I was out with some friends recently and we were trying to come up with a good definition for the word pretentious. Pretentious is one of those things that is hard to put into words but you know it when you see it and I knew it when I saw the 2010 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner, Sophia Coppola’s Somewhere.
I remember some controversy around this selection for the award; Quentin Tarantino, who led last year’s jury,handed his former girlfriend, Coppola the festival’s top honor and his buddy, Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia was awarded best director and best screenplay for his movie, A Sad Trumpet Ballad. Then Tarantino topped it off by making a crack about the modern Italian cinema being depressing.
So I finally got around to seeing Coppola’s Somewhere – and I was excited. I’d kind of forgotten about it, and when it arrived from Netflix I told my husband we had a really good one to watch that night – a big winner at Venice. As we watched it, my husband kept asking me, “Are you sure that this is the one that got the Golden Lion?” I was confused as well.
It wasn’t the worst movie ever, but it was, as I said:
pretentious.
It’s a very slow to develop, small story about a famous young actor who is bored with his life, and it’s OK, but it is no way, no how, an award-winning movie. It’s kind of like watching a film made by a high school hipster, with “hit you over the head” imagery and symbolism; yes, we get it – the car is going nowhere and the protagonist is going nowhere. The hardening mask that the makeup people put on him is smothering him just as is his life. And the ending? I won’t get it away, but if you watch the movie remember that I said of it, “What the hell?”
There were some things to like, the acting, for one; Stephen Dorff as the actor, Johnny, is pretty good as the going nowhere guy who can have anything and yet has nothing, and Elle Fanning is very likeable as his sweet 11-year-old daughter. But in her effort to make sure we understood just how tedious Johnny’s life is Sophia makes it super tedious for me, the viewer, and my attention kept wandering away from the movie. I kept having to say to myself, “Oh yeah, the movie’s still on. Now Johnny’s staring vacuously at strippers just like he was just staring vacuously at his dinner. I wonder what he’ll be staring vacuously at next?”
My point is simply this – American movies get way too much credit anyway, and Italian movies not nearly enough. For a movie like Somewhere to be considered far superior than all of the Italian entries last year is just baffling to me. How about this, Tarantino – Somewhere is not even good enough to be depressing. It’s just boring.
I Love Italian Everything 