• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • TP について/About
  • Topics/トピクス
    • Gender/ジェンダー
    • Globalisation/グローバリゼーション
    • Japan and Asia/日本とアジア
    • Japanese/日本語
    • Media/メディア
    • News/ニュース
    • Social Justice/社会正義
    • War and Empire/戦争&支配権力
    • Environment/環境
    • Other Stories/他の記事
  • Links/リンク
  • Contact

TokyoProgressive

Linking Progressives East and West Since 1997

東西のプログレッシブをつなぐ − 1997年設立  |  Linking Progressives East and West Since 1997

Sofia Coppola Wants You to Feel Bad for the Very Rich and the Very Sad

December 5, 2020 by Leave a Comment

 

From Jacobin

I should probably recuse myself from reviewing Sofia Coppola films.

Years ago, I worked as a receptionist for six months at her father Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. There, I occasionally watched the teenage Ms Coppola and her twenty-something brother Roman waft in and out of the Zoetrope offices — both of them sullenly beautiful and free as the air.

I was there when Francis Coppola gave his children a small film company of their own to run, the short-lived Commercial Pictures. I even watched as a large crane hoisted up Marlon Brando’s desk from The Godfather so that it could be hauled in through the windows of young Roman’s new office — Don Corleone’s desk was simply too enormous to drag up the staircase or cram into the elevator.

Film critics almost always comment on the way Sofia Coppola’s films deal exclusively with the world of the affluent and ultra-privileged, the world that she knows. But few critics have had a ringside seat, as I have, to the gorgeous luxury in which she was raised. Such ease, such splendid leisure, such immediate access to all showbiz opportunities, with so many of her dad’s brilliantly talented cronies hanging around, taking an interest in Sofia’s various career ambitions — screenwriting, photography, fashion, acting, and finally directing.

Anyway, the point is, I hated On the Rocks — her new film on Apple TV+ — even more than most Sofia Coppola films. But can my hatred be trusted? It’s very pure hatred!

According to Apple’s ad campaign, it’s supposed to be a comedy. Maybe it’s my bias talking, but On the Rocks sure seems more like a laugh-free, four-hour trudge. (Technically, it runs ninety-six minutes.)

Extraordinarily vapid, On the Rocks is oblivious to its own world of wealth, privilege, and access. It’s inspired a sneering Slate piece entitled “What Is the Bougiest Status Symbol in Sofia Coppola’s New Movie?” The bougiest is probably the first one listed: a vintage Chanel purse worn by the protagonist, Laura (Rashida Jones, herself the daughter of a famous mother and father), priced at $6,000, paired with a cool Strand Book Store tote bag, priced at under $30, that conveys this message about the wearer:

It’s a duo that says “I can spring for couture when I want to, but I’m not above browsing the used books.”

The movie’s about daddy-daughter dysfunction involving Laura and her charming but domineering father, Felix (Bill Murray). Coppola is cagey about how much the relationship is based on her own with Francis Coppola, but in certain interviews, she admits that, in broad strokes, it provided inspiration:

I remember as a young woman my dad telling me, “This is what guys are thinking,” his generation, his point of view. So I was thinking about that. I wanted them to be a little bit of an odd couple, a modern young woman and this old-world guy with those attitudes.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the once reliably wonderful Bill Murray less funny than he is here, playing Felix. Admittedly, there’s not much for him to work with in the script, but once upon a time, Murray could get by without laugh lines entirely — his whole attitude toward life was inherently funny. Now, he’s adopted a kind of coy, wide-eyed preciousness that’s more baffling than funny.

Felix talks Laura into hitting swanky Manhattan bars and restaurants in pursuit of her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), an entrepreneur whose tech company is surging into the big money class. Laura is also very successful. She’s a writer who’s already received a big advance for an unwritten book. But she’s got writer’s block because she has two daughters and now has to be up early for them, meaning she has to try to write in the daytime. She used to write all night, you see.

Here, Sofia Coppola is drawing on her own life, trying to approach a “ridiculous” premise with “some realism.” Just as Lost in Translation was inspired by her own youthful crisis of creative uncertainty alongside a failing marriage to director Spike Jonze, so is On the Rocks a highly personal film of twenty years later, charting a midlife crisis based on her own struggle to stay creative while navigating parenthood.

Sofia Coppola at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. (Georges Biard / Wikipedia)

But it’s not much of a struggle, since everyone tends to be ultra-successful in the Sofia Coppola Cinematic Universe. Felix, for example, is an art dealer who wears flashy suits and has a chauffeur to drive him around. But the issue in her films is how disconnected they are anyway — not actual struggle. How many alienated walks do they take, how much do they gaze disconsolately out of windows, how neurotically are they messing up their posh lives, while never seeming to realize that almost every problem they have is not only readily solvable but, in fact, hardly even counts as a problem in most people’s estimation?

