Sofia Coppola is one of those directors who’s gotten a lot of criticism over the course of her career. Some of that obviously stems from the fact that her father is one of the most legendary directors of all time, and anything she does is bound to look pale in comparison to his best work. Some of it might even be residual feelings of resentment from the nepotism that put her in an acting role in The Godfather Part III, when it was clear to everyone other than her father that she was no actress. Most of it is because she’s a woman of privilege though, and because most of her stories feature characters who are people of privilege as well. Her work is derided as being shallow, all artifice, and existing in the bubble of upper crust Hollywood where no real problems exist, so the smallest of inconveniences get blown up into grand melodramas. While some of her movies are better than others, all of this criticism has largely been hogwash, because Coppola is a filmmaker who’s too talented in her craftsmanship and too focused on character for the work she’s done to this point to ever validly be called shallow. With The Bling Ring though, it appears that she’s finally made a movie that validates all of her detractors’ criticisms.
This film, based on the real life exploits of a group of Hollywood teens who targeted celebrity homes for robberies, is exactly the sort of shallow trash that makes you feel dumber and dumber the longer you watch it. Coppola has always been a director who took a feminine glee in shooting shoes and sparkly things with a lingering perversity, but never until this movie has the ogling of the pretty things been the shallow point of the whole thing. The vast majority of The Bling Ring’s run time just consists of Coppola’s cast rifling through extravagantly equipped walk-in closets, holding up articles of clothing, and then yelling out the name of the designer who made them. The deepest the character work goes is when the movie tells us directly, in one throw away sentence, that the pseudo-protagonist Marc (Israel Broussard) joined the gang because he always felt insecure about his looks and he enjoyed feeling the sense of belonging that came with being part of the cool crowd. Deep.
There’s no tension to the robbery scenes here, because Coppola’s script takes a non-linear approach to telling the storytelling, so we know that the kids get caught from the first couple moments of the film. There isn’t anything interesting to be found in the particulars of the robberies either, because instead of coming up with any real plan, the kids mostly just walk up to the celebrity victims’ houses, check to see if any doors are unlocked, and then casually walk in while finding that no alarm systems have been triggered. This isn’t exactly the sort of movie you could classify as a heist story. No, it’s pretty much pure fashion porn wrapped in the flimsy disguise of being an incisive look at the detached narcissism of today’s youth. Or something. Honestly, that thread doesn’t get developed much further than having the kids all be completely without remorse or empathy, and then showing that they have a firm understanding of the ins-and-outs of psychology jargon. Which I guess is something.
The young cast that Coppola has put together, including famous face Emma Watson as well as newcomer Katie Chang, seems like they’re all likely talented enough, but they don’t ever get enough to do to prove themselves. The characters here are virtually indistinguishable, aside from the fact that Broussard is playing the boy and they all have a fashion quirk or two that seems to define them. This one is all about purses. This other one likes anything that comes in a leopard print. You keep waiting for the breaking point where the walls come down and the characters actually start to get interesting, but it just never comes. Perhaps that’s the point of the film, but it’s hardly one that needed to be hammered home any further. Just a couple minutes flipping through network television programming or listening to the music on top 40 radio is enough to let one know that today’s youth culture is tacky and intellectually and morally bankrupt.
When all is said and done, what are we supposed to have gotten out of this simple, stupid movie? Coppola still has a flair for putting together an energetic montage. I guess Emma Watson’s dumb American girl accent was pretty amazing. Other than that though, The Bling Ring is the perfect excuse to pull out the old man analogy of something being “all sizzle and no steak.” It’s full of young people, bright colors, and loud, obnoxious music, but there just doesn’t seem to be any substance to its story whatsoever. As a matter of fact, the deeper you dig the less you find. Let’s just hope this was a cheap attempt from Coppola at making something that could bring in some box office dollars, and next time around she’ll get back to making movies about the human condition.
