With the 2010 Somewhere, Sofia Coppola wrote and directed a film that has more in common with the films of Olmi and Antonioni than with today’s serious pictures, which is to the good.
It has to do with a popular, recently divorced movie actor (Stephen Dorff) and his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning), the latter of whom fears she is losing her intimate connection with her mom and dad. This rattles Dorff. Fanning’s departure from him, and from the frivolous, vacuous film-industry world in which he lives, leaves the man sobbing over being a self-identified “nothing.” Somewhere eventually becomes a bit dull and would probably be better as a short. But it’s an astute film from an artist whose clear talent makes me regret that I declined to see The Bling Ring, her follow-up to Somewhere (albeit I did see, and enjoyed, Marie Antoniette).