The Gorgeous Gilded Cage of Sofia Coppola’s PRISCILLA

Sofia Coppola movies tend to be a dice roll.

I’ve covered it extensively in this space this year already, but I’ve found there to be a unique gap between the ceilings of her filmography and its floors. When she’s really clicking for me, she’s capable of making some of the best movies of the past twenty-five years; 1999’s THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is one of the great tales of suburban ennui from one of the best years Hollywood ever had. Also, its clunkiness in its handling of race aside, 2003’s LOST IN TRANSLATION is still one of the few movies I can pop on at any time, any place, and feel like I’m falling in love with the medium for the first time all over again. Finally, 2010’s SOMEWHERE is Coppola at perhaps her most fundamental and efficient, telling a full tale about a failed celebrity father with a minimum of dialogue. All three are timeless mood pieces about the universal feelings that unite us (even though they are admittedly very white-oriented, something which may be a barrier to truly loving her work. As always, I leave you to determine your personal mileage).

When she’s not really firing on all cylinders (again, at least for me)…well, you get stuff like 2013’s THE BLING RING, a movie that truly stunned me in its complete lack of (or even attempt at) insight, especially given that the topic of star-chasing California vacuousness should have been a layup for Sofia. This is to say nothing of 2020’s ON THE ROCKS, a movie that doesn’t so much stink as it does just kinda sit there, an empty and far-too-light exercise from a filmmaker that is so obviously capable of much more.

With that in mind, then, when I finally went out and saw PRISCILLA, Sofia Coppola’s eighth and newest film, it felt like there was a lot on the line for me. Although 2017’s THE BEGUILED had intriguing elements, Coppola hadn’t really made a movie that I loved in the last thirteen years. I needed her biopic about the famous wife of Elvis Presley, a woman who was able to carve out a sizable acting and business career herself, to at least be adequate. “Make me feel something” is the only thing I asked of it.

I’m happy to report, then, that PRISCILLA did make me feel a little something! It certainly gave me stuff to chew on. I hesitate to call it one of Coppola’s greats, but it’s definitely one of her very goods. It also gave me the energy to move forward with putting a temporary button on another one of my running series. For the last time this year, let’s jump back into the filmography of Sofia Coppola!

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Although there are many potential aspects within the life of Priscilla Presley (nee Wagner) one could potentially dramatize, PRISCILLA is exclusively focused on her marriage to Elvis. The film starts with a chance encounter on the military base she resides in, a moment that leads to an invite to a party, a party where the starstruck teenager officially meets the celebrity singer for the first time. The film ends with the functional (if not official) ending of their union, as Priscilla finally leaves their home in Graceland for the first time in her adult life. The story is fairly small in scope, yet the lessons to be taken from its telling feels wide-ranged.

PRISCILLA is structured somewhat like a series of vignettes. In one sequence, Elvis provides her some of his sleeping pills, believing them to be safe due to them being prescribed by a doctor; when she wakes up a couple of days later, he seems genuinely apologetic. In another, Elvis rejects Priscilla’s desire for a job; after all, what would happen if he needed her and she suddenly wasn’t available? Thus, as stories of his rumored affairs with film costars start to hit the front pages of the morning newspapers, she has nowhere to go. Despite his insistence that it’s all just junk made up by the media, she has no choice but to take it all in. His alleged affair with Ann-Margaret. His outbursts of anger. His continued substance abuse. His awkward sexual advances. She’s forced to sit in it.

And so are we.

Elvis and Priscilla’s dysfunctional marriage can be a lot to take in at times, although what gives it the Official Sofia Coppola Touch is the cushy wealth and dreamy Graceland extravagance constantly on display, scored with a softer mix of needle drops than you might expect from the same filmmaker who brought you MARIE ANTOINETTE*. At Priscilla’s lowest moments, it becomes clear how quickly comfort and luxury can be a prison. When your husband can pay to have all three of your daily meals served at the door of your room, what reason does he have to let you leave?

*Although I personally really liked the usage of modern tunes in MARIE ANTOINETTE, there is nothing as jarring as The Strokes utilized here.

The main driving force that makes Elvis’ behavior on display so striking, however, is the stark age difference between he and Priscilla. On the day they met, Priscilla was 14, Elvis 24. By the time they officially wed on May 1, 1967, she was only 22. It’s one thing to know intellectually that Elvis’ only marriage was between him and a teenager; for all of his immense accomplishments and legacy, it’s still one of the most known things about him. It’s another to see it dramatized for ninety minutes straight, even if the exact truthfulness of what you’re experiencing can depend on who you talked to.

Speaking of, QUICK SIDEBAR! For several reasons, I disengaged from diving in too much about the real lives of Elvis and Priscilla, a move that the more attached might object to. I do acknowledge the movie is based off of Priscilla’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, and that Priscilla was an executive producer on the film itself. I also acknowledge that Lisa Marie Presley emailed Coppola last year with her concerns regarding her father’s portrayal in the film’s script. It can be difficult to form an opinion about the movie, then, without feeling like you’re secretly taking sides in what is clearly a sore subject for the family.

Like all human beings, I strongly suspect Elvis revealed different sides of himself to different people, resulting in these divergent opinions about his character. It’s tempting to walk out of PRISCILLA wanting to hate Elvis; however, I will make the obvious point that he’s no longer here to defend himself one way or another. Beyond that, I am not in any way either an Elvis or Priscilla biographer; thus, I made the call that fact-checking PRISCILLA was not within my purview. There are a lot of excellent articles that do exactly that, and they provide good context for their lives in the real world. It might also help you calibrate your expectations for the film.

For me, I wanted to review PRISCILLA as a Sofia Coppola movie and nothing more.

(It’s also why I resisted the temptation to catch up with ELVIS, the glitzy Baz Luhrmann movie from last year that earned Austin Butler a presumably well-deserved Academy Award nomination. Directly comparing ELVIS and PRISCILLA admittedly seems like the obvious and appropriate thing to do; however, despite their clearly opposing titles, I’ve never gotten the impression that they’re really in competition with each other, either onscreen or off.)

As a Sofia Coppola movie, then, it seems to me that the story of the Elvis-Priscilla marriage is being used as a vessel to explore a social situation far too common to the human experience: a young girl being plucked from obscurity to be the beau of a powerful and influential man, the subsequent existence within a gilded cage, and the relative normalization of this kind of set-up. Again, walking away from PRISCILLA wanting to furiously cancel a long-dead Elvis Presley is somewhat understandable, but also somewhat missing the point. Instead, one has to wonder why this sort of thing is so easily allowed to occur, and why it’s more or less accepted. It’s a substantial thought to chew on, and one that’s still rattling around in my brain all these weeks later.

A criticism of PRISCILLA I’ve seen occasionally thrown around is Jacob Elordi’s portrayal of Elvis, at least in terms of its accuracy compared to Austin Butler’s work in the same role just one year prior. And, it’s true that Elordi doesn’t look or sound all that much like Elvis, really at all. However, I’d argue a depiction need not be 100% accurate or faithful in order to be effective. Just as a random example, Will Ferrell’s work on SNL and Broadway as George W. Bush was a wildly unconvincing impression that nevertheless cut to the heart of what Bush felt like, at least at the time. Elordi’s performance is like the dramatic version of that, I suppose. It’s not a perfect imitation, but because of him, you feel the tension and ping-ponging feelings that Priscilla (who is the main focus, after all) might have felt on any given random day.

So, no, there’s no comparison between Elordi and Butler (at least, I presume). However, Coppola’s focus is different than Luhrmann’s, and the scope of her Elvis’ performance appears to be calibrated in kind. At the end of the day, the onscreen star of PRISCILLA is Priscilla herself, Cailee Spaeny.

Spaeny ends up being a casting coup, if for no other reason than she manages to play so much younger than she really is. For all intents and purposes, the two leads here are the same age (Spaeny is 25, Elordi 26; thirteen months separate them). However, the age gap still manages to read perfectly, because…well, she just looks like a teenager. Maybe it’s her eyes, maybe it’s her size, maybe it’s the soft way Coppola films her throughout*, maybe it’s all of those things. Any way you slice it, you get uncomfortable seeing the two engaged in anything resembling romance. It’s a nice touch.

*In the tradition of Kirsten Dunst and Scarlett Johannson, Cailee Spaeny turns out to be an ideal “Sofia lead”. Coppola’s camera loves her.

It also helps that Spaeny is terrific as Priscilla. Like almost all Coppola leads, the role is written on the page as more internal, and Spaeny gives an understated performance in kind. Although the story PRISCILLA tells is not precisely a revelatory one, it’s still crucial that the emotions that come from dramatizing a turbulent and inappropriate relationship feel real. Spaeny essentially nails it at every turn; she’s enamored and intoxicated with the glitz and home comforts that come with celebrity. She makes her buy the isolation and pain that comes with being with a public-facing heartthrob, a man who frankly has different needs than a civilian ever will. You feel her rationalizing when he loses his temper, when he essentially demands she get used to his affairs, when he changes her and builds her up into his desired image. You feel for her, which (as I identified earlier) was my baseline ask of this movie.

PRISCILLA isn’t perfect; watching it, I get the sense that, at this point, Coppola has likely revealed everything about her filmmaking technique that she’s going to. Sofia Coppola’s movies have never been traditionally plot-heavy; they instead rely on the emotional truth of the situation being depicted. Although she’s only made eight feature films, she’s been at this for twenty-five years. This reliance isn’t going to change. This is just who she is, and when it works, she’s transcendent. Her very best films take a hold of you so intensely that they are difficult to shake. When they don’t, her movies can erode quickly.

It’s a difficult alchemy, one that PRISCILLA doesn’t quite reach for reasons I haven’t been able to put my finger on. There’s nothing to point to and say, “this doesn’t work”. It’s actually an uncommon movie that doesn’t really have anything wrong with it. BUT, I think the bar is just set so high for me when it comes to Sofia Coppola. I mean, LOST IN TRANSLATION literally caused a euphoria in me the first time I saw it. PRISCILLA simply didn’t; however, that’s a insanely unfair standard for me to keep setting her against.

Because PRISCILLA is absolutely good enough! It’s not at all difficult to take the general framework of this story and apply it to any number of age-gap celebrity marriages and relationships. Many of them are famous enough to jump to mind almost immediately; we’re all mostly familiar by now with Jerry Seinfeld’s relationship with a teenager back in the 1990’s, at the height of his sitcom’s fame. Sure, she had essentially just turned 18 when she and the 38-year old comedian made it official, so it was all technically legal. Same goes for actor Doug Hutchison, the man who married sixteen-year-old Courtney Stodden back in 2011, a story that ran in the media mostly as a sort of freak show curiosity: see this gross guy with this crazy girl?

Jerry Lee Lewis. Bill Wyman. Jimmy Page. Hell, going out with younger people is not the sole domain of celebrity men. Ask Nicole Scherzinger, who dated a 19 year old Harry Styles when she was in her mid-thirties. Age-gap relationships are common enough in entertainment that it’s practically assumed at this point.

But does that negate the possibility of damage? Does it negate the morality of it all?

