All the lonely people

Whereas Sofia Coppola’s directorial breakthrough, Lost in Translation, featured two lonely souls rattling about in a Tokyo hotel, her latest film, Somewhere, features one lonely soul holed up in a Californian hotel, and isn’t half so good.

Whereas Sofia Coppola’s directorial breakthrough, Lost in Translation, featured two lonely souls rattling about in a Tokyo hotel, her latest film, Somewhere, features one lonely soul holed up in a Californian hotel, and isn’t half so good. It’s not bad. It’s not hateful. It’s not evil. You won’t want to hunt it down and bring it to trial. But a second film about ennui suffers from ennui itself. And I’m not sure I can buy into the ‘emptiness of celebrity’ shtick any more. I wouldn’t mind being an empty celebrity. At least, then, I could drive my emptiness around in a nice car and get someone else to park it for me. As it is, I’m driving my emptiness around in a 14-year-old Honda with only one wing mirror. Where is the joy in that?

Our empty celebrity here is Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), an A-list action star who drives his emptiness around in a throaty Ferrari and lives at Chateau Marmont, the fabled faux-French hotel on Sunset Boulevard where Howard Hughes lived and both John Belushi and Helmut Newton died. This is a place of casual decadence, impromptu corridor parties and young women who go about bare-breasted.

Anyway, as the film opens we find Johnny laid up with a broken wrist, and even though he’s attended by a parade of pretty, eager girls, as well as twin pole dancers who set up shop in his bedroom, he cannot be entertained. He tries, gamely, but does not have it in him.