvious “thing” that makes apparent what lit a fire in Coppola’s brain to even make it in the first place. Telling a tale of suburban ennui. A melancholy tribute to the city of Tokyo. A reclamation of the last queen of France. Hell, even the fucking BLING RING had an intriguing hook to it, even if the ball was ultimately dropped. Here, the only evident hook I can see for Coppola may have been the chance to work with Murray again.

And, look, I think it’s perfectly fine for a director, even a great one, to release something that’s no better than pleasantly average every once in awhile. I think we’d be wise to decouple ourselves from the expectations of “genius and paradigm-shifting” every time. Even Scorsese had a couple of ground doubles mixed in with his home runs. Not every movie Coppola makes has to be THE VIRGIN SUICIDES! You could even make the argument that ON THE ROCKS’ greatest virtue is that it’s Coppola at her most straight-forward. A couple of likable stars, an easy plot, a somewhat positive resolution…it’s not a bad entry point.

Except, it’s also completely devoid of the magic and reward that her very best movies provide. Near the very beginning of this run of articles, I talked about seeing LOST IN TRANSLATION for the first time twenty years ago as a teenager, and how it instantly gave me this….feeling. It burrowed its way into my brain, my spine, my heart and I’ve been floating around in its aura ever since. It was my first Sofia Coppola movie and seeing it in a genuine movie theater will forever remain a core memory for me. It’s the reason I spent my summer this year revisiting THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, and digging into the movies of her I had yet to see.

If ON THE ROCKS was my first Coppola movie, is there a chance in the world that my experience would be the same? It’s almost impossible to imagine so. And a director only gets so many chances at providing future generations those kinds of moment, especially when we’re talking about one as relatively un-prolific as Coppola; seven movies in twenty-five years isn’t exactly minuscule, but we consistently wait three to four years for her to return to the screen. As time marches on, the movies we do get from her have to count.

ON THE ROCKS could have been made by anybody, and that’s its true crime. In a way, it’s probably very lucky that it released during the Big Pandemic Quarantine Year. Like all things in 2020, everything feels a little hazy and forgettable, at least in terms of time and place. That’s the perfect time in history for ON THE ROCKS to exist in. If it had come out even one year prior, it may have generated serious questions about where Coppola goes from here. As it stands, though, it’s a forgettable movie that everyone saw during a hazy time.

It manages to be an airplane movie even when it’s on the ground.