Sofia Coppola (2020)
Accepting her Oscar for the screenplay of Lost in Translation (2003), Sofia Coppola acknowledged Bill Murray as her ‘muse’. They’d not worked together since and Coppola must have been keen to give Murray another star turn. The role she’s written for him in the comedy-drama On the Rocks is certainly that but it comes at a cost to the film as a whole.
This time, unlike in Lost in Translation, Murray doesn’t have the main part – at least in the sense that Rashida Jones has much more screen time. She plays fortyish Laura, who lives with her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) and their two young daughters in a handsome New York City apartment. Laura is a published writer, though struggling to get going on her latest project. Dean, an ambitious businessman, is spending more and more hours at work – including wining and dining potential clients, and time away from New York. When Laura finds a woman’s toilet bag in his luggage and asks about it, he’s unfazed: he says it belongs to his colleague Fiona (Jessica Henwick), who hadn’t room for the bag in her own case when they returned from a business trip together and must have forgotten to ask for it back. The discovery nevertheless crystallises suspicions in Laura’s mind that Dean and Fiona are having an affair. She contacts her father, Felix (Murray), for advice.
That, on the face of it, is a surprising move. Felix, a rich art dealer, is an incorrigible playboy, whose unfaithfulness ended his marriage to Laura’s mother years ago. Does his daughter approach him because he’s a serial womaniser – in a spirit of it-takes-one-to-know-one? Or perhaps he’s the only person she can turn to. We see her on a brief visit to the distaff side of the family, headed by her aged grandmother (Barbara Bain), but Laura isn’t close to these relatives and seems to have no friends in whom she can confide. Her only regular social contact is with Vanessa (Jenny Slate), a self-obsessed, jabbering mother she has to listen to as they wait to pick up their children from school. However, the main reason Felix must be his daughter’s confidant is that it brings Bill Murray into the picture and keeps him at its centre.
Laura’s father is more than ready to accept her suspicions as well founded: he knows – from the human evolution explanations that he spouts, as well as from personal experience – that all men are the same when it comes to women. (He means all heterosexual men, though doesn’t say so.) Felix can’t wait to prove that her husband is doing Laura wrong. Without consulting her, he hires someone to follow and photograph Dean. Felix then proposes that he and Laura themselves start tailing him. In the meantime, Dean is doing his bit to increase Laura’s suspicions. On her birthday he’s away on business with Fifi (as he’s started calling Fiona). His unromantic present to his wife is a super-sophisticated household gadget but Felix’s spy has seen Dean shopping at Cartier. Felix urges Laura to check Dean’s phone texts. When she reluctantly does so, the absence of any texts at all is fishy in itself.
Sofia Coppola’s previous films, as a body of work, are hard to define summarily but she brought a strong personal style to each one. That’s missing from On the Rocks, which is reminiscent of Woody Allen through more than the New York setting. The set-up and the principals’ amateurish sleuthing bring to mind Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). The soundtrack includes a couple of standards that lend a mellow, nostalgic flavour to proceedings, harder to understand here than it is in Allen’s work. Vanessa, with her school-gate monologues, is the kind of facile comic makeweight to which he’ll sometimes resort. Coppola’s script is conspicuously unlike Allen, though, in virtually ignoring the Freudian implications of Laura and Felix’s relationship, and the latter’s attitude towards his son-in-law. ‘Is there any woman you won’t hit on?’ Laura asks Felix when he flirts with a waitress in the restaurant where they’re lunching. Although he doesn’t reply, the answer seems to be yes, but only you (and presumably Laura’s younger sisters). While candid about his own philandering, Felix behaves as if compelled to rescue his daughter from the treacherous man who took her from her father. Of course Coppola doesn’t have to psychoanalyse Felix or Laura but she does need to suggest why this bright, professionally successful woman complies feebly and repeatedly with her father’s increasingly outrageous instructions – and Coppola ignores this, too.
There are bits of enjoyably broad comedy in On the Rocks, as when Felix is stopped by a police patrol as his car careers through New York in pursuit of the cab containing Dean and Fiona. The exceedingly well-connected Felix gets out of this tight spot when it emerges he knows the father of the cop (Mike Keller) questioning him. When her father eventually drags Laura along to the Mexican coastal resort that’s the site of Dean’s latest business trip, it’s hard not to smile at Murray’s rendition of ‘Mexicali Rose’ on the beach there (though I tried not to: Felix’s behaviour was getting on my nerves by now). In films of recent years like St Vincent (2014) and The Dead Don’t Die (2019), Murray has seemed to be coasting. There’s real pleasure in watching him re-energised by Sofia Coppola’s writing. The role fits him like a glove but Murray’s line readings are still sharp and inventive. There are nice details, too, in the exchanges between him and Rashida Jones, like the refresher course in whistling that Felix gives Laura. But the basic premise doesn’t convince. When the cop stops Felix’s car, Laura is in the passenger seat – that’s her position throughout and what’s wrong with the story. Because Rashida Jones gives it a semblance of truth – she’s emotionally deft, often funny and her playing is highly naturalistic – you’re all the more aware of the unconvincing basis of the plot. Spotlighting the father puts his daughter in the shadows and makes On the Rocks frustrating – though it does also have the effect of increasing curiosity about the true state of Laura’s marriage.
It’s obvious how things will turn out. Laura is distracted at the end of Dean’s Skype call on her birthday; she misses that he says the remaining part of her gift is to follow. A reasonably attentive viewer won’t miss this, though; it’s no surprise, once Felix’s investigation has collapsed, when Dean takes Laura out to dinner and presents her with a Cartier box containing a watch (a meaningful choice: Felix had just given his daughter his own posh watch, which she’s loved since her childhood). Dean apologises for the delay – he didn’t realise engraving took so long. The film ends with him and Laura smiling at each other but Marlon Wayans’s playing is nicely ambiguous to the last. Except when Laura owns up to doubting him and he’s rather pompously outraged, Dean is unfailingly genial to all concerned. He’s an adoring father but, despite his smiles and cuddles, a mechanical husband and lover. There never is an explanation of why a go-getting entrepreneur hasn’t a single text on his phone. Perhaps Laura’s limited resistance to her father’s crazy schemes signifies that she knows her marriage is on the rocks. More probably, however, Sofia Coppola keeps her heroine quiet so that her muse stays in charge of the conversation.
8 October 2020
