Somewhere
Somewhere is a film that on the surface level feels and sounds like a complete retread. The log line is as cliché as it gets: a famous but unhappy actor re-evaluates his life priorities after an extended period of time with his eleven-year-old daughter.
That's all this movie is. It's very much Lost in Translation, except swap Tokyo for LA and swap an implicit parental relationship for an explicit one. Steven Dorff is a little bit earlier on the age curve than Bill Murray, but they're still in the same place — having arrived and realized they're nowhere.
I would not expect many people to love this film. It is, I think, a bit gratuitous with Coppola's clichés: a lot of intentionally overlong shots with fixed apertures, a lot of too-cute musical cues, a lot of emphasis on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Action is not even secondary to plot; it's tertiary at best.
And yet, I really enjoyed this movie. I thought every bit of it was successful. It accomplished everything it tried to do, and the only serious criticism you could level at it is that it didn't really try to do anything new relative to her work up to this point.
The film only exists in any capacity based on the wattage and nuance of Dorff and Elle Fanning's performances — as individuals and as a unit. And I'm not sure what there is to say besides the fact that they knocked it out of the park. I think playing a character in a Coppola film is not unlike playing a character in a Wes Anderson film: you're asked to filter yourself through an affectation that might mute you entirely. But Dorff's physical presence — he absolutely nails it. I don't think I've seen him in anything before, and a quick scan of his filmography suggests that I won't see him in anything after this. But the kind of crisp crap-except-a-bit-of-a-sleaze energy, much more interested in uppers and downers than in introspection, he just nails. He's neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic. He makes sense as a person.
I'm also left with the feeling that BoJack Horseman took and cribbed a lot from this movie — which is perhaps giving this movie too much credit relative to the wide pool of art set in LA about a famous actor who's nonetheless depressed.