I think that’s the real power of Sofia Coppola’s new movie. Not so much that it brings up something nobody’s ever heard of before (celebrities being bad? Who knew?). But, rather, it’s the way she makes you sit with how being in an underage marriage with the biggest star in the world might feel, both the ecstasy and the agony. It shines because Priscilla’s conflicting emotions are depicted beautifully by Cailee Spaeny. It works because Jacob Elordi connotes the idea of Elvis so well. It’s effective because Sofia Coppola has never lost her eye for lush imagery.

The point is, is that PRISCILLA works. Consider me relieved.

THE BEGUILED Marks a Return To Form

(Don’t do it, Ryan.)

(I’m not joking. It’s hacky. It’s corny to the point that you trying to couch it by first writing a cute couple of lines acknowledging what you’re about to do is also hacky. It might actually be worse.)

(Sigh….)

Webster’s Dictionary defines “beguile” as “to deceive by wiles”, “to lead by deception", quite literally “hoodwink”. It follows, then, that to be beguiled means to be hoodwinked, to be deceived by false appearance.

THE BEGUILED, then, is a movie title that gives you a sense of the entire story before a frame has run through the projector (I’m not sure film really works like that, anymore, but…you get the imagery). Sofia Coppola’s sixth film, which both reunites her with a couple of her former leads AND allows her to collaborate with two modern powerhouses for the first time, deals directly with what happens when a deceiver enters a space of isolation through cowardly means and begins to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting.

It’s also a period piece, a suspense tale set in the American South smack dab in the middle of the Civil War, a time when pretty much everybody walked around with a significant amount of tension, distrust, and anxiety at all times. One could also make the argument that Coppola is dabbling in allegorical story-telling; many of the images and blocking in this movie seems drenched in double-meanings (there’s a lot of tilling of soil, much pruning of branches).

More than anything else, though, THE BEGUILED marks both a relieving return to form for Coppola after a confusing mini-disaster in THE BLING RING, while still representing something different altogether from her. Even if it doesn’t always work 100% of the time, it all at least hangs together. This is a victory in and of itself.

THE BEGUILED (2017)

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Colin Farrell, Elle Fanning, Angourie Rice

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Coppola

Released: June 23, 2017

Length: 97 minutes

Based off a 1966 Thomas P. Cullinan novel of the same name, and previously made as a 1971 Don Siegel movie starring Clint Eastwood, THE BEGUILED tells the story of a sparsely populated Virginian girls’ school in 1864, ran by Martha Farnsworth (Kidman) and staffed by just one other adult, Edwina Morrow (Dunst). As Edwina teaches the five students French, the Civil War rages ever on in the background.

One fateful morning, one of Edwina’s young students, Amy (Oona Laurence), makes an odd discovery while picking mushrooms: a wounded Union deserter, Corporal John McBurney (Farrell). After some debate whether to turn or take him in, Martha allows McBurney inside the school in order to rest and recuperate. This decision ultimately comes at a cost, as McBurney starts slowly and methodically seducing each of the girls, as he shows a talent for showing only the parts of himself he thinks the woman in front of him needs to see (psychologically speaking, not physically. It’s not that kind of movie).

His charm turns to violence as he gets busted sleeping with teenage Alicia (Fanning) by Edwina, whom he had previously declared his love to. Edwina responds by pushing him down a flight of stairs, which wounds his leg to the point of amputation (whether this amputation is truly medically necessary, or merely an act of revenge is a deliberately unanswered point of contention). He’s furious, the women are trapped, and the story shifts to one about how one removes the wolf from the hen house.

In many ways, THE BEGUILED almost plays like a Best Of Sofia Coppola movie, with elements of her past films all mixed together to create something new. There’s Kirsten Dunst! There’s Elle Fanning! There’s that palpable PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK aesthetic and tension at play again! Oh, is that the French language I hear?

And yet, many pillars and tenets of what a typical Sofia Coppola movie looks like is almost entirely absent here. No longing, colorful, fast-paced looks at wealth here. In fact, THE BEGUILED is almost entirely shrouded in darkness in its key moments (a decision that I have mixed feelings about, more on that in a second!). Even though it clocks in at her typical 90 or so minutes, its pace is quite intentionally slow and methodical.

Yet many of her themes remain. Loneliness. The want for freedom. The repression of desire. And perhaps no single character best exemplifies those classic Coppola themes than Edwina, the schoolteacher. All of the girls at the school develop feelings of some sort for McBurney, but Edwina is the one who most obviously falls in love with him. She’s a woman who’s lost in her current role, with no real future ahead of her. War surrounds her. She’s just a schoolteacher, and that’s all she’ll ever be. Then comes this handsome, somewhat dangerous Corporal. Even though it’s clear he’s writing her a check he has no intention of cashing, a large part of her wants to believe it. She has to; it’s her only chance at another kind of life.

This isn’t my original observation, and I do not remember exactly where I first saw it, but it’s worth aggregating it anyway; THE BEGUILED completes the Sofia Coppola Trilogy of Movies Where Kirsten Dunst Plays A Character Who’s Trapped In A Social System With No Easy Way Out Of It (the first two, of course, being THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and MARIE ANTOINETTE). Here, it might be that archetype at its most heartbreaking. She wants so badly, maybe more than any of the other women at the school, to believe McBurney and his seductions. Even to the very end, as McBurney’s deadly dinner begins, it’s not clear to us as an audience if she’s going to actually eat the poison mushrooms and die alongside him (whether she does or not, I’ll leave for you to experience).

It shouldn’t be surprising that Coppola keeps going back to Dunst for these kind of roles. She’s good at them. Dunst is really, really skilled at communicating heartbreak and desire non-verbally and always has been (she’s a big reason those Raimi SPIDER-MAN movies have the emotional punch that they do), which makes her a valuable tool in Coppola’s workbox. We’ve actually reached the end of their collaborations, at least as of this writing (Dunst isn’t in ON THE ROCKS or the upcoming PRISCILLA). One has to imagine there’s more to come on that front. One day.

Another pleasant standout is our sole male lead, Colin Farrell.

Farrell is a guy whose presence has been interesting to grow up around. I distinctly remember that period in the 2000’s where it felt like he was everywhere. As a young man, he had a knack for picking the exact right, fun project (MINORITY REPORT, MIAMI VICE, IN BRUGES) except for when he didn’t (PHONE BOOTH and DAREDEVIL to pick just a couple). He also had a very distinct bad boy reputation, and was at the center of one of the only entertaining and interesting moments in Jay Leno’s TONIGHT SHOW tenure (naturally, it never aired). And now, here he is at the age of 41 (at least at the time THE BEGUILED was released), and all of a sudden a different kind of guy has emerged. Farrell is now a man who connotes danger without living it, a man with that great combination of handsome and seasoned.

All of that to say that, as far as the only main male role in the entire film, Colin Farrell is the exact right fucking choice in 2017 for Corporal McBurney, a man who has to be both many things to many people AND ultimately a man only interested in himself. It’s a tough role to play, but Farrell is maybe one of the only leading men in his current age bracket that could pull it off. It requires a guy who can be charming in an understated way; McBurney is never a “light up the room the second he enters it” kind of man. He’s more of a “slowly nestle his way into your soul” kind of man. Yet, he also needs to be able to provide that believable rage when pushed and cornered. Near the end, McBurney starts dipping into horror movie villain territory, ranting and raving and carrying on while our core women leads are locked in a room, waiting for the tempest to pass.

You basically need to both believe him when he’s charming AND when he’s insane. With age on his side, Farrell’s the guy. We’re lucky to have him.

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On the matter of how the movie is shot and its relationship with literal darkness, I can’t decide if it’s an exercise of form over function. Yes, it makes a lot of sense that the movie would be only lightly lit. The symbolism of the house being covered in shadow once McBurney enters it (as well as the follow-through in thought of key exterior shots being shot through the leaves of a tree) is clear and easy to track. And, of course, the dinner scenes lit only by candlelight evokes a technique mastered by Stanley Kubrick 40 years prior.

On the other hand….well, the movie is hard to see! I know it sounds stupid, but that matters! To be perfectly honest, THE BEGUILED is on Netflix as I write this, and it’s how I screened it for myself. I was ready to blame my visual issues on a touched-up streaming upload or something, so I was somewhat relieved to hear that one of the top Google results for “THE BEGUILED” is “Why is THE BEGUILED filmed so dark?”. For a movie that rests a lot of its storytelling on quiet moments, glances, and facial expressions…bust out a couple more candles, that’s all I’m saying.

(Note: this could be all the result of some setting on my screen that I’m overlooking. Let me know if you had this issue when you watched it, too.)

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Something I’ve been avoiding mentioning this entire article, minus a brief mention near its beginning, is the 1971 version of this same story which, again, starred Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page in the Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman roles, respectively. Normally, whenever there’s a prior version of a movie I’m reviewing, I have no problem comparing them directly. For instance, 1991’s CAPE FEAR is a direct remake of the 60’s original; therefore, it seems fair to be able to view them side-by-side and judge them accordingly.

Here, though, up until the very last minute, I hadn’t even watched Siegel’s version of the Cullinan novel because Coppola isn’t technically remaking his movie. She’s just taking another crack at the same source material. So it didn’t seem fair to compare them. Yet….curiosity got the better of me and I ultimately fit in an opportunity to sneak in a viewing (one of the big reasons this article is coming out a day late).

And…well, I liked it better.

It’s not an overwhelming victory or anything, and it doesn’t necessarily invalidate Coppola’s vision; a lot of the differences between the two simply come down to style choices. The story remains largely the same. However, there are some notable departures that Coppola takes that gives one pause (although I think they’re slightly defendable).

The first thing to point out is that there’s a female slave character, Millie, in the 1971 BEGUILED that Coppola excised completely from the 2017 version. This doesn’t exactly help her beat the allegations that she tells stories from a strictly white (and privileged) perspective, something that has plagued her since the LOST IN TRANSLATION controversy. On one hand, it’s a shame; Mae Mercer brings a lot of humanity to the role (she actually gets one my favorite lines and moments in the whole thing; “You better like it with a died black woman. Because, that's the only way you'll get it from this one”), and I think bringing race in as a component adds even more dis-ease to the story, especially considering it’s a Civl War tale set in the South (with its villain a coward Union soldier). On the other, I think it’s reasonable to assume Coppola simply didn’t think she had anything to provide to the race angle and thought better to avoid it altogether (and considering the tense implications of Millie’s presence in the story, something that could have gone even worse for Coppola if she had bungled it).

All things being equal, it would be nice if Sofia Coppola had some deep insight to provide in regards to race. But she doesn’t. If she did, she would have done so by now. Thus, it doesn’t seem like the scathing indictment people think it is to continue to point out that “she only tells stories about white people!”. I think she knows. Frankly, it’s part of her style at this point. Anyone continuing to watch her movies looking for that kind of insight, when there are twenty-plus other directors that can, feels like torturing yourself on purpose. It’s what it is.

The second, and bigger in my opinion, is that the 2017 BEGUILED frames the story from the perspective of the women. This wouldn’t seem to be a huge deal; after all, there’s only one man in the whole movie (more or less). The thing is, though, that I think Corporal McBurney might be the most compelling character in the whole thing (save for arguably Edwina). Yes, the women are the ones who are changed from the experience, so it would make sense to put the dramatic focus on them. But, when you have such a bizarre and dark central character provided to you, sometimes you gotta roll with it. Focusing on McBurney and his headspace is a large reason why Siegel’s version has such an offbeat and unforgettable vibe (well, that and the incest subplot….it sort of makes sense in context….you should just watch it.) Coppola’s version lacks a punch by comparison.

