Post by Dracula on Dec 12, 2020 19:20:15 GMT -5
On the Rocks(11/22/2020)
I’ve never quite been on the same page as critical consensus when it comes to the work of Sofia Coppola. I liked both The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation but not quite as much as some of their biggest accolades, but I also think I probably liked The Bling Ring and The Beguiled more than many of the critics who thought they were kind of minor works. Having said that I think I am more in line with the consensus around her latest film On the Rocks, which has mostly been viewed as a bit of a trifle, but not a bad trifle. The film is about a woman (played by Rashida Jones) who suspects her husband has been cheating on her on business trips and goes on something of an adventure with her father (Bill Murray) in trying to get to the bottom of the truth of these suspicions. As you can probably intuit the movie isn’t really about this lady’s marriage so much as it’s about her relationship to her father, who is this millionaire womanizer who she loves while sort of resenting some of his attitudes towards relationships and women in general. Given that Sofia Coppola is rather famously the daughter of a larger than life man it probably isn’t too much of a leap to suspect that this is at least slightly based on her own feelings about Francis Ford Coppola but given that he’s still happily married to Sofia’s mother there are probably some limits to how much Murray’s characters should be viewed as a stand-in for the elder Coppola. Relationships between fathers and adult daughters are not overly widely explored in cinema so there was something kind or interesting and refreshing about seeing that as the focus here, but the film never really manages to build into something particularly potent. The characters all live in a bubble of relative privilege and wealth and there isn’t that much of a sense that the protagonist will ever really be divorcing her husband or breaking away from her father so the stakes for all of this just seem kind of low to the point of being meaningless. That might still have worked if the film had gone all in on being more of a comedy but it’s not really going for laughs either. It’s not a bad movie by any means but it is a slight one and being a streaming premiere probably works in its favor as this would seem like a particularly insubstantial entry into the Sofia Coppola catalog were it in theaters.
*** out of Five
I’ve never quite been on the same page as critical consensus when it comes to the work of Sofia Coppola. I liked both The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation but not quite as much as some of their biggest accolades, but I also think I probably liked The Bling Ring and The Beguiled more than many of the critics who thought they were kind of minor works. Having said that I think I am more in line with the consensus around her latest film On the Rocks, which has mostly been viewed as a bit of a trifle, but not a bad trifle. The film is about a woman (played by Rashida Jones) who suspects her husband has been cheating on her on business trips and goes on something of an adventure with her father (Bill Murray) in trying to get to the bottom of the truth of these suspicions. As you can probably intuit the movie isn’t really about this lady’s marriage so much as it’s about her relationship to her father, who is this millionaire womanizer who she loves while sort of resenting some of his attitudes towards relationships and women in general. Given that Sofia Coppola is rather famously the daughter of a larger than life man it probably isn’t too much of a leap to suspect that this is at least slightly based on her own feelings about Francis Ford Coppola but given that he’s still happily married to Sofia’s mother there are probably some limits to how much Murray’s characters should be viewed as a stand-in for the elder Coppola. Relationships between fathers and adult daughters are not overly widely explored in cinema so there was something kind or interesting and refreshing about seeing that as the focus here, but the film never really manages to build into something particularly potent. The characters all live in a bubble of relative privilege and wealth and there isn’t that much of a sense that the protagonist will ever really be divorcing her husband or breaking away from her father so the stakes for all of this just seem kind of low to the point of being meaningless. That might still have worked if the film had gone all in on being more of a comedy but it’s not really going for laughs either. It’s not a bad movie by any means but it is a slight one and being a streaming premiere probably works in its favor as this would seem like a particularly insubstantial entry into the Sofia Coppola catalog were it in theaters.
*** out of Five
