Somewhere (2010)

Somewhere opens with a Ferrari tracing the same desert circuit for what feels like a geological era, and this is the film's entire thesis delivered in one gesture. Johnny Marco, a movie star of moderate wattage, drifts through the Chateau Marmont with a broken wrist and an unbroken supply of beer. Sofia Coppola, who directed, has made a film about a man's spiritual vacancy, and she has done so without a single gesture toward the cultural concerns of its moment. The cast is white. The world is white. Nobody in the frame seems to notice, and the film does not ask them to.

This is not a failure of nerve. It is a choice, and a coherent one. The picture observes where lesser films would sermonize. Johnny's ennui is not framed as a symptom of late capitalism, nor as a critique of celebrity culture that might double as a critique of the market. He is simply a man who has run out of interior furniture. Cleo, his eleven-year-old daughter, arrives and functions as a catalyst for his maturation, which is to say she serves the arc of a male protagonist. Coppola's camera regards this with patience and no commentary whatsoever. There is no thesis to be extracted, no lesson pressed upon the audience.

Here is a 2010 film that behaves like a 1974 film, austere and observational and entirely uninterested in instructing anyone. The Golden Lion it collected in Venice suggests the jury found this restraint admirable. So do I. On the cultural ledger it registers as a clean zero, and it earns that zero with a quiet dignity that most films cannot approach.