A common (false) complaint surrounding Sofia Coppola’s 2006 effort
Marie
Antoinette was that the film’s frequent depictions of opulence and
decadence deadened you to the plight of Kirsten Dunst’s titular character
instead of making it more accessible and explicable to a modern audience. Coppola’s
efforts in that film grounded you in the reality of a person whose insular
existence slowly lost touch with the realities of her time, reclaiming Marie
Antoinette from history and bringing her back to life. Which is all preamble to
saying The Bling Ring fails on precisely the levels that many
mistakenly accused Marie Antoinette of failing on, plunging us headlong into a
world where our lead characters are voids looking to emulate a vacuous
celebrity culture defined by gaudy excess and Caligula-style decadence while
forgetting to give us anybody or anything to care about along the way.
Coppola does manage a trenchant observation or two
throughout the picture, an early scene set in a nightclub where our main
characters spend their time taking selfies in lieu of interacting with each
other or anyone around them is an example of the film making its point with wit
and verve, something the majority of the picture sorely lacks otherwise. Instead
we’re treated to an endless parade of scenes where our characters Google the
home address of an LA celebrity after finding out they’re out of town and then
wander around the interiors ransacking said abode, followed by a subsequent
scene of them ingesting illicit drugs and dancing to dubstep in celebration of
their ill-gotten gains. Rinse wash repeat. A brief introduction of the
“Chekhov’s gun” principle into the monotony breathes momentary life into what becomes
a protracted descent into all-encompassing tedium. Gorgeous tedium, though. Sofia
Coppola films shoes like
with fetishistic delight, and certain sequences of her characters engaged in
their fevered bacchanalia create an appealingly toxic quality, the cinematic
equivalent of taking in a lungful of glitter.
But is the film empty on purpose? There’s an argument that
could be made that the film is intentionally drowning us in artifice without anything
in the way of recognizable or relatable humanity, creating a damning portrait
of
youth as a TMZ logo-emblazoned ouroboros, much in the way Godard’s Week-End
rained an oppressive assault on late-60’s bourgeois values. But Godard had
surreal excess on his side and a strong sense of the grotesque, where Coppola
seems to be content to let the events speak for themselves despite the events
having nearly nothing to say. I don’t ascribe to the theory that this film is
trolling its audience, however, I believe it to be genuinely trying to
entertain and elucidate the ills of these youths at the same time.
Nowhere is this more evident than through the overtly
comedic performances of Emma Watson and Leslie Mann (as Nicki and her mother)
in the film’s final third. These are finely honed comedic performances that
help enliven the proceedings greatly, but the performances feel pitched at a
different frequency than everyone else in the film, as though they’re in on a
joke the rest of the cast were never made privy to. If the film had committed
in one direction or another, either committing to knowingly lampooning this
pursuit of a vacuous ideal or fully immersing us in the meaningless void that
is these characters’ lives it might’ve congealed into something more appealing.
Frank
us out over the end credits, and it seems appropriate that his song of youth
warped by a cocoon of privilege that inures them from reality makes its points
more saliently and soulfully in five minutes than the entire film that precedes
it.
