There’s no inherent conflict between style and substance—for the best filmmakers, they’re inseparable—but one of the most stylistically advanced of current filmmakers, Sofia Coppola, fascinatingly, movingly, and ironically dramatizes her experience of such a conflict in her new film, “On the Rocks” (coming to Apple TV+ this Friday), which she wrote and directed. Here, she once again joins forces with Bill Murray (who, of course, starred, with Scarlett Johansson, in “Lost in Translation,” and was the center of attention in her divertissement “A Very Murray Christmas”)—and she does so with a surprising, bracing sense of skepticism. In the new film, even as Coppola distills and delivers the wry and rarefied delights of Murray’s style of performance and personal bearing, she wrestles with the very sources of her own sensibility and the roots of her own taste.
It’s a story set in the milieu that has long obsessed Coppola—within the four dimensions of money, power, generational relations, and romantic crisis. The protagonist, Laura Keane (Rashida Jones), is a seemingly well-regarded author with an international career, who lives in a luxury apartment in a converted SoHo loft. She has an advance on her next book, but she is struggling to write it, because of the busyness of her family life. The breadwinner is her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), the chief executive of a successful tech startup, which requires him to travel far and wide and to devote vast amounts of time to his work, leaving Laura to manage the household and care for the couple’s two young daughters, Maya (Liyanna Muscat) and Theo (played by the twins Alexandra Mary Reimer and Anna Chanel Reimer). Laura has begun to suspect Dean of having an affair with a new colleague, Fiona (Jessica Henwick), and, when speaking by phone with her father, Felix (Murray), she discloses her suspicions. Felix—after admonishing her, from Paris, to “start thinking like a man”—takes action, showing up spontaneously in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes and plotting a wide-ranging surveillance and deep-delving investigation of Dean.
As if with a cinematic tuning fork that hums its overtones throughout the film, Coppola begins the movie with a black screen and a voice-over conversation: Felix’s declaration to the child Laura, “And remember, don’t give your heart to any boys. You’re mine until you get married. Then you’re still mine,” and the young Laura’s audibly eye-rolling response, “Um, O.K., Dad.” Felix is more than a possessive father; he’s a suave whirlwind of engulfing power, a wealthy and worldly art dealer who takes commanding control of her life. Dashingly elegant, he makes his appearance like the star of Laura’s life—he rolls down the tinted window in the back seat of his limo and fixes her in his luminescent gaze. Felix dresses up: a pale seersucker suit, a sumptuously soft dark suit, a jaunty racing cap. He knows the private clubs and concierges and maître d’s in New York and cities worldwide. He knows the hotels everywhere and knows what people do there. He knows what to order in every restaurant, and he has friends to visit and villas to borrow in far-flung destinations. When he greets Laura with a huge tin of caviar for them to share, he adds an anecdote about cosmonauts who ate it. (I won’t spoil the ending.) He’s a walking volume of the Great American Songbook, and he unhesitatingly adorns social occasions (as Murray adorns the movie) with his expressive, emotive yet wry singing voice. He also whistles, provides whistling lessons for Laura, and reminds her that she was named for the title song from Otto Preminger’s film of the same name. Yet he doesn’t call her by name—he addresses her with a handful of diminutives, ranging from “Shorty” to “Kiddo” to “Kid,” and brings her to “Bogart’s table” at the 21 Club to seal the connection.
When they’re together, Felix dominates the conversation with what Laura calls “lots of theories and stories,” many of which have to do with sex and gender—his own glamorous romantic adventures and his speculations on the subject. Laura’s bangle bracelet sparks his historical reflection that women were formerly considered men’s property; his reflections on evolutionary theory yield his explanation of why adult men are attracted to adolescent women and why men are relentlessly domineering philanderers. He claims he’s going deaf—but only to women’s voices (and ascribes it to their pitch). He has also dominated Laura’s life as much by his absence as by his presence: when Laura was growing up, Felix left Laura’s mother (Alva Chinn) and the family for another woman. Felix is a serial philanderer, a relentless seducer who, even now, at around seventy, in Laura’s presence, flirts outrageously with young women, perfect strangers—a waitress, his granddaughters’ ballet teacher, one of Dean’s colleagues.
Felix is also impulsive and intrepid, and the detective-like adventures that he ropes her into, in order to track and survey Dean, run major risks—including legal ones, which he eludes with the aplomb and presumptive impunity of privilege. The signal moment in the film involves the police—and it’s too juicy a scene to spoil, but suffice it to say that a situation that other people might find fearsome (and Laura, who is Black, observes the events in question dubiously), Felix is able to handle in his own inimitable way. He is equally cavalier with the lives of others: his adventures become their adventures, whether they like it or not; and, whatever they may lose along the way, they’re at least left with the stories to tell.
Because Coppola has written (and dressed) Felix with such alluring flair and breathtaking savvy (and because he’s played by the charming Murray), he comes off as a lovable rogue whose charm dominates the film as it dominates (and runs roughshod over) Laura’s life—and conceals with lofty irony the film’s mighty and terrifying core, namely, that Felix is the elegant and roguish villain of Laura’s life. Felix may have offered her, in childhood and adulthood, a significant part of her education in style—though her grandmother (Barbara Bain) and mother are also exemplars of worldly refinement, grace, and wisdom, even if they are less flamboyant about it. They also, unlike Felix, were around and taking care of things at home while Felix was traipsing around the world collecting the souvenirs of experience—exactly as, now, Laura is holding down the home front during Dean’s business travels. She also bears the petty humiliations and frustrations of a woman who, though working and despite professional accomplishment, doesn’t go to an office; ends up doing the drop-offs and the pickups and the signups and the registrations; keeps the household running; and so does her writing only in stolen moments.
Without at all ascribing Felix’s self-justifying, troglodytic philosophy, his condescending manners, his aggressively sexist behavior, or his feckless and domineering ways to any individual in her family, her past, or her circle, Coppola nonetheless delves dramatically into the personal history of her generation. She suggests the experience of women in Hollywood (and, for that matter, outside it) who came up under the authority of an older generation of men, and of the very assumptions of modern culture, including the masculinized sense of cool that Hollywood shaped and amplified. As if doing a painful intellectual and emotional archeology of her life and sensibility, she looks sharply and critically at the conveniences of wealth and the prerogatives of privilege; she confronts the attitudes and assumptions of which old-school charm and commanding manner reek. The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent tale of private and public abuses of power looks askance at Hollywood mythologies, too, including the ones of the early classic movies that Felix reveres and those that brought Murray to stardom—to which “On the Rocks” ironically owes much of its appeal.
Coppola’s previous film, “The Beguiled,” was her least stylistically refined, because her connection to the subject was tenuous and hesitant—it’s a theoretical film in which the very desire to revisit the scene of the crime (not history’s crime, but Hollywood’s) got in the way of her relationship to the events onscreen, and their real-life basis. In “On the Rocks,” Coppola’s relationship with the subject is so intense that it nearly burns away style; there’s so little distance between herself and her subject that her exquisite flourishes of refined documentary-rooted observation—short glimpses of city streets, a shot of father and daughter side by side in a restaurant, a view of Laura wearing a bright yellow dress in front of a magenta wall—seem extracted with pain from the drama’s scrutiny of a certain aesthetic sensibility, and the wealth and the power on which it depends. “On the Rocks” lends a poignantly ironic twist to a self-questioning, even self-excoriating tale of regret: its breezy tone and casual moods suggest a lightness that’s no frivolity but an urgent necessity—because the movie shatters Coppola’s own artistic bedrock as it goes along.
