In “On the Rocks,” Sofia Coppola and her cast get lost in privilege
With “On the Rocks,” Sofia Coppola gives us just the sort of myopic, unaware tale that she’s always been mistakenly accused of making.
It happens all the time in pop culture, primarily in popular music, when, after years of producing smarter than average pop that might fly slightly over the heads of critics, an artist comes out with a collection that is just as shallow as their worst critics have always claimed. And so, with her latest film, Sofia Coppola has invested a great deal of artistic resources to come up with a tale of privileged New Yorkers that is so myopic and out of touch, it doesn’t reflect any version of reality at all. It’s an alternate reality, but not the one we all need right now.
Let’s face it, this movie has me writing opening lines that are so long I can’t even follow them myself. Perhaps it is because I’ve always admired Sofia Coppola’s work. Even when others bashed films like Marie Antoinette and Bling Ring for seeming to not grasp the greater context of their stories, I admired them for exactly that quality. They seemed to intentionally show us lives without a moment of consequence, but Coppola seemed to trust us to bring that to the film ourselves. There’s a limit to how far this narrative frame can be stretched. Even The Beguiled literally begins and ends at the gates to the…
