Mother. Somewhere.

Quick thoughts about two 2010 releases that I was eagerly anticipating (although I missed the first one when it was initially released in theaters, way back in March):

The delirious South Korean crime thriller/comedy/psychodrama Mother, directed by Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder), is striking in its genre-bending unpredictability, but unfortunately it's less successful at evoking audience sympathy for its two main characters. The movie is about the murder of a young girl in a seemingly tranquil small town (you know, the kind of place where murder is unimaginable yet, when it happens, is latched on to with scandal-hungry sordidness). The main suspect is a mentally-challenged twenty-something man who was last seen drunkenly pursuing the soon-to-be-victim; a golf ball was even found next to her corpse with his name written upon it. Following his imprisonment and the mishandling of the case by a detective and a defense attorney (the first man is sincere and kindly, but has no choice but to close the case; the lawyer is surreally self-indulgent and sleazy, advising his clients in the Lynchian VIP-room of a restaurant), the man's eerily dedicated mother decides to pursue her own investigation. Convinced of her son's innocence, she uncovers what appears to be a torrid plot revolving around the victim's sexual promiscuity and incriminating photos on a missing cell phone.

Repeatedly, we are reminded that mother and son literally slept together—though he's an adult, they continue to share a twin-sized mattress on the floor of their home. They may figuratively sleep together as well: incest is suggested, but never clearly exposited. Broadly, the movie is about the horrific lengths that a mother will go to to protect her son, ultimately (perhaps) deluding and damning herself in the process. Thus, without giving anything away, the movie's most shocking scene: denying the obvious, committing unspeakable acts in order to protect a lie.

Although I haven't seen Bong's critically-acclaimed Memories of Murder, I found his monster movie The Host (2007) to be one of the cleverest takeoffs on Hollywood cliché over the last decade. In a year that also included 28 Weeks Later and Hot Fuzz, The Host may have been the best of all three at smuggling an embittered mockery of American brashness and bombast into the trappings of a rote genre picture. (In The Host, the American military steps in to help destroy the river monster that they created in the first place, by dumping some toxic chemicals into Seoul's waterways; predictably, in trying to eradicate the beast, the US Army ends up destroying the city and killing much of the civilian populace in the process.) The Host never really asks us to take its premise all that seriously, which is maybe why I find its political outrage so subversive and amusing.

But we really should take Mother seriously: the movie features characters who are meant to resemble real people, and the lengths that they go to to protect themselves and one another instill irrevocable psychological damage. At times, the movie is successful at evoking the fraught relationship between mother and son, and at making us fully experience the trauma undergone by the titular character—the reappearance of a small case for acupuncture needles towards the end of the film, for example, speaks volumes about what has been lost by and discovered about both mother and son. But at other times, Bong's deftness at manipulating genre and creating gorgeous stylistic tricks (the flashback to one character's perception of the murder is astoundingly, nightmarishly beautiful) obscure what is at stake emotionally. The images of dancing which open and close the film are meant to convey the main character's desperate attempt to free her soul of the violent burdens with which it is now laden, but they come off as little more than clever bookends. Also, some of the small-town characters embroiled in the central web of sex and lies receive a level of absurd mockery that's a little too close to the Coen Brothers. But these are slight detractors from a unique, beautiful, and striking film that abounds in intriguing manipulations of style, genre, narrative, and theme.



Meanwhile, Sofia Coppola's recently-released Somewhere, which won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, fares a little less well. I absolutely consider myself a fan of the director's: I was put off a bit by Lost in Translation's shades of condescension and insularity, but both The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette are sublime, painful immersions in longing and uncertainty. Somewhere is as gorgeous as any of her films to date (it's filmed by Harris Savides, one of the best cinematographers working today), but its expressions of aimlessness and emptiness often reflect negatively upon the movie itself. The story of a successful (but, one senses, quickly-fading) movie star who involuntarily becomes reacquainted with his young daughter, Somewhere follows a very distinct narrative pattern: a first act of almost-silent, dreary wandering; a sweet middle portion observing the growing intimacy between father and daughter; and a surprisingly overt final portion in which the main character realizes his hollowness and tries to rediscover himself.

