Bill Murray the charmer in Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks
It’s a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ when Bill Murray suspects his son-in-law of cheating on his daughter in this new dramedy.
On the Rocks (M)
Short, limited cinema release before streaming on Apple+
★★★★
The first words that are spoken in writer-director Sofia Coppola’s delicious new dramedy On the Rocks are pretty provocative. A father is lecturing his daughter: “Don’t give your heart to any boys. You’re mine till you get married. And then you’re still mine.” The unseen speaker, Felix (Bill Murray), is addressing his daughter Laura (Rashida Jones).
While the song I Fall in Love Too Easily is heard on the soundtrack, we see Laura at her wedding to Dean (Marlon Wayans); and it’s not so very long before they have produced a pair of delightful daughters. They live in a comfortable apartment in Manhattan; Dean has started his own business and travels a lot while Laura, a writer, is finding it difficult to be creative when two youngsters need so much of her attention.
Laura is also beginning to feel neglected because Dean is away so much, and a few things that occur, including finding a woman’s toiletry bag in his suitcase, sow the seeds of suspicion. Could he be cheating on her? When she meets his new assistant, Fiona (Jessica Henwick), who is English and attractive, her suspicions increase.
That’s when Felix shows up after a long time away. As played to perfection by Murray, he is cheerfully old-style — he’s a retired art dealer, he’s wealthy and he’s a charmer who travels in a chauffeur-driven car and knows the first names of every head waiter and hotel concierge worth knowing — not only in New York but also in Paris and London.
He flirts with younger women but not in a nasty way — at any rate, most of the women he chats with seem to appreciate his attentions. Talk about old school!
Fidelity was never something Felix was good at, so naturally he jumps to the conclusion that Laura is being betrayed and, with his active encouragement, she starts to believe it too.
Most women will probably cringe at the way Felix treats women. He refers to Laura as “the little girl” and “Shorty”, and he regularly pontificates on male-female relationships (“Monogamy and marriage are based on property”).
Yet few people, women or men, are immune to his charm. When he takes his daughter on a mission to spy on her husband he drives his own car, a noisy bright red convertible. He is stopped by police for speeding and he immediately sets out, as he puts it, to make new friends. Once the astonished cops have given him their full names, Felix realises that one of them is the son of an old friend and, after a chat about the policeman’s father and grandfather, Felix asks the astonished officers to help him with a push start. “It must be very nice to be you,” remarks his impressed daughter.
Laura challenges her father over his marital infidelities, but he’s always ready with an excuse or a comeback. In one strangely poignant scene he talks about a woman called Holly, who seems to have been the reason he left Laura’s mother. “She died this year,” he says. “I never thought I’d outlive her. I never got to say goodbye to her.”
On the Rocks is filled with beautifully scripted scenes such as this. Coppola successfully explores the small ways in which doubts and worries seep into Laura’s life. Jones and Murray — appearing in his second Coppola film after Lost in Translation (2003) — give perfectly pitched performances in a story that rings painfully true.
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Sputnik (MA15+)
Limited release (outside Victoria)
★★★½
As a teenager I was mesmerised by the BBC television serial The Quatermass Experiment (and the subsequent feature film version), a sci-fi thriller in which a manned rocket returns from space bringing with it an alien that has entered the body of one of the astronauts. Ridley Scott’s memorable Alien (1979) took the concept a stage further and there have been plenty of imitators since. One of the more effective is Sputnik, a Russian thriller set in 1983 when the Soviet Union still ruled.
A two-man capsule returns to Earth from space to land in the desert of Kazakhstan, but something has gone wrong. One cosmonaut is dead and the surviving man, Konstantin (Pyotr Fyodorov), can’t remember what happened. Led by the authoritarian Colonel Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk), a team of scientists examine the strange behaviour of the survivor and decide to recruit a specialist neuropsychiatrist. Dr Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) has a reputation for cutting corners and taking risks, but she’s not prepared for what she discovers when she examines the unfortunate Konstantin. Every night a slimy creature — a cross between a king cobra and a skeletal, long-limbed beastie — emerges from the unfortunate cosmonaut’s mouth to search for food. It seems to like human brains most of all. What happens next should not be revealed but suffice to say that the Cold War-era setting, when each side sought to gain military advantage over the other, adds a complex level to the problems and very real dangers faced by the scientists. In this respect the film bears some resemblance to Guillermo del Toro’s award-winning The Shape of Water (2017).
First-time director Egor Abramenko succeeds in creating a wonderfully chilly atmosphere, setting the action mostly in subdued light (perhaps to disguise the film’s modest budget) in ways that add to the tension. There’s a somewhat clunky subplot involving a crippled child in an orphanage in faraway Rostov, but this doesn’t detract too much from the generally efficient and suspenseful storytelling.
As the scientist who becomes attracted to her patient, Akinshina gives a strong performance while Bondarchuk (son of the famous Soviet-era actor-director Sergei Bondarchuk of War and Peace fame, and also one of the producers of Sputnik) gives a clever performance in which we’re never quite certain what to make of him. Overall the film is a superior example of Russian sci-fi and has been a tremendous success on its home turf. It should find plenty of new supporters among sci-fi buffs.
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The Last Black Man in San Francisco (M)
Dendy Newtown (NSW) only, other screens to follow
★★★
Highly regarded by US critics when it premiered at Sundance last year, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is something of an oddity: clearly a labour of love, it’s a film made by a white director — Joe Talbot — and stars his (black) friend, Jimmie Fails. The theme is that of gentrification.
Based on Fails’s life, the film is set in San Francisco’s Fillmore district which traditionally was a black area, though today its grand old houses have been renovated as luxury homes for well-to-do white Americans. Jimmie, who lives with his friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) with Mont’s blind grandfather — a cameo role for Danny Glover — is obsessed with the beautiful old house where he lived as a child. Discovering that the place is empty, he simply moves in.
The film’s modest narrative is weighed down by an excessive — two-hour — running time, but the theme of a man in love with a house, rather than with a human, certainly makes it unusual. There are, in fact, hardly any female characters involved, apart from brief appearances from Jimmie’s aunt and from his long-lost mother. It’s an independent film with a difference, but not as emotionally engaging as you’d really like it to be.
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