(Also, it doesn’t do the 2017 version any favors that Geraldine Page blows Nicole Kidman out of the water in terms of performances. I hadn’t brought up the Coppola version’s biggest star yet up for a reason, and it’s because Kidman made no impression on me whatsoever. Considering she used to be one of the most compelling leading women we had, this was rattling for me.)

AND YET. Unlike THE BLING RING, THE BEGUILED has ideas and a point of view and a palpable artistic vision. This was a relief to me, because Sofia Coppola obviously means something to me. I wouldn’t have dedicated my summer to her movies and inspirations if she didn’t! It sucked to see her take such an artless turn seemingly out of nowhere. If nothing else, THE BEGUILED at least showed me that she hadn’t lost it.

But, you know….you should watch both versions. Just because.

THE BLING RING Goes In Circles

The 2000’s were a terrible time.

I’m allowed to say that. I was there.

Demographically (and calendar…ically) speaking, my adolescent years ran from 1998 to about 2009 or so. With a birth year of 1988, I didn’t experience the 1980’s in any meaningful way, and most of the 1990’s are actually kind of a blur; I don’t think I really processed things in front of me as “oh, a new TV show/cartoon/movie/song” until 1997, 98 or so. Thus, the 2000’s were the first decade I got to consciously experience from beginning to end.

It was a bad time.

To be clear, I didn’t necessarily have a bad time; my adolescent and teenage years had the ups and downs you might expect, but the average day was probably no worse or better than yours. I went through the same peaks (realizing there are a few things I’m actually really good at! Developing a close-knit friend group!) and valleys (realizing there are many more things I’m not good at! The realization that there was more darkness in my family than anyone let on!) that most kids go through.

It was just….all the stuff around us. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what was so awful about the detritus that was the Aughts. The things that come to mind aren’t exactly unique to that time; parasitic celebrity gossip wasn’t new in 2000, loud and obnoxious blockbusters meant to be consumed and forgotten were in their third decade at that point, an weird shifts in popular music taste** just kind of comes with being alive.

* That was part of it too, we never landed on a satisfying, rhythmic name for the decade.

** Although, man, if you weren’t there for that moment when boy bands were out and nu-metal was in, seemingly overnight, you missed out. It was hilarious, like someone hit a switch or something.

However, it did kind of all feel vaguely like maybe we were in the beginning of the end. Cheap reality television exploded, first off the backs of solid network hits like SURVIVOR and THE AMAZING RACE, then accelerated by cheapie celebrity fodder like THE OSBOURNES and THE SIMPLE LIFE, before practically mandated after a late-decade writers’ strike that ground the only decent programming out there to a halt. Media outlets like TMZ added a really sadistic and snarky streak to the gossip rags, encouraging us to giggle and roll our eyes at the deteriorating health of public figures like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Amy Winehouse (semi-related note: most stand-up comedy in the 00’s was godawful, too). And, although I personally believe them to be pretty great in their own ways, the 2008 summer releases of IRON MAN and THE DARK KNIGHT are more or less responsible for the current collapse of the superhero movie genre, and maybe all of Hollywood.

Oh yeah, and 9/11. That sucked, too.

So, when I learned that a filmmaker that I really liked, and one that always managed to have something to say about her favorite subjects (the ennui and isolation of upscale life being a big one), made a film based off one of the last “celebrity culture” news events of the decade, I got excited. Sofia Coppola making a movie about the Bling Ring felt like a match made in heaven.

So, of course it sucked. Why wouldn’t it? Everything else about the 2000’s did.

THE BLING RING (2013)

Starring: Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: June 14, 2013

Length: 90 minutes

“THE BLING RING? More like Bore Ring!” - my wife

Yeah, look, I’m just going to get straight to the point. I didn’t like THE BLING RING much, if at all. It was a shocking crash following the high of Sofia Coppola’s previous film, SOMEWHERE, a movie I just about loved due to her instincts as a director guided her to an unbroken series of good decisions. Here, the complete opposite occurred, and I’m left to try to figure out what happened.

For those not in the know, THE BLING RING is a movie based off a real event (specifically, it’s based off a 2010 Vanity Fair article), where a group of seven Calabasas teens who started just kinda walking into the mansions of nearby celebrities when they weren’t home and taking off with some of their outfits (one of the teens referred to it as “going shopping”). They were all mostly fashion, reality television and social media obsessed. In fact, one of them, Alexis Neiers, was in the middle of shooting a reality show pilot for E! when the arrests were made (that show, Pretty Wild, ended up airing in 2010 and lasted nine episodes).

In the actual movie, the names have been changed, presumably to make it more of a fictionalized account. Nick Prugo becomes Marc Hall (Broussard), the repressed outsider and de-facto audience surrogate (and perhaps the only character in the entire movie Coppola actually empathizes with, more on that in a bit). Rachel Lee becomes Rebecca Ahn (Chang), the ringleader. Neiers becomes Nicki Moore (Watson), perhaps the most ready for fame of them all. Tess Taylor and Courtney Ames become Sam Moore (Farmiga) and Chloe Tainer (Julien), who…well, I don’t really know. The movie is largely uninterested. Together, they decide to start breaking into the mansions of the biggest celebrities the 2000’s could allow. Audrina Patridge. Megan Fox. Orlando Bloom. And, of course, Paris Hilton.

It’s not the worst source for a movie premise ever (especially since I’m writing this in a week where a trailer just dropped for a movie based off a fucking Twitter thread from a Buzzfeed employee), and it presents several opportunities. For one, it sets the stage for a unique take on a standard crime/heist film. For another, the idea of glitz and glamour glossing over a sadder reality is right up Coppola’s alley. Heck, it even provides avenues to explore a lot of sneakily-fascinating themes, the most prominent being the fact that, for as racialized and class-based the depiction of crime has traditionally been in media, it was ultimately fellow rich kids that brazenly robbed the affluent this time around.

It doesn’t even really matter that the ending is a forgone conclusion; the mere fact that we even know about this story at all implies they get caught. That’s okay! Not every story needs to be full of twists and turns. Heck, many crime films deal with this. As long as the characters are somewhat compelling (even if (especially if!) we don’t like them), watching the noose tighten around the necks of amateur criminals can be thrilling!

Funnily enough, the moment I accepted that THE BLING RING probably wasn’t going to suddenly make a comeback was when we inevitably reached the scene where the members of the ring are systematically arrested. Theoretically, in a crime story such as this, when you reach the moment justice catches up to our criminal protagonists, you want to feel one of two emotions:

1. Catharsis - these unlikable burglars are finally getting what’s coming to them and you can’t wait to see them squirm under the pressure;

2. Sympathy - you somehow feel for these admittedly shallow, privileged teens who were too bored and stupid to realize they were about to ruin their lives

What you don’t want to feel is what I felt, which is nothing. I felt roughly equivalent to the way I would had I merely skimmed to the Arrest and Aftermath section of the Bling Ring’s Wikipedia entry. And I realized the whole movie up to that point had felt like that, like I might have been better off just reading the Vanity Fair article and calling it a day.

This was…really shocking to me. And disappointing in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Because Sofia Coppola has spent seemingly her entire career dodging accusations of making boring movies with nothing to say about the lives of the rich people she depicts. I’ve always found this to be a really reactionary and frankly surface-level take, one borne of a willful refusal to sit down and engage with her material. Even her worst movie up to this point in her career (MARIE ANTOINETTE) absolutely has something to say about its titular subject. Whether or not you agree with her take on the famous French queen, she found an angle that she was intrigued about, and executed on it. It’s not my favorite, but it isn’t boring, and it isn’t about nothing.

So it went previously with LOST IN TRANSLATION and afterwards with SOMEWHERE, two movies about actors implied to be of means that aren’t all that likable on the page, but manage to break your hearts by the end. Hell, even THE VIRGIN SUICIDES found a way to depict frightened religious parents with a large degree of empathy and understanding, where a lesser movie would have made them the clear and obvious villains. Making the inherently vacuous kind of compelling (Midwestern suburbs, rich performers, the French aristocracy) has long been Coppola’s superpower. Tackling mid-00’s little Hollywood Hills shits should not have been that big of an issue.

But with THE BLING RING? What else can I say? She finally made the kind of Sofia Coppola movie everyone thought she had been making all along.

———

THE BLING RING has good moments and items of merits here and there. I really liked Leslie Mann as Nicki’s “The Secret” spouting stage mom, who’s written with just the right amount of blank-faced vacuousness to set the stage for a larger theme to the film (did these kids ever really have a chance?) that never comes. Emma Watson is an obvious highlight in the cast, although I was expecting something more transcendent from the way everyone was carrying on about her (I can only surmise that in 2013, people still associated her with Hermione Granger, and were amazed that she could play a completely different type of role, i.e. what an actor does).

The closest the movie gets to evoking an emotion is a scene where Sam finds a gun in Megan Fox’s house and starts waving it around wantonly in Marc’s face. Despite his protestations, she never seems to practice any common sense with the stolen weapon, and a weird tension emerges. There’s no music playing underneath any of this, and given what we know about this found friend group, it sure doesn’t seem like Sam’s coming to her senses anytime soon. Although nothing ultimately ends up happening, I genuinely feared for him here.

Finally, there’s a grim theme that the movie is practically begging for its creator to explore, that of the toxic parasocial relationship people have with fame. The central conceit of rich suburbia feeling entitled to just walk into a celebrity’s mansion and start taking off with stuff is so palpable and so relatable (this entitlement, more than COVID-19, is what derailed the possibility of any future secret album sessions for Taylor Swift fans, I reckon), you kind of can’t believe it doesn’t get addressed much here. It almost feels like a point the movie makes accidentally.

That’s….kind of it as far as positives go! It’s not offensively bad or anything, and I’ve definitely seen much worse. But there’s no insight, not even any active parody. Coppola acknowledges the artificial celebrity trappings that surrounded us in the late-00’s; there are frequent cuts to red carpet photos of Lindsay Lohan and Lauren Conrad and the like. But….so what? Yes, it existed. Now what? So it goes with the final reveal that Nicki is attempting to trade in her notoriety for clout, plugging her website in a tell-all interview. But this is hardly an original thought or insight; much better movies have been riffing on that them for decades. For the most part, THE BLING RING just sits there, content to be a flat and superficial film.

And I can already hear it now: “might this be the point? To reflect the flat and superficial nature of these teens?” And…possibly! This might have absolutely have been exactly the texture Coppola was after. But if that’s the case….well, the movie doesn’t really commit to this, either. Because satirical superficiality can still sing and pop off the screen; Amy Heckerling did it masterfully almost thirty years ago. But here….our core group of teenagers definitely don’t have a lot going on between their ears (outside of maybe Marc), but that’s as far as the satire goes, at least as far as I can tell.

If Coppola’s plan was to make a movie with nothing behind it, as a method of establishing character, it was a bad plan.

———

It dawned on me what the core difference was about THE BLING RING compared to the Sofia Coppola movies that came before. Whether she’s aware of it or not, I don’t get the sense she likes any of her central characters (again, outside of Marc). Yes, you can make the argument that they’re not meant to be likable, and that’s fair. Some of the greatest motion art features unlikable people at their core (hell, AMC gained a second life off the backs of two of them, Walter White and Don Draper). But in both of those cases, Vince Gilligan and Matthew Weiner found their creations fascinating, even when they were being awful. They, and their crack team of writers, liked exploring these guys.

