The Bling Ring review

                With her fifth film “The Bling Ring” director Sophia Coppola has attempted to approach a story by doing both what she has always done and what she has never done before. Like her other films, she furthers her exploration of young female protagonists who live in lavish worlds of wealth and celebrity. However, unlike Scarlett Johansson in “Lost in Translation”, Kirsten Dunst in “Marie Antoinette”, or Elle Fanning in “Somewhere”, the teens that occupy this movie aren’t the sad, longing, navel-gazing loners that she usually cyphers herself though—growing up as the daughter of famed director Francis Ford Coppola.

                While her past movies tended to explore and investigate emotionally tethered characters in interior-dwelling tone-scapes, this film uses that familiar point of view and sharpens it's edges to skewer the banality of the material obsessed, American, attention seeking, Facebook generation.

                Based on a recent true-crime incident of teenage delinquency, this movie recalls the story of a small group of Beverly Hills teenagers who broke into the homes of C-list celebrities and Hollywood debutants and made off with their cash, their jewelry, and their high-end fashion. What makes this story almost too hard to believe is that millionaires like Paris Hilton, Audrina Patrige, and Orlando Bloom left their homes unlocked, unguarded, and relatively unprotected. In fact, no glass was broke and no alarms were set off. To successfully commit these violations of privacy, the only tools this group needed were the twitter accounts of their targets, to know when they would be out, and Google maps to better understand the layout of their homes. And had they not been so cocky as to brag about it with their high school friends, they might have even gotten away with it.

                Katy Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson (aka Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger) and Taissa Farmiga play Rebecca, Marc, Nicki, Chloe, and Sam, the core group.  But it doesn’t matter that they are played by different people or even that they are separate characters. They are a hive mind; a collective conscious of the suburban frivolous. Together they become a strange order of pod-teenagers who are out to consume and appropriate what they see as attractive and important in the magazine-cover lifestyle and the famous-for-nothing paradigm they conform to.  Some of them are cold and calculating, some of them stupid and naïve and some of them are hilariously flakey, but none of them act like human beings. This becomes a difficult needle to thread for Coppola, as she is asking the audience to hang out with these unlikable and unsympathetic creatures for the entirety of the picture, without a single glimpse of heart or personality behind their fake, glitter lip-gloss smiles and their vacant, Dolce-sunglass stares. What’s more, she doesn’t editorialize on their lives or their morality. Instead, she simply observes their alien behaviors with the emotional distance of a nature documentary.

                Some might respond negatively to the film’s remote tone, the coded themes, and/or the actors' icy performances, but it's because of these exact qualities that I found “The Bling Ring” to be a refreshingly sharp and studied satire of a hyper-stylized version of America’s one-percent.

                Individual shots are framed and lit to look like fashion photography, in-store displays, and television advertising.  As the story progresses and the stakes get higher, the movie becomes more and more abstracted as her characters transition from eager teenagers trying on new clothes, to would-be models showcasing their goods, to finally becoming mannequins, empty of morals, feelings, or empathy. 

                With all of that said, this film is not humorless. In fact, while it explores the attitudes of these disconnected youths it reverses their absurdity back and gives the audience the opportunity to laugh at their irrationality. Watson in particular, along with Leslie Mann who plays her mother, really gets to deliver the screenplay’s best dialogue and together they embrace the love-to-hate quality of their characters.

                Around all the style, all the slow-mo, and all the bling, eventually what Sophia Coppola gets at with "The Bling Ring" is something like a feature length moving tableau or a narrative installation of images juxtaposed with ideas that relishes in the beauty of the Beverly Hills, gossip-stalking world, while at the same time repulsing at its excesses. What rises to the surface is well-acted, technically accomplished, darkly comic political statement about haves and have-lots. 

Grade: A –

Originally published in The Basic Alternative/Aug-2013