It was only last year that A Rainy Day in New York, with its wet behind the ears perspective of the city, graced foreign theaters with its presence. It had been banned in the U.S. thanks to Woody Allen being thrown on the pyre of cancel culture. And maybe Sofia Coppola’s latest ought to have endured a similar banning. For, to be honest, it’s just as much of a non-movie with an extremely affluent and privileged view of New York as anything Allen has released in the twilight years of his career (not to say that he didn’t always favor setting his narratives in the bourgeois world of white neurotics). Yet Coppola’s eighth movie has been met with something like acclaim. Perhaps it has to do with the shortage of auteur-helmed movies in 2020. Strangely, however, there is no stamp of anything from Coppola’s previous films in this, save for Bill Murray, who seems to be tasked entirely with making the story interesting. It doesn’t prove effective and instead, he comes across as an annoying cliche of the white male that society has come to despise as the twenty-first century wears on.
Daddy issues mixed with an Electra complex are nothing new to Coppola’s work (or life as Fracis Ford’s daughter), for 2010’s Somewhere is deemed as one of her better filmography offerings (amid a pile that includes The Bling Ring and A Very Murray Christmas–which might have repurposed some scenes from the Carlyle in her latest). In it, we have Stephen Dorff (who Murray is standing in for in On the Rocks) as Johnny Marco, the womanizing Hollywood star blazing so fast that he feels the need to drive in literal circles in the middle of the desert in order to cope with his testosterone levels and rat in a cage feelings. After breaking his arm while on a bender at the Chateau Marmont, some strippers show up to his room in candy striper costumes with their portable poles to dance to Foo Fighters’ “My Hero.” This is already ironic foreshadowing to the fact that a man like this is supposed to serve as a role model to his daughter. He falls asleep by the end of the dance, later going to the bathroom (where we get a shot of Propecia to emphasize his middle-agedness) to splash his face with cold water. It’s that rare moment of unpleasant reckoning with the self that men like Johnny and Felix (Murray) abhor. That’s why they keep their lives filled with a constant parade of women and alcohol.
Somewhere’s paucity of dialogue also serves to make it say so much more about the characters. Coppola was, at this time, more committed to her proud displays of long silences and scenes of boredom, with minutes of Johnny sitting on the couch doing nothing save for fondling a pear and smoking. This seems to prove that she had a more artistic edge in those days, and that New York in the present has only served to help strip away that edge as her environment of choice. Conversely, On the Rocks is laden with frivolous dialogue (most of it spoken by Jenny Slate as an archetypal self-involved New Yorker that Laura [Rashida Jones] gets roped into listening to whenever she takes her daughter to school), and the second anyone opens their mouth, you kind of wish they wouldn’t have. Coppola also dispenses with her once great signature of seeming to create scenes solely for the purpose of playing a song she likes, as is the case when Cleo (Elle Fanning) ice skates to the appropriately titled “Cool” by Gwen Stefani. Poetically, her dad claps for her with as much enthusiasm as he did for the strippers the second time they showed up to his hotel room (this time in tennis-inspired ensembles).
Coppola is able to lend depth and insight into Johnny’s character as we watch him stumble through his day to day in the haze of someone suffering through the existential crisis that comes with fame and the meaninglessness of it. Murray’s rendering of a father, instead, is two-dimensional. We know what Felix does for a living (sells high-priced paintings, because, again, Coppola can only speak of the world of privilege), but we never see him alone, what his day to day might look like. And honestly, the movie might have been marginally better for a few images of Felix without Laura hovering near him. In lieu of taking this opportunity to flesh out his character fully, we’re saddled with the uncomfortable Wikipedia-like entries he recites to Laura whenever they’re together, including platitudes relating to how all men are the same: animals driven to propagate with the most desirable females. So it is that the basic premise of On the Rocks is the “log line”: A woman initially believes that because her dad is an asshole, all men are assholes. But since she marries the antithesis of her father, she realizes, finally, that not all men are assholes after a bout of suspicion and paranoia spurred by her own dad, who just wants to spend time with her as a means to make up for his behavior when she was younger.
It’s not exactly something that needed to be made into a movie, or at least not this kind of movie. Again, Somewhere was Coppola’s grand testament to the father-daughter dynamic as it pertains to having a cad of a father. And maybe there’s a reason Francis Ford has a producing credit on Somewhere rather than the schlock that is On the Rocks. What’s more, while people love a chance to lick New York’s asshole by seeing “classic” images of it onscreen, Coppola is more at home behind a camera in Los Angeles, where its sweeping vastness, beat down upon by the sunshine, is ideal for her cinematic eye. In contrast, we’re hemmed in by what feels like a four block radius of SoHo in On the Rocks. Because it is those four blocks around Prince Street that look the most “classic” with their cobblestoned roads. And no, nobody actually fucking lives in SoHo. If they do, you surely don’t want to know them, for they’re the type of assholes who complain about the woes of selling a book before having actually written its content. You poor, poor suffering “artist.” Yes, this is exactly what Laura complains about while talking on the phone with a friend in between being worried about her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans, utterly devoid of personality in this), no longer being attracted to her.