The problem here is that I don’t get the sense that Coppola really cracked what could have been interesting about The Bling Ring themselves. I genuinely think she thought she could, or she certainly wouldn’t have spent two years of her life making it. But at the end of it all, it wasn’t there.

Ultimately, it turned out Coppola just kinda had nothing to say in regards to late 2000’s pop culture, which is a shame, because it was actually a pretty dark time. And maybe diving into the production of a movie set at that time in 2011 was too soon. But you figure if anyone was custom built to come up with something insightful about a very strange era in American culture, you’d figure Sofia Coppola would be the one.

And yet, she found nothing. It provided nothing for her, and she reflected it back in kind. And in a way, doesn’t that make it the ultimate 2000’s movie?

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.

Sofia Coppola and The (Possible) Reclamation of MARIE ANTOINETTE

MARIE ANTOINETTE has had a really fascinating lifecycle of discourse.

The movie, I mean. Not the person.

Well, maybe the person, too.

Anyway.

I remember pretty acutely that Sofia Coppola’s third feature and follow-up to LOST IN TRANSLATION, the film that won her a screenwriting Oscar, was fairly polarizing at the time of its release. The written record seems to back this memory up; it currently has a 57% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (not that the famous aggregator site has ever been a real reflection on a movie’s true qualities), and a review of some Wikipedia snippets confirm some critics at the time really loved it, while others….really didn’t.

General audiences didn’t seem particularly high on it either. Its CinemaScore landed right in the middle, at a C*. It made its $40 million budget back, but just barely: it made $60 million worldwide, which admittedly isn’t exactly nothing. Still, LOST IN TRANSLATION made $118 million worldwide off a $4 million budget, so MARIE ANTOINETTE’s relative failure must have given producers pause.

*Although, again, a CinemaScore is really only a measure of how much fun a given average audience just had, period. Consider that EYES WIDE SHUT received a D- CinemaScore, BOOGIE NIGHTS a C, while Michael Bay’s PEARL HARBOR received an A. Simply put, who gives a shit about CinemaScore?

Is any of this fair? Maybe, maybe not. All I can tell you is that, for as obsessed with LOST IN TRANSLATION I was as a lad (and, boy howdy was I), I was a little disappointed by her choice in direction for her next film. Marie Antoinette was not a historical figure I was all that interested in (I was admittedly an uncurious teenager in many ways), and the prominent usage of modern music in the trailers made me hesitate. It all felt…surface level somehow. Immature. To that end, I didn’t even see it, something that would have seemed unfathomable to me in 2004 or so.

It didn’t help that I had friends at the time who also rolled their eyes every time the movie came up in conversation. People definitely had feelings about it, although the sands of time prevent me from recalling exactly what they were, or why they were felt. But the facts were, nobody I knew really wanted to see it, I certainly wasn’t going to see it by myself, and I barely wanted to buy a ticket in the first place. So that was that.

And yet! Here in 2023, I have now seen MARIE ANTOINETTE. Furthermore, a quick scan through Letterboxd (which, because I actively use it, is in fact a completely objective way of deciding a movie’s value and worth) shows that there are many, many, many people out there who quite adore this Kirsten Dunst historical vehicle! My rushed math suggests the aggregate rating for MARIE ANTOINETTE amongst my friends is an easy four stars out of five. A reclamation appears to be at hand.

So, now having finally seen it for the first time, over sixteen years from its release, what did I think? Well, I liked it way, way, way more than I would have ever expected. Yet, it’s the first Sofia Coppola movie out of her first four (a de-facto spoiler for next week’s article, I guess) that I didn’t exactly love. This means I now have to use this space to figure out precisely why.

So…let’s find out!

MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006)

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rose Byrne, Judy Davis, Rip Torn

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: October 20, 2006

Length: 123 minutes

MARIE ANTOINETTE tells the story of…well, Marie Antoinette (Dunst), an Austrian teenager who, in 1770, becomes betrothed to the Dauphin of France (Schwartzman) in an attempt to form an alliance between the two countries. As most of you are aware, Antoinette will become the future Queen of France. As history will turn out, she will also become the final one, as the French Revolution continues to foment in the background of her rule before finally consuming the country and the monarchy by the 1780’s.

Coppola’s film, based off Antonia Fraser’s biography MARIE ANTOINETTE: THE JOURNEY, frames Antoinette as somewhat of a tragic figure, a young girl who gets married into a life of luxury and power essentially against her will, then gets swept up in the excesses afforded a woman of her stature before getting executed by the masses at the ripe old age of 37.

Whether this is a fair depiction of Antoinette is up for debate, to say the least (and probably depends on the individual). For what it’s worth, it’s probably not a discussion I’d be able to have with much clarity, given that I’m not as studied on her as a figure as many others. What I could purport to know about her are items that basically come down to legend, with the “let them eat cake” quote looming largest.

It’s easily the most well-known thing about Marie Antoinette’s short but infamous life, the ultimate “too wealthy elitist leader who is completely out of touch with the common man”, a response to the information that the peasants had run out of bread.

Naturally, she almost certainly didn’t actually say it.

The primary evidence against the claim is the fact that the quote was coined in 1765 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his autobiography CONFESSIONS, when Antoinette was only nine years old and hadn’t yet left her native Austria. Even in that context, it’s hard to tell whether Rousseau’s tale that spurned the phrase was itself truthful (he attributed the “let them eat cake” to simply an unnamed “great princess”). It’s equally unclear how exactly the quote got attached to Antoinette in the first place. But, in the decades after her reign, it certainly felt like something she could have said. So if pro-revolutionaries recognized the symbolic power of the phrase implied as such, what’s the harm?

Thus an entire legacy is altered permanently in culture.

So, I ask: if the “let them eat cake” quote turned out to not be anything I can attribute to her, what else do we think we “know” about Marie Antoinette?

This is the same question that MARIE ANTOINETTE has on its mind as well, and it’s probably the best prism with which to view Coppola’s film here, although it’s also what I think ultimately ruffled some feathers. The movie’s distinctive feature is its committal to depicting Marie Antoinette not necessarily as an out-of-touch member of the ruling class, but as an outsider trying her best. This runs somewhat counter to our popular understanding of her and, thus, has the vague cadence of someone stirring the pot*.

(* It should be noted that the 2001 biography Coppola’s script is technically based off of, Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey is also known for being a quite balanced and sympathetic account of her life, although it should also be noted that I have not read it.)

MARIE ANTOINETTE would seem to be an even more controversial watch in 2023, when “eat the rich” sentiment is, not unreasonably, at an all-time high. What is one to think now of a giant shopping scene set to “I Want Candy”? Couple all of that with the friendly reminder that this is a film birthed from a director who happens to be the child of one of the most well-regarded filmmakers of all time, a woman who for all intents and purposes was born on third base. Simply put, one may ask: why would I care about a rich, privileged woman’s sympathies for another rich, privileged woman?

So I get the instant hostility.

AND YET. I think it’s this marriage of creator and subject matter that gives MARIE ANTOINETTE its…something. Because what the movie seems to be about, more than class, more than French history, is about celebrity and what it means to be swept up in it, accept it, embrace it, then ultimately get destroyed by it.

A major aspect of the film are how concerned people are about Marie needing to be doing things “correctly”. She needs to act a certain way in public. Her marriage needs to be of a certain passion. She’s taking too long to provide the Dauphin a heir (her mother writes her letters on how to help things along in that regard). She’s inappropriately giving the cold shoulder to the current king’s mistress (Asia Argento). She needs to be comfortable in power, but shouldn’t enjoy it (In the film’s less subtle moments, Marie hears all the gossip directed at her as she walks through the halls of the Palace of Versailles). On and on it goes.

Her marriage is amiable, not unfulfilling. Her only role is to be by her side and be “perfect”. The only thing that allows her any sort of joy is partying and buying beautiful clothes. So, naturally, she gets advised by her own damn brother, The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (Danny Huston), not to do that stuff anymore. Her lavish lifestyle coincides with a major financial crisis in France, which puts her in the crosshairs of the public. She eventually sires a son, the thing everyone wanted her to do, and settles down into a family role, but it’s too late. Louis XVI’s perceived indecisions and foppish leadership has doomed him, her and the monarchy as a whole.

Her public decides they’re done with her, and they kill her. They have their reasons, but then, everybody does.

If you separate Marie Antoinette from the context of European politics and put in a more modern context of a public figure, this all sounds familiar, right?

This is more or less how we expect our most notable personalities (usually performers and entertainers, although not always!) to conduct themselves. Women are either too fat or too skinny. Men are either total assholes or they’re little smol beans that must be protected. We demand unfettered access to their personal lives, only to turn around and mock them for being “sloppy”. And lest you ever feel bad for celebrities…well, that’s what the money’s for, right?

This is an intentional line Coppola is drawing, at least it seems to me. And I think that’s why MARIE ANTOINETTE is worth checking out at least once to see how it hits you.

And, I get it. How do you feel bad for the powerful, either onscreen or off? But I think Coppola is maybe one of the few who can find a path towards possibly getting someone to. Considering her entire formative years and beyond must have been populated with figures exactly like this, the influential, famous and beautiful who nevertheless have feelings, desires and anxieties…it doesn’t exactly surprise me that Coppola found this aspect of Antoinette completely compelling.

Kirsten Dunst is a good fit for Marie Antoinette in this regard, and it’s fun to see how much she’s grown, both as an individual and as a performer, since we last saw her in 1999’s THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. Between those two films, Dunst’s career had skyrocketed thanks to her costarring role as Mary Jane Watson in the first two Sam Raimi SPIDER-MAN films. She had also gained cool cult-film cred with 2000’s BRING IT ON and 2004’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND.

But I think it’s easy to forget how skilled a performer Dunst can really be. It helps that she’s able to pull off the glamour you imagine Antoinette to be associated with; she doesn’t exactly look like her, but she does feel like her, and maybe that’s all the difference. But, she plays the somewhat contradictory emotion of this somewhat lost and naive soul well. Every scene of her and Louis XVI trying to connect, trying to make something out of this arrangement they’ve been thrown into…it’s bittersweet and kind of heartbreaking. Crucially, when the movie reaches its inevitable conclusion, your heart sinks more than a little bit. I think this wouldn’t be the case if Dunst weren’t so compelling in the role, which makes her perhaps the most important piece of this film’s foundation.

We haven’t talked about him much, but by the way, Jason Schwartzman is phenomenal as Louis-Auguste, the Dauphin of France. In a bit of perhaps-unintentional meta-comedy, he’s a legacy hire, likely cast for his familial connection to Coppola (they’re cousins). But that would only be an issue if he weren’t as good in the role as he is. He fully realizes the Dauphin as a character, a boy given a man’s position that he is completely not ready for. As far as all that hand-wringing from the royal court that Marie cannot provide the country an heir? Yeah, turns out that’s more on the Dauphin than people want to admit.

Despite the lack of solid evidence that Louis XVI was in fact gay, it’s a rumor that has dogged him even to this day (possibly as a during-his-time explanation as to why they had such trouble consummating). The movie seems to at least flirt with this as a possibility, although it’s just as likely that Louis XVI was too young, too indecisive, too introverted, too unattracted to his assigned wife (he would have made an incredible Redditor).

