Somewhere 96 minutes
R
Stephen Dorf, Elle Fanning, Chris Pontius
Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola.
What it's like down here
I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around,
Everybody knows this is nowhere.
The story is familiar; a man who has everything and gets everything he wants, suddenly he finds his life boring, devoid of love and meaning. Johnny Marco (Dorf) is a well known actor. He drives a Lamborghini and this car symbolizes the bubble he lives in. His day consists of shallow interactions with opportunistic individuals. Drifting through life comfortably. With no real need to get his hands dirty. This guy seems kind of dead inside.
His daughter, Cleo (Fanning) is eleven. She is keen, resourceful and surprisingly down to earth. She gets dumped off by her mother. The mother seems to need some “me” time. In years prior, Johnny seemed to have a low maintenance, hands off approach to parenting. The girl is going off to summer camp in a couple of weeks. So there is a relatively small window of time for them to spend quality bonding time together.
Johnny has to take a break self-absorbent, hedonistic lifestyle. He and his daughter share quite a few warm precious moments together. This leads to significant reassessment of his priorities in life. Throughout the film he improves the fractured relationship with his daughter.
The only major fault I could really find with the movie is the Lost in Translation moment (what were Kirsten Dunst and Billy Murray saying to each other at the end?). It didn’t work in that movie and it doesn’t really work when you artificially insert it into this one. That being said, this really is only a minor blip in otherwise decent movie. I think you can say Sofia Coppola completely redeemed herself with this movie, at least in my eyes anyway.
The style of Somewhere is unique. We genuinely see the world from his point of view. Some may find his point of view excruciatingly boring. But this is how a depressed man would face life and the world around him. Make no mistake, this is an art film, and it requires a great deal of patience to sit through it. Watched in full, the viewer is eventually rewarded with a very satisfying conclusion.
Final Verdict: 94 out of a possible 100