DVD of the Week: Somewhere

Sofia Coppola’s fourth feature, “Somewhere,” which I discuss in this clip, is both a great inside-Hollywood story and a great father-daughter story, and it brings the two stories together to show how art and life are meant to fuse, to the benefit of both. It’s the story of an alienated actor and a detached father whose double roles reflect off each other and show him not his presence but his absence. Coppola’s film is itself the kind of personal film that is made personal both by its distinctive, original, and impassioned artistry and by its distillation of the director’s own experience. She is, of course, a daughter of Hollywood—the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola—but she’s not showing what it was like to have him for a father. She’s showing what it’s like to grow up with money and celebrity as a given—and suggesting that the vulgar indulgences of the movie milieu are an essential part of the allure and the affect of Hollywood movies. This is one of the great paradoxes of “Somewhere”—and of Coppola’s career. Hollywood, like Versailles, can both inspire the unprejudiced and unblinkered imagination or stifle it; in “Somewhere,” the vain actor’s Ferrari, which for him is an unreflective pleasure and a status symbol, is, for Coppola, the ultimate camera dolly: her views of the city from its low-riding, smooth-gliding, road-hugging perspective are contemplative, introspective wonders. Few recent movies make such sharp use of point-of-view shots; few conjure so vivid a sense of thinking by way of vision itself—or connect life experience so closely to the actual act of looking.