Schwartzman plays this ambiguity perfectly. Whether or not he was a latent homosexual, or whether he was just a sweet weirdo under pressure, all that matters is that he’s a recipe for disaster, a heavily introverted leader who does as much to sour the people against the monarchy as Marie ever did. And, look, if you’re going for that kind of guy, there’s no reason to look further than Jason Schwartzman.

———

Interestingly, the aspect of the movie’s production that I thought for sure would drive me crazy was easily my favorite part about it, that being its modern soundtrack. I often find that using modern music or production aspects to gussy up an old story or period piece is a corny crutch that implies a distrust of a given audience’s interest in the very story it’s invested itself in.

Here, though, Coppola’s ear for the perfect “needle drop” comes through. Take the infamous use of The Strokes’ “What Ever Happened”; for whatever reason, more than any other song on the soundtrack, this gets singled out as something egregious. My first counterpoint is that the song rocks, so who cares. My second and more productive counterpoint, though, is that the song happens to sonically match the emotion of the moment in the film perfectly.

As a reminder, the song arrives as Marie is giddily arriving back from the beginnings of her affair with Axel von Fersten (a mid-twenties Jamie Dornan!). She’s running as quickly as her uptight, high-end outfit can allow. She finally crashes onto her canopy bed, and just kinda….stares into space. She’s a teenager in love, maybe for the first time. Tell me “What Ever Happened” doesn’t sound like how that feels.

(Also, I think “What Ever Happened”, a song whose exact meaning appears to be somewhat open to debate, sure seems like it has the trappings of celebrity on its mind. It doesn’t seem to mach this moment lyrically, but it does seem to align with the deeper themes of MARIE ANTOINETTE as a whole.)

The soundtrack to MARIE ANTOINETTE goes on like this. There’s an inherent emotional truth to the songs being used, and that’s why it works. It’s not cheesy novelty (this isn’t peasants screaming”WE WILL ROCK YOU” at a jousting match in A KNIGHT’S TALE) or an incongruous attempt to force the text to support an invalid interpretation (everyone calling their guns swords in ROMEO + JULIET). It’s a way to paint the feeling of a given scene with whatever sound is deemed necessary. Using modern and semi-modern rock as the sonic palette is a conscious choice, but it’s also one with a purpose.

If nothing else, it’s a choice that gets us that coronation scene where The Cure’s “Plainsong” begins blaring, as the future of France (and its two new in-over-their-heads rulers) has changed forever. A top Sofia Coppola musical moment if there ever was one.

———

Dang, Ryan, it sure sounds like you liked it! Well, and I did. But, as I indicated at the top, I didn’t quite love it.

The issue for me is…the movie doesn’t quite have a secondary gear beyond its unique interpretation. I think I enjoyed this idea of who Marie Antoinette might have been like, but I’m not sure it inspired any desire to dig further into the subject, if even just to fact-check the movie.

Now, I try to be really careful not to judge a piece of art for what it isn’t. Thus, I want to make sure I’m not railing on MARIE ANTOINETTE for not being a full-fledged biography or historical document. It’s not trying to be. Its aim is to be a moody and dreamy character piece. In fact, her stated desire for the film was, allegedly, thus:

It is not a lesson of history. It is an interpretation documented, but carried by my desire for covering the subject differently.

In that sense, it’s 100% mission accomplished. And it created a good movie (refer back to everything we just talked about)!

However, I can’t help but think about a movie that Coppola had mentioned as an influence for MARIE ANTOINETTE: Ken Russell’s 1975 ode to Franz Liszt LISZTOMANIA.

There are superficial similarities between the two films. Their principal subjects are famous “celebrities” of their time (and I had little to no historical knowledge of either). They are both anarchic historical biopics in their own way, with equal concern for emotional accuracy as opposed to historical accuracy and, of course, they’re both infused with a modern sensibility. And both films have evoked extremely strong reactions, both positive and negative.

But, of course, they are deeply different films at the end of the day. Russell goes full fucking Ken Russell on LISZTOMANIA (if you haven’t seen it, you must), while MARIE ANTOINETTE is a much gentler type of movie. And there isn’t anything wrong with that. But, maybe just out of its sheer audacity, LISZTOMANIA immediately triggered a strong response from me the second it was over: “I guess I need to bone up on Franz fucking Liszt”.

Alternatively, I guess MARIE ANTOINETTE the movie, as interesting and maybe as underrated as it was, didn’t really get me that excited to learn any more about Marie Antoinette the woman. Further, I don’t know that I was left with much more to chew on when it was over than the notion of “maybe popular history has misunderstood her”. Paradoxically, some solid prior knowledge of this time in world history would almost certainly be a boon to the experience, since the movie’s primary directive is to riff off that knowledge.

Basically, if I had done some studying beforehand, I might genuinely have loved MARIE ANTOINETTE. Further, there’s a very real chance that with some studying, this could become a movie I love on a re-watch. I just don’t know that I’m going to do that solely because I liked it.

Sorry, Sofia. On this one, it’s not you, it’s me.

On the other hand, I think of something Marie says to her first-born child, a daughter instead of the anticipated son, in a moment of quietness about midway through the film. Marie says to Marie Therese, simply:

“You are not what was desired, but that makes you no less dear to me.”

Yeah.

LOST IN TRANSLATION and The Power of Connection

One of the hardest questions for me to answer is “what’s your favorite movie?”

Responding to any variation of the “what’s your favorite ___?” inquiry is a daunting task, mostly because…well, nobody ever seems prepared to receive the almost infinite number of possible responses. There are always hidden right and wrong answers, but even the right answer can often be deemed wrong. For instance, say you asked someone “who’s your favorite musical artist?”, and they answered with “The Beatles”. It would be a technically appropriate answer (maybe even The Answer), but it would feel somewhat unsatisfying, right? Deep down, it feels a little too easy or something, doesn’t it? On the other hand, say they responded with a sincere “Imagine Dragons!”. You wouldn’t be able to hide your instantaneous eye roll, begging the question as to why you even asked in the first place if you were going to throw attitude at an “incorrect” answer.

It’s a piece of common communication that often breaks down before it even begins.

Because what we’re really looking for is something interesting, an answer that provides a little insight into the inner workings of the person being asked. You’re kinda hoping the question “who’s your favorite musical artist?” gets responded to with something like “King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard”. So the natural anxiety, at least for me, is the feeling that I have to come up with something cool when asked about my very favorite things.

Thus, when people ask “what’s your favorite movie?”, I’ll mention a range of candidates and maybe spit out one or two titles that mean something dear to me, both in terms of its content as well as its significance in a certain time of my life.

But when it comes to “Favorite Movie”, I stay away from defining it altogether. I have too much trouble communicating it.

Anyway, LOST IN TRANSLATION is my favorite movie.

Or at least it has been. Maybe it still is! All I can tell you is that it’s one of the very few movies that still conjures up the exact feelings I had the first time I ever saw it.

It was November of 2003, I was fifteen years old and my mom and I were knocking out movies that were starting to get awards buzz. It’s a process that caused me to see quite a few films that I enjoyed (ADAPTATION, SIDEWAYS) and many that ended up going in one ear and out the other (RIP to SEABISCUIT and MILLION DOLLAR BABY). LOST IN TRANSLATION was quickly becoming an indie darling that particular year, so we headed down to the Tower Theatre, one of the only two theaters in town that really played stuff like this. I didn’t walk into the theater with any preconceived notions. I mean, I liked Bill Murray from all the stuff a fifteen-year old boy would have seen him in (GHOSTBUSTERS, GROUNDHOG DAY), but I didn’t know Scarlett Johannson and I certainly didn’t know Sofia Coppola.

Oooh, boy, did that change.

I had never really seen a movie that…not spoke to me, exactly, but allowed me so totally to enter its dreamlike haze. Part of it was the soundtrack, part of it were the characters’ knacks for expressing entire lifetimes of thought without actually saying anything, part of it was just its specific color palette. I had never seen a movie that had so completely absorbed me. I’m not certain I’ve ever seen another.

And, man, for years afterwards, I just would not shut up about this movie, so attached I had become to its dreamy melancholy. If someone else mentioned it at school, I desperately wanted to slide into the conversation (and often did, much to their chagrin). I lamented THE RETURN OF THE KING’s historic Oscar sweep that year, if only because it came at the cost of mostly freezing out LOST IN TRANSLATION (at least in my mind; Coppola did walk away with a Best Original Screenplay trophy). The second it got released on home media, I chronicled my pursuits of finding a DVD that was specifically in widescreen on my LiveJournal. There are people I went to high school with who will text me to this day whenever the movie comes up in the course of their natural lives. To them, I say, thanks for bearing with me.

It may surprise you, then, to hear that I really didn’t revisit LOST IN TRANSLATION once I graduated high school. The thing of it is, once you reach your college years and beyond, you begin the process of slowly reappraising and revisiting things you used to enjoy. You dig up old episodes of your favorite cartoons. You pop on all the albums that shaped you. You fire up the movies that formed your tastes. And you often start noticing…hmmm, a lot of stuff I used to like was actually pretty bad! Turns out there’s no accounting for taste when you’re a toddler, and who the fuck knows what goes through your mind when you’re a teenager.

Because of this, I hesitated for well over a decade to revisit LOST IN TRANSLATION, because I just didn’t want to face the possibility that the reason it stirred me so was simply because I was a dumbass.

So there it sat. Until this week.

No, just kidding. I revisited it a couple of years ago first. Fuck, it would have been a way better story if I hadn’t, though, huh?

In February 2020 (yes, there really was a brief period of that year that vaguely resembled real life), the very same Tower Theatre that I had originally seen LOST IN TRANSLATION was doing a promotional event. Dubbed The Director’s Cup, it was a sort of March Madness bracket where eight different directors’ filmographies would be competing head-to-head against each other. Two movies would square off and be ran as a double feature over a weekend. You at home would get to vote for which director gets to move forward. So on and so on. They…uh….never got a chance to finish it.

Anyway, as a result, LOST IN TRANSLATION was playing in town to represent Sofia Coppola’s ouevre. Nervous as I was, I finally got to take my wife to see it how I saw it. This was it, the movie I had often talked about but never worked up the courage to actually pop in. In front of my spouse, no less, I was about to find out if my taste held up or not. And….

It held up. Of course it did. If anything, LOST IN TRANSLATION took on even more meaning now that I was an adult (we’ll get into it).

Now, it also revealed itself to be a movie with its own unique flaws, and we’ll talk about them as we get there. But it turns out there’s something universal about the feeling of disconnect, of being profoundly alone, and forging unexpected bonds in the middle of nowhere.

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Starring: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johannson, Fumihiro Hayashi, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: September 12, 2003

Length: 102 minutes

Bob Harris (Murray) is an American actor, one who has likely left his prime, who has arrived in Japan to shoot a series of Suntory Whiskey ads. He’s immediately and hopelessly out of his element; his translator has a habit of broadly summarizing the meticulous instructions being thrown at him, the hotel shower is much too small to accommodate him, and he can’t really adjust to the jet lag. His extensive travel is also clearly putting a strain on his marriage; his wife still needs him to pick out carpet samples, and she faxes him messages that come in the middle of the night.

