Getting Lost in the Middle of SOMEWHERE

People often ask me, “why do you primarily focus on chronological filmography reviews on your blog?”

(All right, nobody’s ever asked me that. About the only question anybody ever asks me in regards to the blog is, “why do you keep trying to get me to read one of those SANTA CLAUSE articles?”. But just for the sake of storytelling technique, let’s just pretend I get this question a lot. Theater of the mind and all that.)

Okay, so people often ask me, “why do you primarily focus on chronological filmography reviews on your blog?” And the simple answer is that I enjoy the simple thrill I get of charting growth from even the medium’s most established filmmakers. It can even provide context to movies that are already pretty well-regarded; something like Fellini’s JULIET OF THE SPIRITS is a monumental work on its own, but when taken within the full context of LA STRADA, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, as well as his relationship with the star of all three, Giulietta Masina, it becomes a masterpiece of almost jaw-dropping audacity.

It’s just fun to see creators grow. When you go through a director’s filmography from start to finish, you start discovering things both big and small. What they did to get their first hit. What they do when their budget gets increased (or taken away)*. But, more than anything, you start notice the things they learn from their bigger successes or failures and start carrying with them going into some of their smaller films.

(*I think a lot of this is why the BLANK CHECK podcast, a show with more or less this exact premise, has been such a runaway success the past half-decade or so.)

So it goes with SOMEWHERE, a Sofia Coppola film that you don’t hear a ton about for whatever reason. It came out in 2010, which I wouldn’t really call a banner year for American film. Not that it’s the ultimate arbiter of quality, but the Best Picture nominees that year included THE KING’S SPEECH, THE FIGHTER, BLACK SWAN, and 127 HOURS, four well-received movies that I bet you hadn’t thought about once in the past ten years.

Yet it felt like SOMEWHERE just kind of came and went. I’m not even sure I remember hearing about it at all, and I was still firmly in my "keep tabs on this kind of stuff” era (my beloved Entertainment Weekly at my side most of the time. It certainly seems to be a faded memory in Coppola’s fairly scant filmography. THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, LOST IN TRANSLATION and MARIE ANTOINETTE all still loom large after all these years. But SOMEWHERE kind of went nowhere.

And it’s a shame because it’s terrific, and certainly belongs in the same echelon as her first three. More to the point, SOMEWHERE is the exact type of movie that ends up shining like a jewel when watched in the context of what a given filmmaker had done before.

In isolation, it’s a small character-driven odyssey in the desert of Hollywood. On the backs of the movies mentioned above, however? Sofia Coppola’s growth as a filmmaker from the end of the 90’s to the beginning of the Roarin’ 10’s is fully on display here, and it’s a wonder to behold.

Let’s dig into why.

SOMEWHERE (2010)

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Starring: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Chris Pontius

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: December 22, 2010

Length: 98 minutes

Johnny Marco (Dorff) is a rising Hollywood actor crashing indefinitely at the Chateau Marmont, healing from an unexplained wrist injury. Passing the time between publicity obligations, he invites strippers over to his room, has casual sex with younger women, and kinda just hangs out with his childhood friend Sammy (Pontius). His marriage is long over, and he’s not exactly making a ton of new friends in his chosen industry; his most recent costar (played by a micro-cameoing Michelle Monaghan) fucking hates him after a failed night together.

Johnny is just nowhere.

In between all of these passionless activities, he does his perfunctory divorced-dad duties for his eleven-year old daughter Cleo (Fanning), He takes her to her ice-skating lesson, he drives her to things when her mom isn’t able to, he’s technically there. But it’s just one more checked box for him and nothing more. It’s not out of malice (he doesn’t seem to resent Cleo in any way), it’s just…it’s one more thing that fails to bring Johnny any meaningful happiness.

The “meat” of the movie is when Cleo gets dropped off at his door when her mom decides she needs a break. This coincides with a European leg of his promo tour for his new movie. Johnny has to make the most of this unexpected family time before Cleo goes off to summer camp. So….can he?

Admittedly, this all sounds a little dull written out. A movie about a burned-out actor who now has to connect with his precocious daughter, and maybe along the way he learns something. It all sounds like well-worn material at best, twee and annoying at worst.

Of course, the game gets played on the court, not on paper. Because the above forms the basis of one of Coppola’s more thrilling and underrated works, in no small part because it feels like she’s returning to what made her early movies work so well. Although I will never begrudge a director going in a completely different direction between films*, SOMEWHERE does feel like the natural successor to LOST IN TRANSLATION.

(* In some ways, her “return to form” for her fourth feature made me respect and appreciate just a half-inch more the expansion of her style palette in MARIE ANTOINETTE.)

The parallels between the two films are numerous; they are both about burned-out actors at a crossroads (although I would classify Bob Harris as more aloof and lost, while Johnny is truly a Fucking Loser when we first meet him), both feature leads living long term in a hotel, both leads find themselves desperately trying to connect with a younger girl (in SOMEWHERE’s case, it’s Johnny’s own daughter), and both films drip with ennui. Oh, and in their own ways, they’re about the mundanity and borderline humiliating nature of professional acting.

What struck me about SOMEWHERE is that it truly felt like Coppola showing us how sharp the knives in her tool belt really are. She’s come a long way in just four films, especially considering her debut (THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) was plenty strong already. She’s never been a director afraid to show off a little style, to say the least; both VIRGIN SUICIDES and MARIE ANTOINETTE told its stories with some visual heft. Here, though, she goes for a more austere style. It was the correct and perfect choice.