Somewhere is worth watching for the naturalistic performances of Stephen Dorff (perfectly cast) and Elle Fanning, in particular their interaction with each other. With seeming effortlessness, they portray a precise relationship: there is fondness, closeness, to begin with, but as the movie progresses the familial bond becomes stronger, more unbreakable, in shaded ways. Coppola has often excelled at conveying these little moments between human beings, hinting at their intimacy but hesitant to spell it out for us, apparently respecting her characters too much to intrude upon their most private moments. It's especially impressive here, maybe because, for almost the entire movie, we are immersed in the private sphere that only these two characters share with each other.

But the insularity and condescension that I sensed in Lost in Translation resurface here (to an extent), and for the first time I think the label of “aimless” is a detractor for a Sofia Coppola movie. I have to give away a slight spoiler here: essentially, the last third of the movie consists of this world-famous movie star realizing that the glitz and glamour of Hollywood are suffocating a shell of a man who doesn't know himself. In order to find himself again, he simply begins driving, as far away as possible, and the movie ends hopefully (but ambiguously) with him parking at the side of the road, the cornfields of some Midwestern state in the distance, and simply walking. The idea, of course, is that this despondent movie star finds himself by abandoning his celebrity and becoming, again, one of the “common folk.” Beyond how cliched and naïve this idea is, it also seems downright pandering—that one can find solace in the folksy rolling plains of flyover country, where people are good and down-to-earth and have their shit together. This is especially weird since, for some of the film, Coppola's point is that these idolized movie stars experience the mundaneness and glum routine and slight identity crises that we all go through—that we're not so different after all. This itself is an obvious point, but well-conveyed by the half-seedy, half-privileged hotel in which the main character and other Hollywood celebs reside. (A cameo by Benicio del Toro would seem unbearably pretentious if it didn't take place in an elevator that was covered in a layer of its own fluorescent filth.) That Somewhere tries to convey this we-are-all-the-same idea, then negates it by marking the main character's epiphany by abandoning one lifestyle and fleeing for another, betrays the movie's (and maybe Coppola's) ideological confusion. All of her movies so far are about privileged people, and one shouldn't fault her for making movies about her own upbringing and the lifestyle she has experienced; but only Lost in Translation and Somewhere, in my opinion, foolishly suggest an innate rift between a life of privilege and the lives of the “common folk.”

In addition to this questionable attitude towards celebrity and normalcy, Somewhere is often adrift in its own uncertainty and aimlessness, to a detriment. Again, all of Coppola's movies are about this aimlessness to an extent, but before Somewhere they had still seemed centered around a fairly consistent central theme or unifying idea (sexual longing and repression, geographical displacement, conjunctions between disparate historical eras, and so on). In Somewhere, we know so little about the relationship between father and daughter as it had existed before the movie started that sometimes we simply have to take the movie's word that they need an emotional reconciliation. Briefly, during a (temporary?) farewell late in the movie, the main character of Johnny Marco apologizes to his daughter for not having been around during her childhood; without this line of dialogue, we would have had no inkling of the role that he had played earlier in her life. This evasive approach is, of course, intentional, but Coppola could have included some snippets of dialogue, some telling actions, some tiny behaviors and allusions which could have alluded to Johnny's earlier absence—especially since Coppola has often conveyed these slight, suggestive moments so perfectly.

This is true, too, of Johnny's emotional breakdown late in the film, which culminates in a drunken, tearful telephone call to his ex-wife (and his daughter's mother). During this call, he claims that he is not even a person—that he's nothing. Of course we infer that these feelings of insignificance stem from his awareness of his failure as a father, but the extent of this emotional collapse had been dismissed throughout almost the entire movie up to this point. At worst, we conclude that it's a sudden third-act gimmick in order to make possible the movie's ambiguous ending; at best, we assume that Coppola's intended approach of subtlety, evasion, suggestion, and implicitness has backfired, to the point where we suddenly realize we don't know the main character at all. (Maybe that's the point, but it doesn't work for such a focused character study.) I love movies that coast along on suggestion and allusion, but they must still offer something (in character, in theme, in style) to latch on to. Somewhere offers this to a certain extent, but maybe, unfortunately, less successfully than The Virgin Suicides or Marie Antoinette.