Bob is a man who, in this particular moment, belongs nowhere.

Charlotte (Johansson) also happens to be staying in Tokyo, in the very same hotel in fact, as her rock photographer husband John (Ribisi) tours along with the band he’s currently working with. He’s sweet and well-intentioned, but neglectful in the way that only young career-oriented men can be. He’s always got somewhere to be so, most days, Charlotte’s left to wander the city alone. She’s far too young to be this disillusioned about her marriage and future, but here she is.

As any star-crossed people must, their paths soon intersect. Bob and Charlotte run into each other at the hotel bar, and they quickly spark up a friendship (or something deeper?) as it soon becomes clear that they are the only two people in the entire city, maybe the world, that they can actually communicate with.

What follows is what some people have uncharitably referred to as “nothing”. The body of the film is a series of events detailing the remainder of Bob and Charlotte’s stay in Tokyo. They spend a night on the town with some of Charlotte’s friends, as they hop from bar to karaoke bar. Bob reluctantly extends his trip for a few days in order to honor a booking on Japan’s version of “The Tonight Show”. Charlotte seeks something resembling spiritual awakening. They take a trip to the emergency room. Most of all, they both sit up at night and just…talk.

Again, not exactly what one would call the A to B to C method of screenwriting. But dismissing all of this as boring, as a not-insignificant amount of people seemed to do at the time, is an unfortunate way to dismiss what I would consider to be a very exciting and rousing film.

It’s through these vignettes that we learn so much about our two principals. More to the point, we learn just as much about them through their actions as we do through what they say. The stark differences in their demeanors when they’re together compared to when they’re apart. The way Bob’s malaise turns into joie de vivre. The way Charlotte suddenly seems able to articulate what she normally can’t even define to herself. That’s the movie in a nutshell.

Not to say that their words aren’t important. It struck me watching it this time around that Bob and Charlotte are both people who, despite them being at completely different points in their lives, find themselves in the same marital crossroad. They seem disillusioned, unsure of how they got here with their partner. It’s even interesting how their respective marriages kind of mirror each other; Bob is clearly the aloof partner in his marriage, similar to John in Charlotte’s.

All of this to say that this set-up leads to one of the more devastating exchanges in the whole film. During one of their middle-of-the-night talks, Charlotte bluntly asks Bob, “Does it get easier?” His reply: “No.”

He corrects himself, saying “yes, it gets easier”. But it’s too late.

This feeling of relief and honesty that Bob and Charlotte share with each other hits so nicely, not only because of the two astounding performances at the center of the narrative, but because Coppola so fully dramatizes their previous isolation within the first two minutes of screen time. Consider the first time we meet our central leads.

We can start with Bob, who is hazily sitting in the back of a taxi cab on the way from the hotel to the airport. He’s barely awake, and completely disoriented. The lights from the various billboards whiz by. Suddenly, as Death in Vegas’ “Girls” plays in the background, he sees it. One of his Suntory ads. The first thing he recognizes in this vast city he’s found himself in, and it’s a picture of himself, surrounding by Japanese type.

On the other hand, consider the first time we meet Charlotte. No, not the scene of her looking out the hotel window. It’s the famous first shot, a quietly framed shot of her rear end. It’s interesting to track people’s reaction to an opening like shot this, a desexualized picture of a private part. The first instinct I think anyone might have would be to giggle. However, the second is to get…a little uncomfortable, right? We’re used to shots of female body parts being depicted as sexual (consider that if the context were exactly the same, but with Bill Murray’s rear end, we’d likely know what to make of it more). But, in this instance? A female butt just…existing, as the opening credits roll?

So we just sit, slightly uncomfortable.

We’ve entered the characters’ headspace and it’s been thirty seconds.

———

The world of cinema has many examples of two unconnected people forging intense bonds due to random chance. BRIEF ENCOUNTER is probably the most famous, thanks to the heartbreaking performances of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, but also due to David Lean’s deceptively simple and efficient direction and the eloquent, Noel Coward inspired screenplay. It’s also not hard to make a connection between LOST IN TRANSLATION and Wong Kar-Wai’s international hit IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, a similarly lush and devastatingly understated film about two accidentally connected people whose feelings cannot be fulfilled, released just three years earlier. Lest anyone think that movie wasn’t firmly in Sofia Coppola’s mind when she was putting LOST IN TRANSLATION together, consider that it appeared on her most recent Sight and Sound ballot.

However, there’s a key difference between the connections between Laura/Alec and Mrs. Chan/Mr. Chow compared to Bob and Charlotte. Bob and Charlotte is the one relationship out of those three that doesn’t feel explicitly romantic, or at the very least fueled by sexual desire.

The exact nature of Bob and Charlotte’s relationship is absolutely open to interpretation (it’s part of the beauty of Coppola’s creation) but to me, I’ve always read it as non-sexual, yet wildly intimate. Over the brief time that they share space with each other, these otherwise unrelated and unconnected people are almost quite literally soulmates.

Yeah, sex does enter the equation, in a roundabout way. A running joke about a lounge singer who warbles in the background throughout many of the scenes at the bar resolves with Bob sleeping with her. It comes to a head when Charlotte catches him with company the next morning. And, sure, it all makes things awkward for Charlotte (Johansson’s choice of expressing bemusement rather than shock in this moment has always fascinated me). However, it never feels like a matter of jealousy, at least not to me. It’s more like a bubble bursting, a reminder that this….whatever it is…has an inherent end date.

It can’t just be the Bob and Charlotte show forever.

This “soulmate” character dynamic is key for a couple of reasons. The primary one is that it assures that the significant and blatantly obvious age gap between the two leads never feels lecherous; for all the subsequent criticism levied against the film, I’ve never heard anybody ever accuse it of being “gross”. The second reason is that this difference is what ultimately gives this movie its power. It’s what gives it its universality.

Despite everything, humans are inherently social creatures. Even introverts (of which I consider myself one) can only isolate for so long before a desire to communicate arises; it’s why the Internet can be both a wonderful and dangerous place. I think there’s something more beautiful, then, about Bob and Charlotte’s respective yearning is just for someone to finally get them, rather than a desire to get into bed. Just my two cents.

———

Coppola has stated she drew much of her inspiration regarding Bob and Charlotte’s dynamics off of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s chemistry in THE BIG SLEEP. I found this sort of surprising at first, as those are humongous shoes to fill, and I wouldn’t exactly say it’s a one-to-one translation. However, viewed through this prism, I see what Coppola is going for. There’s an comfortable rhythm to Bogart and Bacall’s dialogue and interactions, maybe the best real-life couple to ever do it (there’s a reason THE BIG SLEEP instantly jumps up a few notches whenever the two are on screen).

Murray and Johansson are absolutely no Bogart and Bacall (who in the history of cinema ever was?), but that easygoing nature is totally there, and I think it helps fuel the storytelling so well. Again, when you think about the major theme of “communication”, it’s a good instinct to have our two leads be so at ease with each other after a few days (and maybe a lifetime) of not really being understood, either by others or by themselves. Why not draw inspiration from the most communicative screen couple in film history?

For their part, both Murray and Johansson are fucking revelatory here, perhaps the crowning achievement in two equally successful filmographies (in completely different directions). Though it’s pigeonholed her at times, Johansson’s power has long been her old soul, her ability to project lifetimes of experience beyond her years. Although she isn’t often doing much at all throughout the film, her world-weariness is so apparent from the jump. To that end, consider Scarlett is actually playing OLDER in this (Charlotte is supposed to be 22, Scarlett was 17 at the time of filming). Not everything she’s made between then and now has been brilliant, but there’s a reason why, unlike many of her costars, she’s unlikely to have suffered much from spending a decade in the Marvel machine.

On the other hand, the most jarring thing about Bill Murray’s portrayal of Bob Harris is how un-chatty his depiction of the character is. It’s so against type; Murray had made his career playing smarmy wise-asses on SNL before perfecting the formula in things like GHOSTBUSTERS, WHAT ABOUT BOB? and GROUNDHOG DAY. He’s mostly known now, I suspect, for kinda being an Internet meme, one of those guys who’s famous for being eccentric, although I suspect that’s a mostly self-promoted persona (and one that has its damages; we’ll get there).

Point being, his performance here seems to be this real turning point for him. It came off his career-pivoting work in Wes Anderson’s early stuff like RUSHMORE and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. Those were supporting roles; here, he’s front and center. Intense melancholy hangs on him just as well as detached sarcasm ever did. The relative lack of a full screenplay (the final document was apparently only 75 pages) also allowed for Murray to do what he does best: improvise and give little wisecracks. The “Roger Moore” photoshoot scene is one of those little “can’t see the acting” moments that are so rare in film, and it’s because of Murray.

I still think he was robbed of the Best Actor Oscar that year (as far as who did win that year? My only comment about Sean Penn in MYSTIC RIVER is that oftentimes acting awards interpret Best Acting as most acting).

———

It’d be disingenuous to talk about LOST IN TRANSLATION without diving its most common criticism, that of its “otherism” and “Orientalism” of Japanese people. However you may feel about it, it’s hard to deny that a large chunk of the movie hinges on the differences between our two leads and the people that surround them. In fact, Coppola wrings a lot of comedy out of it; an early shot of Bob towering over everybody in an elevator gives you an idea of what we’re talking about.

To be clear, this is not “woke mind virus” trying to re-evaluate a decades-old piece of work; charges of uncomfortable racism has dogged the movie since the week it came out. I distinctly remember people on internet forums banging this drum very early on in the movie’s run (including one person who ran a website called Lost In Racism, a name so hilariously blunt that I’ve never forgotten it). And in an era of heightened scrutiny and hate towards Asian-American communities, LOST IN TRANSLATION can admittedly be an uncomfortable watch at times. A not-insignificant amount of Bob and Charlotte’s banter revolve around the way Japanese people speak English. There’s a joke at a restaurant where every picture of the different specials are exactly the same. There’s at least two more “L and R” jokes than you probably remember.

Here’s the thing, though. Outside of a few instances that I’ll get into in a minute, I don’t know that the joke is often specifically on the people of Tokyo. In that elevator shot mentioned above, the interpretation “the movie thinks it’s funny that Japanese people are short” feels like a disingenuous read, at least to me. If anything, the joke is that Bob is different. He’s already a man out of place, and now he barely has anywhere to hide. We laugh due to his discomfort. At least I do (I’m not interested in altering art for the sake of accommodating for those who are laughing because “lol, Japanese are short"!” Fuck you. Stop watching movies.)

One of the bigger themes of the movie is an inability to communicate. Hell, the title is an obvious giveaway. Viewing the film through that frame, sequences like the commercial shoot become clearer in intent. The commercial director rapidly firing off long and eloquent acting notes to Bob, only for his translator to boil them down to a vaguer “more intensity”…it’s a good bit! And the scene isn’t trying to illustrate how crazy these Japanese people are, it’s driving home Bob’s isolation, how there isn’t one single person in his world at this moment that is able to talk to him, or for him to talk back to. Without these scenes, Charlotte and Bob’s stories intertwining wouldn’t have half the impact. The intent isn’t to offend, it’s to dramatize.

Now, that all being said….

Back in 2020, sitting there watching it in an actual theater, the only scene that truly landed with a thud was the “lip my stocking” sequence with the female sex worker. For context: an early scene shows a madam coming up to Bob’s room and giving him instructions that he doesn’t understand, including a command to rip her stocking. You can probably do the racist math from there.

