Who is Johnny Marco?
At one point a reporter asks the sullen actor this question as he slouches on a table during a press conference. He looks back, empty, unable to answer.
Such is the tone for Sophia Coppola’s Somewhere, perhaps her most personal film to date. It observes the life of a man who finds himself listless, oversaturated with the whoops and bells that is the Hollywood glamour life. Fame, fortune, femme – he has these all at his disposal. For some, this is more than enough – it is something to be desired, to aspire towards and more often than not reinforced as the ideal by celebrity news gossip and fickle entertainment news outlets. For Johnny Marco, no amount of sex, booze, drugs or goodies can wash away the inevitable truth – that he is nothing. I suspect he indulges to delay the onset of this eventual realization.
Somewhere is a daring film despite its quietness characteristic of Ms. Coppola. It examines the life of a character not traveling within a foreign country or having existed centuries prior, but a man who lives here in Los Angeles, the hub of Hollywood and of celebrity America looks upon with hungry lust and vicious savagery. Look around the internet and tabloid stands and it’s obvious: many people don’t register that a famous face and body belongs to an actual living a person, a person with feelings, abilities and inabilities as human as we ourselves are. The commonplace of horrid nitpicking and hyper romanticization of who a celebrity-actor is is nothing short of dehumanization as countless photos and videos, flattering and not, surface on a day to day basis since, after all, their glamour and wealth must be more interesting than the mundanity of our own lives; to even fathom that they could even be bored or disenchanted with such a lifestyle is completely out of the question. It is much easier to idolize and criticize a person when they stand behind a tinted window of our construction, a bellowing sea of voices directed and funneled down to their very presence.
Sophia Coppola breaks down this separation by examining an equally mundane (if not more so) life of an actor who finds no joy in anything his current lifestyle offers – he simply continues doing it because there’s nothing else to do.
Make no mistake – Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is in a position where he can afford to be listless amongst a sea of privileges and opportunities. This is not a position many can emphasize with, nonetheless understand: Johnny’s daily life revolves around photo shoots, press conferences, and waking up midday at the Chateau Marmont in the never ending sun of Southern California.
You would think such a situation lends itself to more excitement like the nightlife of Las Vegas. Not Johnny Marco: we see him like we see Vegas during the daytime from the suburbs – empty, monetary, and sad. The illusion is gone, and we are left with Johnny as he falls asleep during sex, weaves awkwardly through a party, and sits for forty five minutes while waiting for a mold to dry around his entire head save his nostrils. No violent paparazzi, no club scenes, no red carpets, just a listless man as he impulsively drives around the sun drenched streets of privileged LA.
When his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) steps into Johnny’s life, Coppola wisely steps away from indulging in cliches of character change because frankly, people don’t change just like that. Change requires change of habit, habits that exist because they are comfortable and everyday. Johnny Marco is no different.
Cleo is not a drastically different person than Johnny, she’s simply different in the sense that is not like Johnny and simply loves him because he is her father. Coppola thoughtfully avoids painting her as precocious, hyper intelligent or comically childish; we instead see a young girl on the brink of puberty, perfectly aware of her surroundings and situation but undeterred from simply being herself. No Hannah Montana, no obnoxious pink or Justin Bieber ogling, just a young girl who wants to and likes spending time a father who is always away.
I suspect Coppola directly or indirectly projects her own experiences and mannerisms onto Cleo, especially given the high profile life of her own father Francis Coppola as she grew up and eventually starred in one of his movies. Cleo is observant and quiet, only once straying from her nonjudgmental demeanor when she eats breakfast with a sultry Italian woman Johnny slept with after she’d fallen asleep. And who can blame her? I can tell you, too, that the eyes of your own child judging you are probably the hardest eyes to look at directly simply because they know something you’re unwilling to admit or live up to.
Johnny’s change is not so much lifestyle or habit (these change and are modified to an extent of course) but is how he comes to understand himself and what he is willing to personally admit. Johnny Marco has not “been here” for a long, long time, and he knows it – the challenging part is acknowledging it, and that’s why Cleo’s presence is such a cathartic wake-up call from the mundanity of his own indulgences.
Sophia Coppola daringly challenges us to simply observe, to infer for ourselves the depths of loneliness Johnny Marco faces daily. Cuts are infrequent and interspersed rarely, further breaking the illusion that what happens on screen is just as exciting real life. I have yet to see anyone frame a pair of pole dancing blondes as unexciting and mundane as Ms. Coppola has accomplished.
Perhaps the only instance in Somewhere that breaks away from Coppola’s usual quietness is when Johnny drops Cleo off for camp. As he tells her “I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” a helicopter propeller turns faster and faster, obscuring his words from being heard correctly. Maybe it’s because the scene involves a helicopter, or that we can actually hear what Johnny says as opposed to Bob Harris’s words to Charlotte in Coppola’s Lost in Translation. The intimacy is lost for a split second to contrivance, but is instantly washed away by subsequent scenes where Coppola kindly invites us to sympathize with a now emptier, sadder Johnny Marco.
Coppola is one of the quietest modern directors around, which is an extraordinary feat considering how loud Hollywood has become. In watching her films I can’t help but think of Yasujiro Ozu, who was so minimalistic about camera movement that for him to even move a camera once within a cut was like anarchy. Ozu, too, was unobtrusively observant and sympathetic to his characters, allowing his viewers to observe and infer the nuances of emotions unspoken.
Coppola may be the greatest voice for the female presence in the world of film. While Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win Best Director at the Academy Awards, Coppola can masterfully convey moods in her films, moods that are unspoken and unquantifiable from a traditionally “masculinist” perspective. Most importantly her films are kind and nonjudgemental, allowing us to watch just as impartially as the characters on screen simply live, their quirks, habits and mannerisms not so different from our own. With Somewhere, she does this and more: Johnny and Cleo’s relationship is explicitly influenced by Coppola’s experiences with her father, and she allows us in to see not the events that took place, but the emotions and moods prevalent throughout her adolescence as she walked amongst the shadows of a filmmaking legend. She lets us into her heart and that of LA, which may make some moviegoers uncomfortable because there is nothing illusionary about it. For me, I couldn’t welcome it enough.
Recommended Reading/Links
• Somewhere Featurette, courtesy of /Film
• A.O. Scott’s Review of Somewhere
• Roger Ebert’s Review of Somewhere
• Gwen Stefani’s “Cool” – This song played during a scene in Somewhere, and I couldn’t help but listen to it on repeat while I wrote this essay/article.