On The Rocks

Synopsis: Laura (Rashida Jones) suspects that her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), is cheating on her with his work colleague Fiona (Jessica Henwick). In a moment of weakness she confides in her father, Felix (Bill Murray), who insists against her wishes on getting to the bottom of things.

Ever since her outstanding 1999 directorial debut The Virgin Suicides Sofia Coppola has been disappointing us in various ways. Her latest film, On the Rocks, a Woody Allenesque comedy for New Millennials continues the tradition.

Right from the beginning as Laura lies in bed alone watching standup comic Chris Rock on television doing a bit about marriage and the death of Eros Coppola’s film raises alarm bells. Surely, you hope, she can’t be announcing the theme of her film so blatantly? It’s not really a spoiler but, yes, she is.

She then introduces us to her heroine. Laura is a published author, her African-American husband Dean has some kind of booming social media advertising business, her father is a former up-market art dealer, she has two cute young girls (think of the child in Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” video), and she lives in a comfortable warehouse conversion apartment in Manhattan.  But Laura has writer’s block, her life has descended into child-centreed routine and she feels physically and emotionally neglected. It’s familiar and potentially rich material, and the title and Michael Nyman’s The Draughtsman’s Contract-like music suggests a wittily satirical portrait of modern-day New York in the offing. But by the time Bill Murray's Dad arrives on the scene in his chauffeur-driven car it is evident that any sharp edges have been well and truly rounded off.   

For a start Coppola squanders the triangulation she has set up between Laura, Dean and her father by writing Dean largely out of the picture. In most of his scenes Coppola has him leaving the narrative and when he is around he is a kind of polite non-presence, an ideal housemate perhaps but hardly the lover for whom Laura yearns.  It is a small jump to see Laura as the writer-director’s alter ego and Dean’s sidelining as a convenient means for Coppola to address her relationship with her own father. Indeed the film opens with a voice-over of Felix saying to Laura (presumably as a child) “even when you’re married, your heart will belong to me” or words to that effect (when in one late scene Felix orders Laura to embrace him despite her protestations one suspects that she protests too much). This implication is borne out by the film’s ending with its rather obvious Freudian resolution.

But even if On the Rocks is really about Laura’s relationship with her father Coppola keeps it all at arm’s length. Laura is a bland creature who does little in the narrative but go along with Felix and his antics. When late in the day she finally loses patience with him it is a welcome display of a to-that-point nearly entirely absent temperament (Coppola never tells us what Laura writes about. We see the cover of her book, which for some reason is in Italian, “Amici e Conoscenti" which I think means “Friends and Acquaintances”).

Which leaves us pretty much with Bill Murray an actor who has had a remarkably successful career with a relatively limited range that is yet-again on display.  O.K, a lot of people like Murray's sardonic schtick (this is his second starring role for Coppola after 2003's Lost in Translation) but it doesn't really stack up here. Felix is evidently supposed to be a lovable old reprobate but frankly his homespun philosophizing on male dominance and the difference between the sexes is more than a little tiresome. When Kevin Kline did something similar in The Extra Man (2010) it was amusing but he was playing a somewhat delusional, indigent snob who couldn’t even afford a pair of socks let alone deal in Hockneys and De Koonigs. And what kind of father tells his emotionally vulnerable daughter within minutes of seeing her that her bracelet is a legacy of a time when women were men’s property? Indeed what kind of adult daughter with a ready line in feminist encouragement to her own daughters forbears such nonsense? The supposed humour of this kind of banter feels forced, the reality being thatCoppola doesn't have Woody Allen's facility with the one-liner. But then, no-one has.

For the rest Coppola lards her story with all manner of self-congratulatory 'New Yorker' magazine-style  name-dropping references to the upper stratum of the Big Apple that she clearly knows well (her first credit as a scriptwriter was for the segment her father made for New York Stories in1989 with Allen and Martin Scorsese).

On the Rocks isn’t a bad film. Indeed it even has some nice moments such as Laura lying exhausted on her bed as a robot vacuum cleaner randomly bumps into the furniture, a tear falling in a martini glass while she and her Dad take pause at the 21 Club and so on. But overall On the Rocks comes across as an inconsequential film caught somewhere between comedy and drama, an unremarkable and at times silly story with under-developed characters, one that never delivers on its promise. And although it is absolutely no fault of Coppola's, as the film was shot prior to Covid-19 all the scenes of maskless people at parties and in bars only serve to emphasise its irrelevancy to anyone but the director herself.

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