It’s not that it doesn’t fit the movie, per se; it’s another example of a communication breakdown between Bob and a person in his space. The issue is that the joke of the scene truly does seem to be on her, the Japanese woman whose behavior is so crazy and weird, despite her being on her own home turf. To that end, this was the scene where you could sort of feel the 2020 theater audience get a little tense (for comparison, the scene received hearty laughter when I saw it back in 2003. Make of any of this what you will).

Everything else, though? Bob and Charlotte poking fun at everyone’s poor English? It sort of made sense to me within the confines of the characters’ situations at hand. To be clear, the characters making the occasional “L’s and R’s” jokes isn’t, like, great behavior or anything (and you could strongly argue it was irresponsible of Coppola to include such dialogue in the first place), and if people in real life were called out on this sort of thing, they’d hopefully feel pretty embarrassed. And the movie doesn’t really provide comeuppance or consequence for any of it, although I’d also argue it’s not obligated to, either, depiction not equaling endorsement and all that.

On the other hand….two outsiders talking shit to each other about their unfamiliar surrounds feels realistic to me. We all do it, even if it’s an uncomfortable thing to admit. I find it highly believable that two white Americans basically stranded in Tokyo with nobody else to talk to would begin rolling their eyes and saying, “why does everyone here talk funny?”. It’s not nice, but it’s a defense mechanism. It’s what people do.

Oh, and I guess another thing to address is the Bill Murray of it all. I grew up with Murray as a presence for as long as I can remember. He’s a guy who made his career off of being funny in front of a camera, but built his legacy off of cultivating eccentric stories about himself, some of which can sometimes sound a little too good to be true. There’s also a large chance that he’s just a genuine asshole; Geena Davis and Lucy Liu have both recently opened up about how poorly they got along with him on their respective sets, and he managed to get Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut scuttled by getting a sexual harassment complaint made against him. In isolation, one can rationalize any one of those things as “Bill being Bill” and retroactive judgment being made against him. On the other hand, it’s possible he’s just always been a dick and has successfully gotten us to look at it as just “funny troll” behavior. You’ll have to be the judge, but I felt like it should be mentioned regardless.

———

Back to what makes this movie such a treat.

First of all, we’ve talked a lot about Murray and Johansson, but there are other actors who shine in this. Fumihiro Hayashi almost walks away with the whole midsection of the film as “Charlie Brown”, a friend of Charlotte’s who adds some gleeful anarchic danger to their nights on the town (in a instance of life possibly imitating art, Hayashi is a friend of Coppola’s in real life). Giovanni Ribisi is perfectly cast as Charlotte’s aloof and flighty husband.

And, my favorite of all: Anna Faris makes a couple of brief, but important, appearances as Kelly, an American actress also in Toyko on a press junket. Her depiction of that superficially nice, yet completely vacuous celebrity is so perfectly realized that it’s been long rumored to be a spiteful caricature of Cameron Diaz, which has never really been confirmed or denied (I don’t really see it, FWIW).

I also think LOST IN TRANSLATION perfectly captures the hazy romance of travel, including the weird sensation of posting up in a hotel for days at a time (in some ways, it’s even stranger when it’s a nice place). I especially have always loved how the movie takes the time to show all aspects of Tokyo, both the big urban hubs and its smaller, more serene spiritual side, all without ever feeling like a corporate travelogue.

Finally, as will become a recurring theme in this series, I simply cannot wrap this up without talking about the soundtrack. I wouldn’t say LOST IN TRANSLATION has a score, per se. Every piece of music within it is a pre-existing song, although there are a handful of Kevin Shields songs that were written specifically for the film. But every track is chosen so thoughtfully in building the atmosphere and vibe (people have described the sound as “dreampop”; couldn’t have said it better myself). It’s a big reason why the movie made such an impression on me in the first place; the scene of everybody singing 80’s hits in the karaoke room was responsible for putting me on a New Wave kick for a while in my 20’s.

And when the final song in the final scene starts, as the opening riff to Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” begins to play as our two leads separate, likely never to meet again…twenty years on, and I still get chills. And if you don’t, I don’t want to know you.

No, I’m kidding. It’s not that serious. I really love that moment, though.

———

This is silly, but I think about Bob and Charlotte a lot. I wonder how their respective marriages turned out, if Charlotte realized just how much goddamn life is ahead of her, and that she doesn’t need to play mistress to her husband’s occupation. I wonder how, or if, Bob navigates his starkly obvious midlife crisis. If he patches things up with his wife. If the whiskey ads were lucrative enough to have been worth it. Hell, I wonder if, in the advent of social media, Bob or Charlotte started chatting again or even braved figuring out a time and place to meet again after all these years.

It’s a movie I desperately wish could be given a follow-up, a BEFORE SUNSET-esque check-in on these two fascinating people. Yet I know that the very reason LOST IN TRANSLATION has any power at all is that it is an unresolved note. It’s a film that famously preserves its most cathartic moment (Bob’s final words to Charlotte) from its audience; Bob’s final words to Charlotte are whispered and rendered inaudible to us, a bold moment of dignity. They don’t know what happens next. And neither do we.

It’s a movie that gives you exactly as much as you need while leaving you wanting more.

I don’t think there’s a greater compliment I could pay a movie than that.

Reflection and Repression: THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

This summer, I’m doing a deep dive into Sofia Coppola’s filmography, mostly because….I’ve always meant to! We start, as always, at the beginning….

———

“You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”

It’s awful being a kid.

It’s an easy thing to forget once you become an adult, when your soul becomes leaden with life’s curses, and you begin to feel the undertow of the boundless sea of nostalgia pull you in. As bleak as it starts to feel once you pass the legal voting age, though, adulthood at least comes with its own certain freedoms. The freedom, for instance, to crack open a beer (or two). The freedom to drive out to the middle of nowhere if the mood strikes. The freedom to hang out with pretty much whoever you want. Sure, those things can all have consequences attached to them, but there’s typically nobody in your way of doing much of anything.

As a kid? Your freedoms depend mostly on the mercies of the guardians surrounding you. You’re too young for beer; you’d be lucky if you’re allowed to even drink a sugary soda every once in awhile. Your ability to travel hangs on the ability and desire of a parent to give you a ride, there and back. And god help you if one of your friends (or…gulp…boyfriend) fails to merit your mom or dad’s approval. And this is all assuming your parents are anything resembling normal. Your already impossibly small world can become almost unbearably tiny if you’re dealt an especially bad parental hand.

How you deal with the restriction of freedom inherent to your adolescence and teenage years can make or break you. One option is to just sort of accept the ennui and decide to start doing things to amuse yourself, like writing crappy stories in a composition notebook, which can lead you down the path of eventually writing articles about Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN and Lembeck’s THE SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE within weeks of each other during a pandemic (just as an example).

Or…you can rebel. And there are lots of ways to reclaim your freedom. You can lie to your parent’s faces just because. You can thumb your nose at their religion or beliefs. You can secretly call or text that boy they disapprove of.

Or, in the most extreme of cases…you can opt out of it all entirely.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999)

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, Kathleen Turner, James Woods

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: May 19, 1999 at the Cannes Film Festival, general release April 21, 2000

Length: 97 minutes

Based on the 1993 Jeffrey Eugenides novel, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES takes us back to 1975 Michigan to tell the story of the Lisbon family through the perspective of a group of neighborhood boys, reflecting back on their youth as grown men in the present. Seemingly living comfortably in a Grosse Pointe suburb, the Lisbons consist of the mother Sara (Turner), the father Ronald (Woods) and five daughters: Lux (Dunst), Mary (A.J. Cook), Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall), Therese (Leslie Hayman), and Bonnie (Chelse Swain). One summer day, Cecilia attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. From there, the movie tracks the Lisbons’ reactions and behavior to this unexpected turn, as well as the boys in the neighborhood that become oddly fascinated with these mysterious girls.

Initially, nobody really knows what to make of Cecilia’s attempt on her own life. Even the well-meaning child psychologist, Dr. Horniker (a role that gives us a wonderful and unexpected Danny De Vito cameo) chalks it up to a cry for help, and suggests increasing her socialization. In response, Mrs. Lisbon instead tightens the reins she has on her daughters, increasing their curfew. After a very forced, very sterile, and very supervised “party” with a couple of neighborhood boys, Cecilia excuses herself and leaps off the balcony onto the metal fencing below.

We follow as Lux begins a secret love affair with one of the hottest boys in school, Trip Fontaine (Hartnett). Their romance burns brightly before being inevitably extinguished in a cruelly arbitrary manner, and curfew becomes tighter and tighter for the Lisbon children. The daughters are pulled out of school and are essentially on house arrest. In response, Lux sneaks onto the roof at night to have random hookups with strange boys. From there, the movie chugs along towards the ending indicated by its title.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is about…well, it’s about a lot of things. It’s partly a story of feminine interiority. It’s also partly a story about the struggle for identity and autonomy in an inherently restrictive environment. Most interestingly, though, it’s also a story mostly told through the eyes of a group of boys. As mentioned, the film is narrated by one of the neighborhood kids (voiced by Giovanni Ribisi), now a grown man, reflecting back on this time of his life where he and his friends were obsessed with the Lisbon sisters, due mostly to the fact that they were so completely…unknowable. They’re not really allowed to go out much, they don’t really socialize….they’re essentially blank slates for others to project their dreams onto. Although we never see the boys as men in the present (although we do see a grown-up Trip, more on that in a minute), their perspective ultimately serves as audience surrogate, our window into the story’s central family.

This would seem, at first glance, to be counter-intuitive. A story about women told from the perspective of men? Phooey! However, I think this extra layer of narrative removal achieves the effect of keeping the girls further away from us. For instance, the only way the boys ever really get any insight into any of the sisters is through Cecilia’s journal after she passes. Even then, they’re only left to imagine what their documented experiences might have looked like, or how those experiences may have played out. Other than that, they really only have their assumptions and gut feelings. And so do we. When it comes to the Lisbon sisters, we know about as much about them as the boys do, which adds to the film’s mysterious and dreamlike haze.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is also a story that Coppola almost didn’t get to tell at all. Before pivoting to filmmaking, it felt like she was best known for most of the 1990’s as the scapegoat for why THE GODFATHER PART III fell short of its astronomical expectations. By the time she was given a copy of Eugenides’ book in 1998 (by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore), she was technically too late to turn it into a film, as a studio had already greenlit a production. However, she just wasn’t able to shake how the book had made her feel, specifically citing it as the reason she decided to finally enter the family business:

I really didn't know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done.

So, she wrote her own script anyway, mostly as a private project for herself. As fortune would have it, the original production subsequently fell through, and she was able to pitch her script to the production company that owned the rights to the book. She made a strong enough impression that she was hired on to be both the writer and the director.

The cast was assembled fairly quickly. Turner, who had previously worked with Coppola on 1986’s PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, was allegedly the first to sign on. Woods was next, having been impressed both with the script and with the young director. After a extensive search for the right fit for Lux Lisbon, Coppola eventually went with her gut and selected 16-year old Dunst, who was transitioning from a child star to someone on the cusp of adulthood. Hartnett won the role of Trip Fontaine by seemingly embodying that mix of swagger and unbridled youth that Coppola saw in the character.

