Somewhere written and dir. by Sofia Coppola

Coppola tells the story of a Hollywood child (Elle Fanning) spending time with her neglectful movie-star daddy. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) sits in a suite of the Chateau Marmont, that little hotel for generations of Hollywood hideouts, and finds himself a hollow man. The notion of a star sinking into seclusion and depression isn't new. What distinguishes Coppola's film is the detail in her portrait of celebrity life. “Somewhere,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, has, for example, an unusually accurate portrait of how publicists work from the client's point of view. Some become friends, some remain employees, but during work, they function as parents and guardians. The star's contract requires him to do some press. The phone rings, and the publicist tells the star where to go and what to do. He takes on a certain passivity. Some stars are more interested and interesting. Not Johnny. He seems to suffer from anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Perhaps he hardly feels anything. The film only indirectly suggests some of the reasons he got this way. He has attained success in his chosen field, and lost track of the ability to experience it. Through the awkward boredom, we are meant to discern a relationship between a man in crisis and a daughter on the cusp of womanhood. Dorff and Fanning could not be better at embodying those states. As in Lost in Translation, Coppola keeps an eye out for the broken places. That's when Somewhere is really something.