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