Los Angeles Plays Itself
One of American cinema's most interesting trends in 2010 was an uncommon wealth of Los Angeles-set films that offer a unique feel or perspective of what life in L.A. is actually like, at least for some segments of its population--as opposed to the annual slew of Hollywood-made/Hollywood-set movies that recycle the same familiar Greater Los Angeles locations without offering much insight outside of lazy SoCal shorthand.
The two most atypical L.A. films this year must be Bruce LaBruce's gay porn-horror hybrid
L.A. Zombie, which navigates some of the seedier haunts of L.A.'s homeless community in an allegory that ponders both the AIDS epidemic and the cultural ghettoization of gay men while expertly walking the line between confrontational art and gloriously bad taste; and Banksy's
Exit Through the Gift Shop, which makes pointed detours to London, Paris, and New York but situates its story mainly in a Los Angeles counterculture that's refreshingly rough around the edges. Whether Banksy's now Oscar-nominated work is a "hoax," or rather the extent to which it is, matters little for our purposes: the grungy, communal L.A. that shines through his sly,
F for Fake-like commentary on artistic authenticity is something excitingly new for most of us non-Angelenos.
The Kids Are All Right and
Greenberg are a decidedly more conventional pair, but they also subtly shift long-held ideas about what constitutes an "L.A. movie." Unlike LaBruce and Banksy's films, they're set in upscale areas of Los Angeles, but they're not excessively glamorous environs--a key distinction to make when talking about Southern California on film (think, for example of Norma Desmond's estate in
Sunset Boulevard or much more recently, of Cher's palatial residence in
Clueless). These are leafy, exquisitely manicured, to be sure, but ultimately cozy neighborhoods in which one can imagine buying a house and raising a family. Or at least that might be true if one is a doctor (like Annette Bening's Nic in
Kids), a successful entrepreneur (Mark Ruffalo's Paul in
Kids, who was, at one point, apparently broke enough to donate sperm for a little cash), or a hotel chain executive (Ben Stiller's brother in
Greenberg, for whom he's house-sitting). Noah Baumbach said that he wanted to show an L.A. where relatively normal people live and raise their kids, but for the film's achievement of this, a debt of recognition must be paid to DP extraordinaire Harris Savides, whose images depict a warm, lived-in city that feels a universe away from the mythic, impossibly luxurious destination that most of us have come to associate with a real place that over four million people call home.
Savides also shot Sofia Coppola's superb
Somewhere, which along with the equally underappreciated
Marie Antoinette, I'd say represents the stronger half of her filmography. Because
Somewhere is about a movie star named Johnny Marco (played beautifully by Stephen Dorff, a performance that's gone sadly neglected in the current awards sweepstakes) who takes up permanent residence at the legendary Chateau Marmont, the film necessarily harnesses L.A. iconicity to a greater degree than those titles listed above, but in a manner not dissimilar from David Lynch's now-canonical
Mulholland Drive, it subverts and ultimately upends our expectations of what such imagery means.
It's also one of the truest, most deeply felt portraits of fatherhood ever put to film. The scenes between Johnny and his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning, whose understated, never overly precious performance is vastly preferable to Hailee Steinfeld's insufferably precocious sassy-adult-trapped-in-a-child's-body
True Grit turn, which just earned a cringe-inducing Oscar nomination) are so sweet and so tender, whether they're competing at
Guitar Hero in Johnny's hotel room, ordering late-night gelato from room service while Johnny's promoting his latest movie in Milan, or clowning around in the hotel pool and then lounging on deck chairs soaking up the warmth of some Southern Californian sunshine. (The most comparable on-screen dynamic that comes to mind is the surrogate father-son relationship between Kevin Costner and T.J. Lowther in Clint Eastwood's great
A Perfect World.) When Cleo, who seems to be as well-adjusted and happy and normal as any 11 year-old girl might be under the odd circumstances, finally breaks down and cries in her dad's Ferrari, it's genuinely affecting because, by that point, we truly care about both characters.
On the other hand, the scenes minus Cleo are among the saddest and loneliest Coppola's ever put to film; while "stylish" and "moody" are obvious adjectives for describing her work,
Somewhere marks the first instance where such moments are actually poignant and resonant rather than just playing like atmospheric fashion ads. The air literally goes out of the film when Johnny's on his own--or even in the presence of pole-dancing twins, who entertain him in his room while he dozes off from booze and pills. When late in the film, Johnny phones an ex and desperately complains, "I'm nothing...I'm not even a person," he's articulating a little too explicitly what Dorff's incredible body language (the Cleo-less scenes find Dorff essentially acting in a silent movie) and Coppola and Savides' often-breathtaking compositions have already made abundantly clear. But it's also a necessary moment: Johnny has finally accepted and even embraced his role as a father and now Cleo is gone to summer camp; in her absence, he realizes what many well-meaning dads (myself included) have before him, which is how oppressively boring and seemingly meaningless life can feel in the absence of that amazing, brilliant little person that we somehow managed to help create. If this scene also serves as a bitter critique of Hollywood artifice, it's simply icing on the cake.
It's the remarkable human dimension of
Somewhere that marks Coppola's maturation (whereas, conversely, it's new-found formal intelligence that makes
Greenberg a significant leap forward for Baumbach). She's always been a preternaturally gifted, if heavily allusive, visual stylist and one of the more intuitive filmmakers of her generation when it comes to using music (though her interesting employment here of tunes as commonplace as the Foo Fighters' "My Hero," Ashanti's "1 Thing," and Gwen Stefani's "Cool" strikes me as more impressive than leaning on already-hip material by My Bloody Valentine, Roxy Music, and Phoenix), but
Somewhere's charm lies in the details. By the end of the film, the Chateau Marmont feels as dully familiar to us as it must to Johnny and after returning from Milan, it can't help but feel a little shabby compared to the more opulent Italian version of luxury; to say that it's the third major character in the film, while a cliche, is certainly not untrue. Even the endless parade of model-looking women vying for Johnny's attention begins to feel relatably tiresome, though such attention is obviously far from the reality of everyday life for most of us. The frustrations and discontents of privilege is Coppola's great theme, and where I once (see: the overrated
Lost in Translation) couldn't resist the impulse to brand her as solipsistic for it, she's now able to make that palpably register for viewers who didn't grow up rich and famous in Hollywood.
Part of the difference is that she's working (mostly) on her home turf this time rather than in, say, Tokyo or 18th Century France--though
Marie Antoinette has plenty else to recommend it. (The trip to Milan borders on dubious, as its depictions of wacky Italian culture aren't far off from
Lost in Translation's gross representations of Japan, but at least in this case, Sofia is
Italian-American and Johnny and Cleo's reactions seem more fondly bemused than condescending or xenophobic) Her portrait of Los Angeles, meanwhile, is essentially affectionate. If the insularity and mechanic motions of Hollywood celebrity are something Johnny feels he must escape to stop spinning his wheels in circles, the palm trees swaying in the Pacific breeze above a nondescript ice-skating rink are something Coppola clearly wouldn't care to leave behind for too long. I'm reminded of the song, "West Coast," by Sofia's cousin, Jason Schwartzman and his band Coconut Records. "I miss you / I'm going back home to the West Coast," sings Schwartzman wistfully. Films like
Somewhere,
Greenberg, and the rest I've mentioned here show us what's to miss.
