Somewhere

For the first three minutes a Ferrari revs past the static camera, going round a small dirt track five times, its revs fading and reappearing. The sports car stops, a man gets out and stands still. Then we see title credits for Somewhere, for a minute. The first scene shows a drunk man falling down a staircase during a party at Hollywood's showbizzy Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Blvd. Cut to his bedroom where a pair of long-legged long-haired blonde twins in red high heels, red g-strings and tiny nursing jackets are pole-dancing to heavy pop music while the man falls asleep. Seven minutes has past, and an audience knows that this is a film about an aimless, rich man needing relief from ennui. Yawn? Switch-off time?

It would have been, but a film written and directed by Sofia Coppola deserves more time to grow on its audience, just as her Oscar-winning Lost in Translation did and her Marie Antoinette demanded. She won the National Board of Review's 2010 Special Achievement Award for writing, producing and directing Somewhere, and it also won her the Golden Lion at the same year's Venice Film Festival - beating off Black Swan, among various other better-rated entries, for the unanimous decision from the jury chaired by Quentin Tarantino (time for upraised eyebrows). Even more commanding was the Rotten Tomatoes scoreboard: 143 favourable reviews at the latest count, giving it a high 76% rating.

Back to the movie, at the seven-minute mark. What happens to the man? We learn he's Johnny Marco, a depressed movie star (played as a reticent Depp type, poorly, by B-lister Stephen World Trade Center Dorff) who leads an off-screen life of pill-popping, booze and casual sex. His 11-year-old daughter is dropped off at the hotel by his ex-spouse, and the movie brightens up because pre-teen Elle Phoebe in Wonderland Fanning (sister of Dakota) has eyes that can invest value if not meaning into a nothing like Coppola's scenario. Father and daughter bond, and travel to Italy for a mildly comic movie promotion (cue deluxe Milan hotel) before returning for a few jaunts in a helicopter and casino.

The girl goes somewhere, and Coppola ran out of ideas. The actor is left to his own despairing devices. He leaves us too, after stopping the Ferrari beside a desert and starting to walk down the road (to somewhere?), toward the camera, with a momentary smile. This is what connoisseurs call bookending, I'm told: starting and ending a movie with a motif. Usually, I'd guess there will be a book between bookends, even Ferraris.

Luckily, Coppola only spun out her flimsy semi-autobiographical thoughts about ennui and celebrity for 90 minutes. If anyone other than a child of a Hollywood icon made this self-indulgent boring home-style movie, full of silences and self-pity, signifying nothing to real film-goers, they'd be scorned. But surely 142 critics, the NBR and Tarantino can't all be wrong ...