For a really bracing view of life among the rich and famous, you can look at the infinitely more endearing and insightful writing of actor-memoirist Carrie Fisher. Daughter of old-time Hollywood star Debbie Reynolds and one-time singing sensation Eddie Fisher — and famous in her own right as an actor after playing Princess Leia in Star Wars — Fisher always saw the freakishness of her tiny elite bubble, and she wrote about it as an outsider might: hilariously and mordantly.

Fisher was always recognizing the bizarre insularity of fame, as the way her mother relied on a network of movie star friends to help her through adolescence — Cary Grant was drafted into counseling a teenage Carrie about drug use based on his own experiments with LSD. Ava Gardner, living in London, once responded to a frantic phone call from Debbie Reynolds that sent Gardner racing to a London hotel to save young Carrie Fisher from a drug overdose.

Fisher loved to document the way her family and friends all lived in the lap of luxury but still tended to make such unholy messes of their lives, sometimes literally, as when her brother, Todd, found a hidden family gun and accidentally shot himself in the thigh, spraying Debbie Reynolds’s whole white-on-white movie star bedroom with blood.

No such self-awareness exists in Coppola’s films, but still, her fans are legion and include many film critics. In the interest of fairness, I’ll quote someone who admires On the Rocks. Stephanie Zacharek of Time magazine says:

There’s no tortured drama, no grand revelation. . . . [A]s with all of Coppola’s pictures, it’s the layering of details that counts, the accretion of sly but not minor observations that come to form the whole, like the stippled strokes of a Seurat painting . . . this is a clever and dexterous look at the way modern life, even a cushy modern life, can throw tricky curve balls — and a reminder that having money never protects you from loneliness and confusion.

If you’re interested in a reminder that even the rich can’t entirely buy off ordinary human emotions such as loneliness and confusion, then this is the cinematic Seurat painting just for you.

Filed Under: Jacobin, Social Justice/社会正義

Join the Discussion

Comment on this article or respond to others' comments.

You can post below or send to the mailing list at discuss@list.tokyoprogressive.org.

a) Please sign you name at the bottom of your comment, so that we know who wrote it.

b) To prevent spam, comments need to be manually approved.

c) Comments which are insulting, racist, homophobic or submitted in bad faith will not be published.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Search the site

Archives

Main Categories (old and most recent)

Alternative News Contributors/投稿者 creative Democracy Now Environment/環境 Featured Gender/ジェンダー Globalisation/グローバリゼーション Jacobin Japan/日本 Japan and Asia/日本とアジア Japanese/日本語 Japan Focus Japan News Korea/韓国 latest latest-j links Media/メディア Mp3 National Security Archive neoliberalism new News/ニュース Other Stories/他の記事 Social Justice/社会正義 Topics Uncategorized Video War and Empire/戦争&支配権力

Search deeper

Abe activities, protests, films, events Afghanistan alternative news Bush class issues and homelessness Environmental research fukushima gaza health care Henoko human rights Iraq Iraq, Afganistan and the War on Terror Iraq and Afghanistan, opposing the wars Israel Japan Korea labor issues Latin America Middle East military North Korea nuclear nuclear waste Obama Okinawa Okinawa Palestine peace protest protest and resistance racism/human rights radiation state crimes Syria Takae Tepco Trump U.S. War world news English ニュース/社会問題 人権 平和、憲法9条

Design and Hosting for Progressives

Donate/寄付

Please support our work. This includes costs involved in producing this news site as well as our free hosting service for activists, teachers and students. Donations/寄付 can be sent to us via PayPal or Donately. You can also click on the buttons below to make a one-time donation.




Work with us

TokyoProgressive
supports and participates in projects of like-minded people and groups directly (technical, editing, design) and not-so directly (financial or moral support). Likewise, we also welcome contributions by readers that are consistent with promoting social justice. If you have a project you would like help with, or if you would like to submit an article, link, or report on a protest activity, please contact us here.

Footer

All opinions are those of the original authors and may not reflect the views of TokyoProgressive. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for by copyright law in several countries. The material on this site is distributed without profit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyleft 1997-present: tokyoprogressive dot org

TokyoProgressive supports and participates in projects of like-minded people and groups directly (technical, editing, design) and not-so directly (financial or moral support). Likewise, we also welcome contributions by readers that are consistent with promoting social justice. If you have a project you would like help with, or if you would like to submit an article, link, or report on a protest activity, please contact us here.

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in