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On The Rocks (Sofia Coppola, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-10-26 02:49:42 +0000 UTC
This is an utterly trivial film, but it's also kind of weird. It's really a fairly standard midlife crisis film from a woman's point of view. We've seen a lot of these in recent years, where a wife feels left behind by her work-driven husband, losing her identity in motherhood. If we might be so bold as to postulate that many of Coppola's films are autobiographical in some oblique way, On The Rocks could even be read as a crypto-sequel to Lost in Translation, which itself was about a younger woman at a crossroads, aided by a much older male mentor played by Bill Murray.
It's also worth noting that Coppola casts Rashida Jones in the lead role as Laura. Like Coppola herself, Jones is a show business scion who grew up in the shadow of a larger-than-life creative father. That dynamic is replicated in the film, to an extent, by making Murray an independently wealthy art dealer, an entrenched figure in what we might call "the old New York."
Like Jones, the character of Laura is biracial. She is married to Dean (Marlon Wayans), a Black tech entrepreneur, and the couple have two kids. There is a notable racial excess to On The Rocks that threatens to make the film more interesting than it has a right to be. Laura is worried that Dean is having an affair. We don't learn very much about Dean until the very end of the film, but one might consider for a moment the latent racial dynamic in the relationship that might make him unhappy.
Because Laura's connection to Felix, her father, is her safe passage to white privilege, time and time again. He throws money at her problems, bolsters her anxieties about her self-image, and gets her out of scrapes that would most likely land Dean in jail, or worse. A scene in which Felix and Laura are pulled over by the NYPD is particularly egregious in this regard. It would be tone deaf anytime, but in 2020 it's kind of repugnant. Laura wryly responds, "it must be good to be you," not realizing that when she's with Felix, she is, by and large, just like him.
Coppola, naturally, fails to explore these questions, assuming that everything is equal within Manhattan's upper-class milieu. Leaving aside the fact that that's not where Felix belongs -- he's clearly a one-percenter -- On The Rocks is a blinkered rich-kid's idea of a bummer. To call it out of touch would imply that its maker was ever in touch to begin with.
