San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
Johnny, played by Stephen Dorff, has a nice car, but that’s about as much responsibility as he can handle. He has a suite of rooms at the Chateau Marmont, the legendary Los Angeles hotel. Everything is taken care of for him, and he wiles away his days cruising around town in his sweet ride, drinking beers by the pool or hitting on women at the parties his old buddy Sammy (Chris Pontius of Jackass) throws. He has occasional duties to perform as a movie star, so he makes sure he’s in the right place at the right time to be picked up and taken to the right place at the right time. It’s not a very engaging existence, and Johnny is painfully disengaged. But things change when his 11year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning, sister of Dakota), ends up staying with him for an unexpected stretch, which causes him to actually have feelings for someone and prompts an existential crisis.
All of this sounds like Johnny’s a snobbish asshole of a movie star. But he’s not. The thing is, he’s not at all a bad guy. He barely abuses his celebrity, using it only occasionally to sleep with a good-looking girl or two. He’s kind to the people who serve him, he’s generally on time and he doesn’t take offense when a massage goes down in an unexpected way. Not being bad, however, doesn’t necessarily make him good. Johnny’s greatest problem is that he’s out of touch, and he needs someone like Cleo to make him focus on what’s truly important, because for years he’s had no idea what that might be. At a press junket for his new film, we learn that his co-star, played by Michelle Monaghan, can’t stand him, and Johnny can barely remember why. When a journalist asks him, “Who is Johnny Marco?” he has no answer. Johnny’s problem isn’t that he’s full of himself—it’s that he’s full of nothing at all. And Dorff, who’s had his ups and downs as an actor, is solid in the role, just sitting back and letting everything happen to him.
For Somewhere, which opens Friday, Jan. 7, Hillcrest Cinemas, Coppola sits her camera down and simply lets the film roll, and the result is often awkward, because sequences go on longer than is comfortable. The sexy becomes mundane, and the mundane becomes strange. And she also makes a wise move by not telling us anything—there’s virtually no exposition in the film, and we’re forced to sort things out by taking in what’s on the screen, rather than being told about it.
That said, while the style is interesting, the subject matter is a tough sell. Coppola’s always had a fascination with fame. We saw it with Bill Murray in Lost in Translation and Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette. And there’s something there, to be sure—she grew up a child of fame and privilege, and she continues to explore what she knows: the person behind the notoriety.
But this is exactly what also makes Somewhere feel self-indulgent. I’m sure there are movie stars like Johnny Marco whose popularity has devastated their sense of self, but it can be hard—or at least it was for me—to feel as though that amount of excess, privilege and luxury is something to be pitied.
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