The film is about superstar actor Johnny Marco (played by Stephen Dorff), who is about to start the Italian leg of his promotional tour of his latest blockbuster. This is a man who you can tell lives life hard, and may not necessarily be the nicest guy towards others, as he is constantly barraged with texts telling him how much of a dirt-bag he is. Also at a photo shoot with his co-star, they are barely on speaking terms. It’s almost as if he just doesn’t care because everything he wants comes to him so easily (especially the attention of women), so he just sits around in his hotel room at the Chateau Marmont, wasting time. However, this all changes when his daughter Cleo (played by the magnificent Elle Fanning) turns up on his doorstep, with her mother telling him that she’s not sure when she would return.
Immediately you can see that fatherhood brings out the best in Johnny and he just seems like a different man altogether. This is especially true during the scene when Johnny takes Cleo to her ice-skating practice. You can just see his eyes open to her world and you can feel the love and pride he has for his daughter when he realizes just how good she is at it. From here he basically has to head to Italy where he knows no-one else, so he spends all his time with his daughter, doing simple things like sharing a gelato at two in the morning.
By the time he has to drop Cleo off at a school camp, he comes to the realization that he is wasting away his life and he wants to change that. The film is bookended with two shots of Johnny driving in his car that sum up exactly where he is in life at that moment. The first scene has Johnny driving around and around in circles on a racing track, obviously symbolizing that he is going nowhere, while at the end he is driving with purpose down a road to get his daughter, to the point that he gets out of his car and walks. Again the symbolizing here is that his is walking away from the materialization that has been holding him back and walking towards his new life (he is now going “somewhere”).
It’s such a beautiful movie with gorgeous human moments, thanks to the brilliant performances by the two leads, they have such great chemistry together. It’s so good to see Stephen Dorff have a human role that he can bite his teeth into, instead of playing villain number 2, like he has over the past decade. Again Sofia Coppola’s direction is sublime. She is quite a brave director too, because regularly she holds on shots and full scenes just that little bit longer than most directors would, and it always works for her. An example of this is a scene when Johnny and Cleo are sitting on an inflatable bed thing in a pool and she just holds on the shot forever, slowly panning out, until it reveals something altogether different than we originally thought, making the scene so much more poignant.
As beautiful and touching as the film is, it is also very funny, with the funniest scenes being when Johnny is sitting on his hotel bed, watching these twins do a pole-dancing act, that is so painfully bad, that it is hilarious. The girls are terrible, but that is what makes it so funny, and he hires them twice in the film, so you get to re-visit the hilarity. Overall, I adored this film and if you are a fan of Sofia Coppola, I highly recommended it, and don’t be put off by the nonsense people are saying that this is just a rehash of “Lost In Translation”, it is not. “Somewhere” is its own distinct film that is a fresh and distinct take on fame and stardom in Hollywood.
Ranked 12 in Top 25 of 2010
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