Somewhere (Coppola, 2010) 3/10


Keep forgetting to review anything. Watched a double bill, which by chance have some similarity so I'll do them both together.
First the good. Save the Tiger, for which Jack Lemmon won Best Actor (beating a lineup of nominees of Brando, Pacino, Redford & Nicholson, no less!) and it's a really fine drama in the 70s American new cinema mould. Jack runs a clothing firm, which is in trouble trying to make enough to keep the company going going year on year. He's middle aged and he fought in WW2, something which still scars him.
It's carefully paced over the course of 2 days during which he must take a difficult decision and it becomes a near-existential crisis as he takes stock of everything. The acting is great, Jack carries it but with fine support. There's hints of Mad Men about it, the character here is nowhere near as suave as Don Draper, but suffers from the same sort of anxieties & haunting from his past. I thought this was really good. Deserves to be filed along with things like Five Easy Pieces and similar.
As for Somewhere, well it must've been kind of embarrassing for Sofia Coppola when she'd got together the cast & was all ready to shoot but then realized she'd forgotten to write the damn thing. So instead of a film we get 90 minutes of nicely-shot nothing. Stephen Dorff has none of the charisma of Lost in Translation's Bill Murray to carry you along with the ennui, and endless shots of him looking bored do not a movie make.
Watching it on the back of Save the Tiger was particularly telling. Both are about a man who is not really sure where he's going with his life & proceed episodically as we learn about the man through his interactions with various others, but the gulf is immense. Save the Tiger demonstrates Jack's state of mind in the opening 10 minute scene of him and his wife starting the day; Somewhere also sets the tone and reveals the character in the first 10 mins, but then just doesn't go anywhere with it. Simply hammers it home again and again. Essentially it lacks good dialogue, interesting characters (the daughter is pleasant enough, but that's about it) or generally any reason to care whatsoever about what is happening on the screen (usually nothing). It's so slow-burn that by the time it tries to make some kind of a climax the match has long since gone out and all it can do is peter out with the most clichéd of indie-movie endings. Very poor.