Pampered & Pretty
Somewhere
Directed by Sofia Coppola
Runtime: 98 min.
Little Fockers
Directed by Paul Weitz
Runtime: 98 min.
Sofia
Coppola is the authentic Little Focker. As the child of a Hollywood
mogul, she makes movies that pamper her own pamperedness. For example: Somewhere, the
wan new drama about apathetic movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff),
who drags his teenage daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) with him to a press
junket in Italy. It’s an illustration of how movie people use their
children as appendages, exploiting parenthood without truly connecting
with their own offspring. Coincidentally, Little Fockers demonstrates
the same exploitation, catching up with Greg Focker (Ben Stiller), now
the father of twins, as a pretext to continue one of the lamest
franchises in contemporary Hollywood history.
The
Focker twins Henry (Colin Baiocchi) and Samantha (Daisy Tahan) don’t
matter much to the story where Greg and his father-in-law Jack Byrnes
(Robert De Niro) once again clash egos. The willingness of Little Fockers’ writers
and directors to take dumb advantage of family life matches Sofia
Coppola’s pretense that her own father issues are again (the fourth time
around) worthwhile movie content.
No
better than a mirthless Hollywood hack, Coppola sentimentalizes her
family dilemma in order to pose as an artiste. Her navel-gazings are a
boutique indie franchise.
It takes
enormous nerve to recycle the same psychotherapy babble as delicate
feeling, yet it must be admitted that Coppola has a devious knack: She
spreads her own anomie evenly between daddy and daughter character—the Lost in Translation formula.
When Johnny sits in his Chauteau Marmont suite watching hired blond
twins do their stripper pole act, it’s the same alienation that Cleo
exhibits when she ice-skates, a budding lithe young woman. Coppola’s big
theme: Boredom Is A Family Trait. Pop culture critic Richard Torres
explained Sofia’s motivation: “If
you think my daddy’s films are boring, watch this!” The combination of
privilege and temerity obviously appeals to the pessimism of trust-fund
hipsters who think their own isolation and parental competition are a
profound condition.
No wonder Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture flopped.
Dunham’s story about a Manhattan artist’s foundering postgraduate
daughter (played by Dunham herself) exposed the waywardness of
privileged kids and surpassed all Coppola’s fatuous self-indulgence by
satirizing it. Admitting its pettiness, Dunham also found its teensy but
real universality. Not Coppola. Her filmmaking penchant favors
remoteness and repetition: The desert race track that Johnny circles
continuously and purposelessly in his roadster in the film’s
symbolic-enigmatic opening; the nubile pole-dancers’ act (featuring
Sofia’s signature admiration of the female rump, doubled); the estranged
marriages; and the anonymous hotel living.
Coppola
has a limited range of experience—Italy, hotels, luxury—that most
people might envy and then mistakenly enjoy. The Hotel Principe di
Savoia in Milan is a Continental dream on the order of the Abu Dhabi
hotel in Sex and the City 2. As a setting, it teases deluxe consumption
while pouting about it. There’s a parallel to this in Little Fockers,
when
Greg throws a lavish birthday party for his twin toddlers; it’s where
the grandparents show up and display their own infantile tediousness.
The scene of De Niro and Stiller diving into a balloon pit while the
Jaws music theme lampoons their conflict has to be a mutual nadir for
two totally opposite careers.
Like Somewhere, Little Fockers is
essentially about careerism. It offers the unrewarding spectacle of
Stiller, De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand (as grandparents
Bernie and Roz Focker) and Jessica Alba, in a thankless sexpot cameo,
simply picking up paychecks. Little Fockers, like Somewhere, goes nowhere.