I have only really seen two of writer/director Sofia Coppola’s feature films: her break-out film Lost in Translation and her unorthodox biopic Marie Antoinette. As a filmmaker, she doesn’t really make conventional movies. Her works are more impressionistic character pieces than straightforward narratives. If there is character growth, it comes not because of the plot but because of who these people are and where they go, and there’s a difference there.
However, this is an odd year, so her latest, the comedy On the Rocks featuring her Lost in Translation male lead Bill Murray, went right to streaming on Apple TV+. Well, if nothing else, I do love me some Bill Murray.
After a few early shots of their wedding, Laura (Rashida Jones) and Dean (Marlon Wayans) seem to have settled into a comfortable married life. Dean is a hard-working executive in a vaguely defined company that sends him on frequent business trips. Laura is an author and stay-at-home mom of two young girls. When Dean’s behavior becomes a little weird, Laura suspects something might be up. Thinking she needs a man’s perespective, she calls her wealthy, philandering father Felix (Murray). Felix is absolutely certain Dean is cheating, and he sets out to prove it, dragging Laura along for the ride without doing the obvious thing of asking Dean if he’s straying or not. Will the two get to the bottom of things as Felix expects, or is Laura right in her initial assessment that Dean’s explanations, odd though they are, don’t really mean he’s straying?
On the surface, this may be the most straightforward movie I’ve ever seen from Coppola. Murray can riff with the best of them, Jones’s own comic timing is fine though she makes a good character to play off of, and the story does move from A to B. However, that doesn’t mean On the Rocks is a conventional comedy. There are some truly funny scenes that wouldn’t look too out of place in most Hollywood fare (Felix’s dealing with a cop that pulled him over being a prime example), but this movie is still more about Laura as a character than it is anything else. Felix may be a fun grandpa to the kids, and he may love his daughter the way a father should, but that doesn’t mean just because he cheated that all men will, something Laura asks him about more than once, each timing ending with Felix assuring her they will.
Instead, this movie is arguably about one woman’s relationship with her father. Felix broke Laura’s mother’s heart once upon a time, and it seems odd she is as close to him as she as noted by multiple characters in the movie while still being close to her mother. Laura doesn’t think her father is blameless, but she is bottling up how she feels about his actions in many ways. It could be as simple as it is hard to think ill of loved ones even when we know they’ve done horrible things, but Laura’s relationship with Felix is, at a glance, unexamined and potentially hurting other important relationships in her life, most notably the one she has with Dean. What this movie is about is not whether or not Dean is faithful but how Laura feels about both her father and the potential ruination of her marriage.
To that end, Coppola has done what she’s always done and fashioned a movie that speaks more of sensations than plotlines, where characters exist to just talk and maybe show what life is like rather than advance a narrative, and where we can at least count on Murray’s deadpan comic timing to enliven a movie that probably would have been a bit on the retched side without him.
Grade: B
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