Review: On The Rocks
Sofia Coppola, 2020
On the Rocks is a paint-by-number Sofia-Coppola with a “This Is 40” schema, commissioned by Apple+. Cityscapes, a quick jet-set, the occasional late night party, a medium shot of two people sharing a meal across a table: all of the auteur’s iconography present. Shoegaze is notably absent from the soundtrack, but Thomas Mars croons as the camera gazes into the light-polluted abyss of eaten-by-the rich nouveau New York.
The film’s premiere sight is Bill Murray, drippy as aged Gouda. The camera clings to him for dear life, but the finely ripened actor can’t invigorate this limp noodle of a movie. The playboy father drizzles suspicions into his daughter Laura’s ear (Rashida Jones) when she suspects her husband (Damon Wayans Jr.) may similarly be chasing skirt outside the home. The inciting tip off, and a convincing one in my opinion, is a feminine toiletry kit stowed in his carry-on, body oil included. Daughter and pop cavort around town as amateur dicks, one in formal wear, the other in I-no-longer-give-a-fuck casual mommywear: tennis shoes, Breton stripes, and feminine denim, all very Madewell.
Betwixt stakeouts, conducted from a vintage red Alfa Romeo, the interpersonal weft of the film is Laura getting reacquainted with her caddish, devilish dad, woven with confrontations of his behavior, gentle misogyny disguised as charm, mainly. It’s the little offenses, like hitting on every waking woman he encounters, that the accrued and amassed, eventually breaking down his marriage. Laura is the only person in her family in friendly contact with cher papa.
Unfortunately, nothing holds weight in the film; everything everyone does feels like a dramatic lie. The three stellar comic actors play it straight, squandering their talents to make space for Murray’s charm, operating off the fumes of his burnished glow. Wayans hardly registers as a sort of tech-startup husband he’s supposed to be (he’s much too kind and humble, for one), whose big-win arrives with the nth user sign-up. Jones becomes the biggest victim of this feeble effort. She has little to work, or perhaps she possesses far too much self-assurance to pass muster as a woman in the Sofia-universe, someone aloof with privilege, contemplative, burdened by ennui. As she sits at her desk in her well-appointed apartment peering out onto Prince Street, what might she be thinking?
I was thinking about how easily she could get her Barbour jacket rewaxed down the block or stare at hordes of tourists clogging the streets of Soho. Indeed, the film’s unfolds unmistakably in New York. Yet the customary pleasure of a Coppola film—inhaling the sights of a major metropolis, more than mere pillow shots but aspirational-mood reinforcements—arrive remarkably stale. It’s hard to fault her, I suppose, when billboards, clothing ads, and other emblems of a commodified city have been marring the skyline now for years. The city has lost its luster.
On the Rocks is actually Coppola’s first film here. You’ll be excused if this comes as a surprise, as it did to me for momentarily; her persona feels inextricably linked to Manhattan, where sometimes lives, but in truth her film’s sensibilities are built on the allure of a globalized elite, which makes her films as comfortable in Tokyo as they are Los Angeles and elsewhere. The spaces and settings she chooses to occupy are ultimately the same old standbys as as Woody Allen, like Bemelman’s Bar and 21 Club (RIP), as well as newer haunts like Soho House. Add to the list of big ticket names Cartier, which helps illustrate the the moral of the story: Bad dads give you vintage, while work-addled husbands gift current. Out with the old and in with the new.