The prosaicness of it all is clinched by a scene seemingly written by Woody Allen himself in which Felix and Laura end up having a drink at the Carlyle (yes, this is also a tableau in A Rainy Day in New York) after they fail to successfully follow Dean in Felix’s highly conspicuous red Alfa Romeo by speeding and running a light. This results in one of the most disgusting and inappropriate displays for a year of racial injustice reckoning in which old white man Felix is able to say some honeyed words to the cops that pull him over and get off scot-free from any charges. Elsewhere, we suffer through a party with some old people and Laura being “put upon” by having to venture to her grandmother’s “outside of the city” estate. Coppola, of course, has lived in the realm of the affluent for so long that maybe she genuinely believes the rest of us are interested in their “problems,” but in 2020, it seems a more tone deaf approach to take than ever. And just because she’s decided to cast a token few people of color in the movie doesn’t negate that.
Back in 2010, when Coppola was able to sustain an all-white cast without as much judgment, there was at least more genuineness to what she was doing. The forced message of On the Rocks offers nothing but saccharineness at every turn. This is best elucidated by the predictable moment when Laura can finally whistle at the end of the non-movie after having complained to her father that she couldn’t anymore since getting pregnant. At least Johnny had grit, an arc. Felix is just a tool wielded to prove that old white men are gross and should not be listened to. Thus, he is given no moment to shine other than some singing solos which, though intended to be “charming,” are more vexing than anything else. In contrast, the most poignant scene in Somewhere comes when Johnny has his head put into a cast mold for the movie he’s working on. Forced to sit there in silence with himself for forty minutes, all we can hear is his heavy breathing through the two nostril holes that have been carved out for him. When the process is finished, he turns around to face himself in the mirror, rendered an old man (who looks about Murray’s age) and forced to think about whether or not this is the person he still wants to be at that stage of life.
Spending time with his daughter becomes less awkward the longer Cleo stays, with her mother suddenly telling Johnny that she needs to go away for “a while.” The two play Rock Band (at the time still all the rage) together, swim together (again, a scene made entirely for the purpose of playing a The Strokes song), travel together–in short, forge a bond as never before. “Failed 20th Century Boy” (as in by T. Rex) reads the screen of Rock Band at one point. This pronouncement has a deeper meaning to what Johnny represents. The dinosauric irrelevance of the white man at the end of the twentieth century having culminated in numerous cultural phenomena in the twenty-first, including the #MeToo movement. So it is that Felix appears to be a more caricaturized version of what Johnny was for Coppola ten years ago (which is saying something when considering how much of a caricature Johnny already was).
After going to Italy and staying in a lavish hotel where Johnny invites one of the many obsessive and jilted women orbiting him into the room in the middle of the night, the following morning Cleo sees him in an entirely different light. As the woman he’s just fucked tries to make nice with her at the breakfast table while in her robe, all Cleo can do is stare daggers at Johnny, suddenly seeing him without the rose-colored glasses of an adoring daughter who is too young (eleven) to know better. She goes back to her admiring stance whenever another woman isn’t around trying to throw herself at Johnny–something about that inherent Electra complex that makes little girls so jealous of a woman they can sense their father is attracted to. In On the Rocks, that jealousy transforms into disgust as an older female.
Thus, Laura is saddled with being the lecturing, judgment-casting woman Felix never had to face until now, at a hotel room in Mexico that he insisted bringing her to in order to spy on Dean. She rails, “It’s shocking that as your daughter, I’m capable of having any kind of relationship at all.” She then lays into him for the issue never officially addressed: his infidelity and subsequent flagrant philandering. Here, it’s almost as though she’s like the grown-up version of Cleo as she scolds, “You weren’t even discreet. You couldn’t even just be discreet out of respect for Mom. And me… Your stupid theories. You’re not an animal with no self-control. You can control your own behavior. And can you be around a woman without hitting on her? Because it’s starting to get pathetic.” Felix merely replies to all that “womanly rage,” “What happened to you? You used to be fun.” This seems to have a double meaning in the sense that all the patriarchy is accusing women of no longer being “fun,” “fun” being to take sexist behavior (as well as sexual assault) with a smile and suppression. But less and less are men able to get away with the get out of jail free card that once came with the embraced philosophy of “boys will be boys.” In Somewhere’s time, such behavior was still accepted. Which is likely what made Johnny’s arc more satisfying (plus the fact that he had an arc at all).
In the opening of On the Rocks, we’re presented with a black screen and Felix’s voiceover, “And remember, don’t give your heart to any boys. You are mine…until you get married. Then you’re still mine.” This is where the symbol of a watch comes in (Coppola herself pictured wearing one in a famous photo of her as a girl with her father). Felix gives Laura his for her birthday, a timepiece she’s always wanted. By the end, however, she is, quelle surprise, replacing it with one given to her by Dean. A girl’s father can’t be her “main man” forever, after all. Laura replies to Felix’s initial warning about being “his” even after she gets married in that tone signifying I’ll agree with you because you’re crazy and you can’t be reasoned with, “Um, okay Dad.” For centuries, this is the method women have employed in dealing with their fathers and garden variety men alike. On the Rocks wishes to demarcate that this is no longer enough to shed the patriarchy. Men–even one’s father–must finally be held accountable without any tiptoeing around it to placate them. Now if only someone hadn’t tiptoed around the many detriments of this script in order to placate Coppola.