As a result, SOMEWHERE has a palpable confidence to it. Here, Coppola has visual storytelling down to a science, to the point where anyone claiming this movie is “boring” (and, oh goodness, are they out there) is almost actively trying not to pay attention. Coppola tells you the entire story of Johnny, the way he’s passively cruel to the people around him, the ways in which his supposed success in an impossible industry has only exacerbated his depressive state, the way he can’t ever seem to take the obvious steps to get out of his own way.

The best part is that Coppola communicates all of this in really simple ways.

Take something like the two scenes that bookend SOMEWHERE, which both boil down to Johnny just kind of driving around. The opening scene: Johnny driving in long, slow, drawn-out circles in the middle of nowhere. The ending scene, after he really and truly does forge a connection and genuine bond with Cleo: Johnny driving in a straight line on a road to…well, we don’t really know. It’s to somewhere (cue that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing the screen meme). All we know is that it’s away from the hotel he’s been wasting away at. It’s in a direction, and maybe that’s enough.

It’s not a reinvention of the wheel by any means. It’s super simple, almost to an absurd degree. It’s Film 101. And yet, it’s also crystal-clear storytelling to a degree you almost never see in the twenty-first century. Without a syllable of dialogue (hell, in the opening scene, you don’t even get a good look at Stephen Dorff), you get exactly what’s up when we start, as well as the significance of where we end.

The whole movie plays off with this kind of simple confidence. Early on, we’re treated to an extended shot of a somewhat awkward and monotonous pole dance (to the tune of Foo Fighters’ “My Hero”) going on in Johnny’s hotel room. It’s, um, technically sound and it’s certainly synchronized, but Coppola’s refusal to really cut away from it, like she’s Chantal Akerman all of a sudden, serves to remove the luridness from it all. Instead, it feels vaguely sad. We don’t get anything resembling titillation, and neither does Johnny.

Then there’s the scene of Johnny getting his head sculpted for a special effect on his next film. He’s called in by the special effects team of his latest movie to sit in a chair for several hours as they cover his entire head in plaster in order to make a mold of his face for some sort of practical effect. His eyes, his ears, his mouth and, eventually, his nose (sans two little holes for his nostrils).

And then, as they wait for the mold to dry, the makeup team just kinda….leaves. The camera zooms in slowly as we wait for something to happen. The only soundtrack is the sound of Johnny breathing as deeply as he can, given the circumstances. A lone phone ringing breaks the silence, confirming that everyone has moved on for the moment.

Again, super simple in that perfect “why didn’t I think of that?” way. There are few better ways to establish building tension than with a slooowww, silent close-up; it’s done so effectively that out of context, it genuinely seems like something from a horror movie. But it helps to both further Johnny’s story along (this is what his life has been reduced to, sitting alone, unable to connect, at risk of being molded over and forgotten) as well as serve as metaphor for the suffocating effects of Hollywood*.

(*It’s also a reminder that many of your favorite actors have had to go through this ridiculous process, and for a lot longer than Johnny does here. Jim Carrey had to sit in the makeup chair for 8 hours to do the fucking Grinch movie, in case you’re wondering why he’s been off the rails seemingly ever since.)

Just through the nature of the film’s content, we’ve talked about actors in this article already. So let’s pivot to talking about the three people we spend the most time with in SOMEWHERE.

Stephen Dorff is an actor I don’t really think about all that often, which is admittedly kind of an asshole way to open up a paragraph meant to praise him. What I mean by it, however, is that was able to take me by complete surprise here. His big claim to fame is probably as the villain in 1998’s BLADE, or maybe more recently from the third season of TRUE DETECTIVE. But he seems to have mostly made his trade by appearing in genre fare. Coppola picked him for this role basically both due to his supposed bad-boy exterior and the sweet, almost shy interior, both of which would be great tools for this particular movie.

Mission totally accomplished there. You buy him so completely as this guy who’s completely burned out and in need of a change that’s he incapable of providing to himself. Dorff just becomes Johnny, one of the finest compliments you can give to a performance. For whatever reason, I keep reflecting back on the moment where he’s kind of stumbling through an awkward press conference, where he seems incapable of providing a satisfying answer to even the most softball question. It’s one of those “can’t see the acting” moments.

Elle Fanning, famously the younger sister to Dakota, holds her own as Cleo and portrays a strength and maturity beyond her years in her scenes with Dorff. Coppola allegedly screened PAPER MOON for Dorff, presumably as a reference point for him as to Johnny and Cleo’s dynamic. However, it feels for all the world like Fanning absorbed that Bogdanovich classic too, because she portrays her end of that dynamic better than could be expected for a performer of her age, More likely, this is another testament to Coppola’s maturing directing skills, a sign of her ability to pull exactly what she needed from her actors.

Out of fucking nowhere, Chris Pontius of JACKASS fame does a great job with a supporting role as Johnny’s friend Sammy. The ease in which Sammy relates to Cleo, is able to play and connect with her…Sammy is the guy Johnny could be if…well, if he weren’t Johnny. Pontius’ normal dude energy is actually what was needed here, and he provides a heartbreaking counterpoint to our lead.

———

It’s beyond weird, and vaguely condescending, to say you’re proud of an artist whom you have no personal connection to. But, damnit, I’m hard pressed to come up with another word for it. Especially for filmmakers with somewhat limited filmographies (she averages about a movie every four years; her upcoming PRISCILLA is only her seventh since THE VIRGIN SUICIDES came out in 1999), it’s so easy to lose the thread. And, to be honest, there’s still three left to go in this series, and they’re not well-loved classics. There’s still time to misplace that thread, Sofia!

But, at this point in her filmography, it feels like she’s only gaining strength. It’s really exciting to find a new favorite from someone who already provided me one of my favorite movies. If you haven’t checked out SOMEWHERE, consider doing so. It might be one of your new favorites as well.