More tone poem than film, Somewhere finds Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) at her most untethered and experimental. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is untethered himself, a movie star drifting through days at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel. Occasional visits from his daughter (an excellent Elle Fanning) punctuate the press conferences, random sex, trips to Italy and Guitar Hero sessions. Coppola tests the audience’s patience right out of the gate with a long, static shot of Marco driving his car around a racetrack—shades of The Brown Bunny, yuck—followed immediately by stripper twins doing a synchronized pole dance to the entirety of “My Hero” by the Foo Fighters. And it goes on like that, three- to five-minute single shots of eating, skating, showering and driving until Marco cries that he doesn’t feel like a person. Somewhere doesn’t feel like a feature-length movie.
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2011.
