Some of those who have already written about Sofia Coppola's Somewhere have categorized it, in a kind of lazy shorthand, as a movie about the "emptiness of celebrity." But Somewhere is really a Western -- a Western without cactuses or rocks or horses, but one that, even so, takes place under a special kind of sunlight found only in L.A., in an environment that's wild and ruthless under its veneer of civilization. The character of the land means everything in Somewhere: Wide boulevards lined with palm trees make for an illusory endless frontier; giant billboards advertise nothing in particular -- they're big because they can be. This is a place where you can lose your way without even taking a wrong turn, and sure enough, the hero of this particular story is a man who has temporarily lost himself. Still, the city's beauty -- either sitting in plain sight under the sizzling noon sun or semi-hidden in the dusk -- is peculiar and specific and alluring. L.A. -- and the idea of Hollywood, if not the actual neighborhood -- is heartless and fabulous. It's a place to really be a man -- or not.
Coppola is often discussed, tacitly or explicitly, as a "girly" director. She refuses to punish Marie Antoinette for her crimes against the poor (which were a myth anyway) and instead grants the ill-fated queen a moment of posthumous delight in the form of a pair of pink Converse sneakers; she sympathizes strongly with a young woman who feels strange and lost in Japan, but also has the temerity to treat the language barrier as a joke. (Forget that in Lost in Translation, Coppola made it clear that the differences between Japanese and American culture produce frustration and confusion on both sides.) As filmmakers go, she's not a man's woman, like Kathryn Bigelow; she's treated as more of an exclamation mark dotted with a little heart.
But Coppola has the most delicate touch of any filmmaker currently working in America, which is not to say that her pictures are in any way soft: She's disciplined and precise in a way few young filmmakers are. (It makes more sense to compare her with someone like Hou Hsiao-hsien than to any of her Hollywood contemporaries.) And Somewhere is her finest movie yet, a picture so confident and assured -- and in the end, so unself-consciously wrenching -- that, despite its quiet subject matter and Coppola's deceptively low-key approach, it's thrilling to watch from moment to moment.
Stephen Dorff is Johnny Marco (a name that's less 2010 than it is 1962) an action-movie star who has holed himself up in the Chateau Marmont. This isn't a home away from home -- there's clearly no home for Johnny, in his wardrobe of scruffy rock and roll T-shirts and his even scruffier chin stubble, to be away from. It's the place where he passes his days and nights in a desultory blur: His days are broken up by significant events, like the arrival of bored-looking yet proficient pole-dancing twins (they come to his room to perform for him, their gym equipment ingeniously folded up into small duffel bags -- these are small-businesswomen on the go) or a snooze-interrupting call from his publicist to alert him that he's due at a press conference in, say, 10 minutes (he's showered and dressed in a flash, though his ablutions barely seem to make a difference).
Unceremoniously -- there's no ceremony in Somewhere, only random, unannounced, everyday minutes -- his 11-year-old daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), shows up in his room. He's asleep when she arrives -- he awakens to find her putting her Jane Hancock on his cast. (Johnny has been injured doing a stunt -- "I do all my own stuntwork," he announces proudly at one point, as if anyone around him really cared.) Cleo has been dropped off by her mother, Johnny's foreboding ex (played by Lala Sloatman), who admonishes him not to get her home too late. It appears he's forgotten he was supposed to see her in the first place.
That's the beginning of a father-daughter adventure that brings Cleo and Johnny first to a local ice-skating rink (where Cleo attends her regular lesson), and later, circuitously, to Milan, where Johnny has been scheduled to receive an award. Johnny's ex has declared a indeterminate "time out" on motherhood, and entrusted Cleo's care to Johnny. Cleo tags along with her fawned-over movie-star dad, reveling in their luxurious Italian digs like an overnight principessa. Their last stop is summer camp: Cleo's mom has given Johnny firm instructions -- he obviously needs them -- to drop her off there by a certain date. He makes the deadline, even though he has to hire a helicopter to do it.
Somewhere moves forward not in strict linear terms, but in gently lapping waves. Coppola, working with genius editor Sarah Flack (who also cut Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, as well as Steven Soderbergh's masterwork, The Limey), ends every sequence in precisely the right place, which isn't always the place you expect. Here and there she'll add or subtract a few extra beats, and the effect is momentarily disorienting before settling into perfection.
