Getting Somewhere

Somewhere is not the sort of movie I would have chosen on my own. And I didn’t even truly appreciate it until I saw the interview with the director afterward, which is probably the first time any of those DVD extras has really done anything for me. It was almost as if I had spent an hour staring at some Jackson Pollock-type modern art painting that meant nothing to me until the artist stepped in to make it clear. And suddenly I got it.

I had expected more from a film that won so many prizes. By “more” I guess I mean more plot, more action, more tension and resolution. The movie chronicles the life of a wealthy and famous movie star who’s bored and unfulfilled. He calmly watches strippers dance for him for ten minutes or so (this is in real time in the film as well), he inhabits non-descript luxury apartments and attends parties he doesn’t seem to have much interest in. Hot women show up at his door for sex. The only thing he really seems to enjoy in life his daughter, who he has to share with an estranged ex-wife.

Sofia Coppola was trying to show the underside of the dazzling movie-stars life. Sometimes it’s quite boring, which I have to say was in many ways reflected in the movie. It literally wasn’t until the directors’ interview that it clicked for me, when she said she wanted the movie to feel something like a poem. At that point I realized that’s what it was.

And it immediately reminded me of  a book I’d once read called Songdogs, which was crafted in such artful prose that’s its general lack of coherent plot and slow-moving pace made it an almost literary counterpoint to Somewhere. My general literary impatience, much like the impatience in the rest of my life, left my friend JB surprised that I was so keen on it. I’ve had such fond memories of the book since I read it four of five years ago, mostly the scenes that the author painted and the constant unspoken tension between the protagonist and other characters including the protagonist’s father. The funny thing is that I could barely even remember much of the book’s plot, and in fact it took me quite some time to even remember the title or author. But there were things that really stuck with me. I remembered that it involved Ireland and San Francisco, and in reading the reviews more recently remembered that his father was photographer and that it also involved Mexico.

It was maybe a bizarre connection to make. Sometimes literature can do that for me. When it’s written in such a way that it feels like poetry, yet more accessible.
A mystery that you’re given some clues to rather than a blank canvas that you’re supposed to fill in with your own mind.

I guess if novels can be poetry, it shouldn’t surprise me that movies can too. I’m glad that in the end, I got Somewhere.