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On the Rocks
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On the Rocks is not a memorable
title: it is sure to be casually referred to, in no time flat, as On the Ropes, Off the Rails, and several other close variations. Unmemorable, and
fairly pointless: it presumably aims to punningly twin the lush lifestyle of
one of its central characters with the feeling of failure haunting the other.
Alas, the film itself turns out to be rather unmemorable and pointless, as well
as strangely feeble and conservative in its dramatic “argument”.
It does have its pleasurable moments, and every one of
them is concentrated in the figure of Felix as performed by Bill Murray. He’s
so good, he completely unbalances the movie; subtract him, and you’ve got
virtually nothing. Felix is the irascible, flawed, but totally charismatic Dad
of Laura (Rashida Jones, fighting with a glum, pale role). She (apparently a
writer, although we get little sense of that) suspects that her hardworking
husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), is having an affair with his long-legged
assistant. So Felix swoops in, takes over Laura’s life and time, and whips them
both into a private-detective adventure … eventually, all the way to Mexico.
It’s a “loving your impossible Daddy” story, centred
in the adult daughter’s viewpoint (not much played for male pathos, The Babysitters Club-style, apart from one splendid
dramatic soliloquy for Murray). In a way, it’s more than familial love, it’s a
full-on romance (not strictly sexual, of course, but intense all the same) …
but that is not an undertone which Sofia Coppola seeks to express or explore;
she runs away from it as swiftly as possible. Why not go there, even as a
subterranean hint? It could have been a much better film if it had – like the
forgotten Duets (2000), for instance. We are very far
from Claire Denis, who frequently speaks of the father-daughter relation as
“close to incest … something unspoken is always there”. Not for Sofia Coppola!
Likewise, all the possibilities of sexual wandering accruing
to Dean and – potentially – Laura herself are all swept aside, out of the
picture, on the rocks. Instead, the trajectory here is simplistically
therapeutic: Laura finally gets, after all these years, to tell off her Dad for
his (at times) questionable and irresponsible behaviour, his male ways and
silly, old-fashioned “territorial imperative”, mansplaining
gender-justifications; while he gets to stand there, take it in, and skulk into
hiding until the final scene …
Coppola should really work with other writers more
often. For this is not a film that likes, or wants, complications and
ambiguities (not even the mild but mellow frisson of Lost in Translation’s
central May-December relationship is present); that’s why I call it
conservative. As well as a Daddy tale, it’s a “whatever you imagine is
happening is far worse than your ordinary, daily lot” cautionary alert – which
is fine for a short O. Henry story, but bad for a feature-length movie. It sets
up a small narrative trap, a mystery of sorts, and solves it – allowing a quick transition back to clear-cut equilibrium and normality.
Never mind that this routine clean-up of the plot
makes not much coherent sense in terms of a bunch of things we’ve seen Dean do:
that inaugural moment of bedroom dissociation on his part; his
text-message-wiped mobile phone; his zippy exit from Laura with his computer-doings
kept fiercely private; and so on. Is he really such a boring, hard-working,
good guy? Screw that. And the “open-minded and inclusive” casting of the part?
Amounts to nothing except an empty, superficial gesture of wokeness.
Coppola’s films seem to be loosely tracking (with some
diversions and deviations) the stages of her own life: childhood, adolescence,
early years of bad marriage, and currently family and relationship “maturity”
(she’s now in her late 40s). She may, like Richard Linklater in his Before trilogy, be about to hit
premature old-age melancholia. And no wonder: I placed that word “maturity” between
scare quotes because, if this is maturity, let me out of it!
Cristina Álvarez López has pointed out to me how so
much in On the Rocks appears to
continue, 30 years on, the story that Coppola scripted for her own Dad’s
episode of New York Stories (1989),
“Life Without Zoe”, and she’s dead right (we watched it again immediately). The
Dad there (well incarnated by Giancarlo Giannini) is charismatic and travels
the world; he is endlessly seductive and has cheated on his wife, breaking up
the marriage; he’s associated with the sublime beauty of art (music rather than
painting); he shares a deep love with his daughter. There’s even a helper-driver
named Hector in On the Rocks, like
the servant in the earlier film; and a repetition of a key motif in their
respective closing scenes: the sudden announcement of “I have two
tickets” to an exotic location …
In On the Rocks,
it’s Felix who says that line; in New
York Stories, it’s Zoe (en route to a European fantasy-reunion of her
family almost as artificial as that which closes Bernardo Bertolucci’s sublime La Luna [1979]). This difference, this switch in emphasis,
tells us a lot. For Laura, as portrayed, is dullsville, and so is her husband
and their marital/family life. There’s no warmth in any of the interactions
occurring in this traditionally nuclear unit (the only inventive moments of
liveliness are brought in by Felix); it’s as if Coppola cannot
quite imagine such daily life richly enough to portray it with any detailed
acuity or tenderness.
Stylistically, too, her films have become successively
flatter and more banal since the stirring debut of The Virgin Suicides (1999); this one is not as spectacular a
misfire as her The Beguiled (2017)
remake but, instead, cruises for a near-telemovie mode, with comic bits of
business (like a car chase, or a painfully one-note, harping-on friend in the
school queue) uncomfortably integrated … It aims to be an “adult” comedy-drama,
no longer the disquieting “affectless” social portrait of The Bling Ring (2013); more’s the pity.
And here another, even bigger difference from “Life
Without Zoe” resounds: Laura is not filthy rich, and therefore supposedly not
as “alienating” to the average viewer as Zoe was criticised for being. She is
hence meant to be (horror of horrors) relatable.
But who would want to relate to her? She’s a zero, and the “happy ending” she
finds is a more desperate emergency-exit than any dreamed up by Douglas Sirk
between Brechtian brackets of irony long ago.
© Adrian Martin 26 October 2020 |