In one scene, Johnny's plunked into a chair so a few special-effects makeup guys can take a mold of his face, a prelude to creating the age makeup he'll need, apparently, for an upcoming role. They tell him to keep his eyes and mouth closed (adding, with a twist of Coppola's trademark dry wit, that the whole process "shouldn't take more than 40 minutes") and proceed to cover his head and face with a gooey white substance. Then as he waits -- and waits -- Coppola and her DP, Harris Savides, train the camera on him, moving in slowly on this heavy-breathing mashed-potato monster. This unnaturally elongated moment is funny and strange and poignant all at once, for the way Johnny's droopy white mask suggests the saggy skin of an old man, a goofy-sorrowful image that's far more affecting than the makeup guys' finished work, which is merely a Hollywoodized premonition of what Johnny might look like as a wrinkled senior citizen.
I suspect Coppola has definite ideas about how the characters she writes ought to be played. But the performances she draws out of her actors never feel constrained or overworked; they always breathe. Dorff is superb here as a guy who's only just realizing that it's not enough to merely love his daughter; he has to really see her, too. Dorff has enough swagger to play a scruffy action star -- he channels some of the loose, leathery coolness (and even a bit of the shyness) he brought to his role as Stuart Sutcliffe in Iain Softley's marvelous Backbeat, about the early days of the Beatles. Dorff is remarkable here not because he advertises how Johnny is changed by this small interlude of time with his daughter, but because he shows virtually nothing -- his face betrays glimmers of anguish and joy, as if Johnny is rediscovering the pleasure and heartache of being a real person, as opposed to just playing one.
In one lovely, austere sequence (it's set to the Strokes' "I'll Try Anything Once"), Johnny and Cleo enjoy an afternoon on the grounds of the Chateau Marmont, first playing ping-pong, later lounging side-by-side, like pale California vampires, in the egg-frying sun. They jump into the pool and let themselves sink to the very bottom, where they stage an impromptu make-believe tea party, raising delicate pretend china cups to their lips. But it's Johnny who instigates the game, not Cleo. The moment suggests that Johnny, the absentee dad, will always cling to some remnants of Cleo's little-girl self -- that's his prerogative as a father -- even though she herself will soon have to fold them up and leave them behind.
Fanning is superb as Johnny's partner in crime; she's a preternaturally self-possessed elf. Cleo adores her father, to the point that she's probably forgiven too many of his foibles and absences. But she doesn't let him off the hook completely: She's exasperated and embarrassed by his sexual exploits (he's a babe magnet, and he doesn't turn off the charm even when his daughter's around) -- she glowers at him with the barely contained hostility of a grade-school Gorgon. But she also laughs when he kicks her ass at Guitar Hero, and she enjoys plenty of yuks with her father's closest friend (and something of a benign hanger-on), Sammy (Chris Pontius, in a silly-wonderful little performance). A natural-born caretaker, she matter-of-factly orders up milk, cheese and a cheese grater from room service. so she can make macaroni and cheese in the suite's kitchenette. Fanning, like Dorff, underplays everything here -- she never allows herself to be the adorable child -- and her restraint is the thing that makes her only moment of true, childlike helplessness so deeply affecting.
Coppola is a filmmaker who fills up a big canvas with small moments: That's the opposite of working in miniature, even though she's attuned to the tiniest details. The most extraordinary scene in Somewhere takes place at that ice rink, as Cleo executes the routine she's probably been rehearsing for months. It's an ice dance choreographed to Gwen Stefani's "Cool" -- a song about reconciliation with a loved one, but only after crossing a mighty river of pain -- and Cleo runs through the moves in a way that's alternately rehearsed and unstudied.
Johnny sits in the stands, his eyes at first focused on his PDA. He glances up now and then, wearing a look of practiced boredom, to catch a little of Cleo's routine. And then he's stopped cold by the evanescence of the moment -- by the evanescence of Cleo, whose legs haven't yet decided where to begin and where to end; her arms are half-willowy, half-gangly. She's in that in-between season, a silverleaf moment that will be over in a flash. If Johnny blinks, he'll miss it. Something in him shakes loose.
The whole of Somewhere is about that something shaking loose. How can that even be a subject for a movie? Is there really enough there to fill a short, let alone a feature? But that's Coppola's gift, the ability to build a movie around nothing more than a whisper (even, in the case of Lost in Translation, a literal whisper). Somewhere is a movie with a resolute sense of time and place -- Savides' cinematography captures both the toaster-oven light and the grayish-blue evening magic of Los Angeles. Through his lens, and through Coppola's eyes, it's less a city than a country unto itself out in the middle of nowhere. Coppola puts an X on the spot, and what she finds there is gold.