In the same quote above, Coppola went on to explain exactly what she saw so clearly about the story:

I immediately saw the central story as being about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable.

With that in mind (especially that part about the “extraordinary power of the unfathomable”), it immediately becomes clear when watching THE VIRGIN SUICIDES what film influenced Coppola most directly in the crafting of her debut feature: Peter Weir’s 1975 mystery magnum opus PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.

If you’ve never seen it, HANGING ROCK is ostensibly about a group of Australian girls at the turn of the century that mysteriously disappear during a picnic at…uh…Hanging Rock, an intriguing (and apparently very real) rock formation. But it’s a movie that’s also about…well, it’s also about a lot of other things. It’s about trying to seek understanding of events that will never be clear. It’s about trying to understand the motivations of people that are ultimately unknowable. It’s about the way nature can compel us to do all sorts of things that defy logic and reason. It’s about…look, you should just watch it, it’s great.

As you might be able to surmise, there are lots of similarities between HANGING ROCK and VIRGIN SUICIDES, to the point where it would make for a fascinating double feature. Besides the obvious parallel of a story (adapted from a novel) regarding a group of girls and their seemingly inexplicable removal from this life, it also features a boy trying (and failing) to understand the girls he admires from afar. Hell, even the costumes in Weir’s film seem to have parallels in Coppola’s; the Lisbon daughters’ unfortunate set of prom dresses bears a very close resemblance to the Appleyard school uniforms.

Another key similarity between the two films is this sense of extreme feeling being intentionally buried beneath the surface, just waiting for enough heat to cause an explosion. Yes, they deal with different types of feelings (in HANGING ROCK, it’s existential and indefinable dread; in VIRGIN SUICIDES, it’s the relief of human passion), but in both cases, the narrative is driven by this urgent sense that something bad is going to happen sans the resolution of this imperceptible note.

To be clear, they are ultimately very different movies, both in tone and in texture; THE VIRGIN SUICIDES feels like a foggy dream you keep trying to hold onto, while PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK feels more like a vivd nightmare you can never shake again. But seeing this kind of connective tissue is exciting nonetheless! And it’s thrilling to be able to see a very young Sofia Coppola consume an international masterwork and learn all the right lessons from it.

———

One of the most striking things about THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is how understated everything driving the narrative is. It’s a story that’s driven by behavior and feeling, which can sometimes get interpreted as '“boring” (an opinion that also gets levied against Coppola’s follow-up feature, LOST IN TRANSLATION). And it’s true, VIRGIN SUICIDES perhaps doesn’t precisely have that A-B-C structure that we normally look to in stories. Yes, there’s a lot of scenes that consist of things happening, but if a viewer isn’t able to connect with the film on an emotional level, it might not be clear what exactly Coppola is trying to say.

But the beating heart of a dramatic story is so definitely there, and being able to lock in on the emotions most of these characters want to express here is what makes for a thrilling watch. Zeroing in specifically on that feeling of longing and repressed desire is the key to unlocking what THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is all about. When you do, you can see two simultaneous and intertwined ideas within the film emerge: the suffocating effect of “normal suburbia” on youth, and the foggy effects of nostalgic memory.

We experience the first idea through what we get to see of the Lisbon sisters and the way at least two of them react to their parents’ fierce clinging to what they can control, out of a complete and paralyzing fear of the uncertain. Cecilia chooses to opt out entirely, successfully committing suicide early on. Lux tries to find feeling and take control in other ways, both through her passionate fling with Trip, then later through random trysts on the roof. In both cases, it’s a call and response to the panicked restriction of control, motivated by the Lisbon parents’ misguided attempts to keep things “normal” and mitigate risks against that normalcy. Ultimately, this push and pull between the parents and the sisters ends up being a race to the bottom.

We experience the second through the narrative framing of the movie. It’s important to reiterate that the narration is reflective, someone in the present trying to recall events of the past, making the entire movie a flashback of sorts. When taking the events of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES in totality, it becomes clear that this is also the story of a grown man trying to sort through maybe the craziest thing he’s ever experienced, desperately searching for an answer to the inexplicable events of his past, trying to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical.

In both threads, the idea of repressed passions keep coming up to the surface. Let’s go back to the boys reading Cecilia’s diary entries. It’s fascinating just how vivid their imaginations become when envisioning those diary pages playing out, and the visual language of the movie changes in kind. The moments that take place in their mind’s eyes are all shot like scenes from a particularly relaxed music video; dreamy shots of unicorns, silhouettes of the sisters superimposed against a normal blue sky (I’d also argue this is the visual influence of HANGING ROCK seeping through again). It’s all a stark contrast to the more washed-out world of 70’s suburbia the movie normally resides in.

Coppola directs all of this with a surprising amount of control and confidence. She does a wonderful job with a difficult assignment: making the invisible visible. To be blunt, subtle filmmaking is really fucking hard. To some degree, more “kinetic” directors have an easier job. Not that action movies are easy (compare the level of craft in an average Mission: Impossible to the endless parade of bullshit Netflix has been crapping out, lest one think action filmmaking is a lesser art form), but the story is usually there in front of you. Motivations are explicitly stated. The twists and turns in a given scene can be seen through a pair of fists. In something like VIRGIN SUICIDES, all those emotions need to be invisible, yet still deeply felt.

All this to say that this makes Coppola’s debut feature an astounding achievement. I’d stop short of saying it’s a perfect film. I have quibbles: I don’t think the boys themselves are all that memorable, unfortunately. Also, the toxic gas leak at the debutante ball near the end of the film is on-the-nose in a way almost nothing else in VIRGIN SUICIDES is. Even still, there are all these little touches throughout the film that inform the story without drawing a lot of attention to themselves. Like the tree in the front lawn that’s dead from the roots, an early symbolic sign that something is deeply wrong in the foundation of the Lisbon home. Or the sad insistence within the community that Cecilia’s suicide was actually just an unfortunate accident; they always knew those metal fences were dangerous!

A less dire example that also comes to mind is the reveal that Lux has written Trip’s name on her underwear are shot and crafted to align with this “under the surface” nature; we see the relevant part of her underwear via a superimposed iris over her prom dress. Like every emotion felt by every kid in this movie, it’s only there if you know where to look.

———

Even know you’re clued into them ahead of time just by reading the title, the suicides that bookend the film still come as somewhat shocking surprises on a first watch. On a second go, however, when you can really take in the behaviors on display, and the undercurrent of unexpressed (and unfulfilled) desire that infuses every primary character….it becomes clear that for these sisters, there’s truly no other way but out.

Given all of this, the unexpressed pain our main characters feel, and their ultimate fates, it’d be easy to paint the Lisbon parents as abusive monsters. But that’s the beautiful things about THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, at least as a screenplay: it’s really, really careful not to dramatize them that way. As presented here, they’re not actively abusive, not really. Not in the way we normally see abuse depicted in film. Instead, they’re presented as terrified. The Lisbons are 70’s-era religious, scared and confused. They’re overprotective to the point of genuinely repressing their children’s feelings, which creates an ouroboros of action-reaction (the Lisbon sisters desire even further rebellion and social interaction as it becomes further and further restricted, and that desire leads to further restriction….and on and it goes).

Kathleen Turner plays all of this with stark realism. In lesser hands, Mrs. Lisbon could have been a caricature of a religious head of household (and to be clear, she is The Head of This Household), an unfeeling zealot that craves complete dominance over her progeny. But, in Turner’s hands, she manages to be weirdly sympathetic, even as you desperately want to shake her and make her realize the damage she’s doing.

The biggest surprise, though: despite currently spending his twilight years being a complete ghoul, James Woods is….quite good! It helps that the character is wildly well-written, another understated Lisbon parent who has no idea how to even function, let alone do right by his daughters. Again, he isn’t a mean, abusive villain. He’s a total dork, a high-school science teacher, all white shirt and earth tones. What help can he really lend to his five daughters dealing with the pain of being a teenager? What counter-balance can he possibly provide to his scared-out-her-mind wife? So he doesn’t. It’s a realistic (and under-discussed) scenario, that of the man who applies for the job of father, only to turn out to only be just okay at it once he gets it.

Of the five actresses that play the Lisbon daughters, easily the one with the most to do is Kirsten Dunst. Although she’d already starred in major hits like JUMANJI and SMALL SOLDIERS, with future hits like BRING IT ON and SPIDER-MAN right around the corner, this still manages to feel like a career-making performance. Effortlessly sexy (but, crucially, only mysteriously so), she serves as good of a gauge as to the headspace of the Lisbon daughters as a collective as anyone else. When Trip makes the boneheaded decision to abandon her after having sex on the football field the night of homecoming, your heart sinks. It’s not just because we know what this is going to portend, but because Dunst embodies Lux’s heartbreak and shame so perfectly.

Hartnett is also dynamite as Trip, the perfect embodiment of the 70’s high school heartthrob. He and Dunst are just perfect together, and their chemistry is insane. There’s a very simple scene in a movie theatre where the two touch hands for the first time; you almost can’t breathe during it, a consequence of a film repressing its passions until two characters can’t help it anymore. When they finally begin to make out in his car, as the needle drops on Heart’s “Crazy on You”*…you can’t help but get swept up.

*(Shout out to the soundtrack, by the way. Coppola was careful not to overload it with a bunch of music from the period in order to preserve a little timelessness, but the few tracks that she does opt to use hit like gangbusters; sorry, James Gunn, but Sofia got to 10cc a decade and a half before you. But the actual film score by Air? Beautiful. “Playground Love”, the defacto theme of the film? Just great. It’s sometimes silly to break down loving a movie to something this reductive, but….a movie with a cool soundtrack makes me feel cool for watching it. In this sense, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is an A+.)

However, I’ve always been most intrigued by the somewhat-incongruous flash-forward to an adult Trip (Michael Pare), who appears to be in detox treatment and deeply, deeply regretful for taking off on Lux all those years ago. In no other scenario in the film’s 97 minutes do we ever leave the confines of mid-70’s Michigan. So to all of a sudden be in 1999 for a minute or two in the middle of the film feels like Sofia intentionally drawing our eye.

It’s a diversion that the book takes as well, and I think it’s a way for both mediums to illustrate how the inexplicable casual cruelness that only teenage boys can truly exhibit tends to come back to haunt them as adults. It’s heavily implied in the film that his addictions as an adult stem from the guilt of leaving Lux at the football field. Now she’s dead, taken by her own hand, and all he’s left with are the feelings he felt and the inexplicable dick move that he probably couldn’t even justify in the moment, much less twenty-five years later.

As to why we get specific insight into Trip and not our narrator or any of his friends? I chalk that up to Trip no longer being an outsider. He got to tango with at least one Lisbon. He knew Lux, at least a little. So we get to know Trip. At least a little.

More to the point, adult Trip shows us directly the devastating power of memory. Trip is left with only his recollections as a young buck, when the world was rife with opportunity, when you could put basically anything into your body with minimal consequence. Now, as he sits with regret, he has only memories.

In the end, that’s all the Lisbon sisters are to our boys: the physical representation of a time gone by, never to return. A time where the world seemed like a dream, where even the unique horrors of childhood felt a little magical, detached from reality. That’s the nature and power of nostalgia (and THE VIRGIN SUICIDES): it can make you even miss the ghosts.