Seventeen years have passed since Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray joined forces to create Lost in Translation, the 2003 hipster classic for which both director and star received Academy Award nominations. Though the pair’s newest collaboration, On the Rocks, can’t quite reach the same high notes, audiences who manage to stumble upon it will find much to enjoy.
Like their previous effort, Coppola and Murray’s latest matches the actor with a far younger ingenue, a move that both accentuates Murray’s trademark drollness and casts his intricately sculpted face in relief. Playing alongside the older man as confidante, pupil, and partner in minor crime is Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation), whose low-key beauty aligns well with a story that sees her writhing in romantic distress. Jones’s Laura is an affluent New York writer and mother of two just entering the doldrums of early middle age. When her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), begins to behave suspiciously, Laura reluctantly enlists her father, Felix (Murray), to help uncover the man’s infidelity.
As its plot suggests, On the Rocks is perhaps best understood as a buddy movie, a series of vignettes given dramatic power by the interplay of dissonant personalities. Tailing Dean around a gorgeously photographed Manhattan, Laura and Felix bicker about birthday celebrations, parenting, and the nuances of human sexuality. (“Males are forced to fight, to dominate, and to impregnate all females,” Felix asserts in one of many odes on the theme.) Complicating Laura’s response to her own crisis is the fact that her father has himself lived as an adulterer and cad. (“You weren’t even discreet,” she protests in a poignant scene.) Though the two characters obviously enjoy one another’s company, the film wisely concedes that the past can throw a long shadow on the present. This is a movie about unfaithfulness, as its narrative arc makes clear, but the question of which betrayal is at the heart of Laura’s malaise is not so easily answered.
Among the many achievements of Coppola’s new film is its success in eliciting the best Murray performance since 2014’s Olive Kitteridge, a production that made greater use of the actor’s inborn sadness than of his charm. Here, delightfully, that formula is reversed. As the raffish globe-trotter Felix, an art dealer with a woman in every port, Murray is so effortlessly appealing that the seas of contemporary life simply part before him. Found watching Breaking Bad with his elementary-age grandchildren, Felix receives no punishment beyond an eye roll from his daughter. Caught ogling ballerinas, he blames evolution and changes the subject. In a scene certain to make the “white privilege” crowd howl, Felix talks himself out of a speeding ticket before zipping away in his cherry-red convertible. But as elsewhere in a movie that features but makes no comment about an interracial marriage, race isn’t the point. Murray’s extraordinary cool is.
So entertaining are Murray’s line readings and Easter Island stare, in fact, that Jones is consistently outclassed despite being a comedic actress of some skill. As Jones demonstrated on both Parks and Recreation and The Office, her greatest strength is an ability to convey exasperation tinged with vulnerability, an aptitude that should have fit her perfectly to the role of a likable woman scorned. It is perhaps surprising, then, that while Jones gets the little things right — Laura’s neurotic desk-tidying during an abortive writing session, for instance — she struggles to make her marital discord interesting. To be sure, the character’s problems are mostly First World. (“I should have never sold a book before writing it,” she complains in a line that had me reaching for a bottle of pills.) But an emotion as universal as jealously ought to gush from the screen in all of its fascinating, tempestuous specificity.
That it doesn’t in the case of On the Rocks is the fault not only of Jones’s overly cautious performance but of the bind in which Coppola the screenwriter has placed Coppola the director. Because Dean’s behavior really is shifty — see, for example, the hesitance with which he loans Laura his cellphone — the movie can’t commit to its notion that Freudian transference is warping our heroine’s perceptions. But it is simultaneously true that the film’s dramatic arc requires Laura’s expectations to be upended. The result is a picture that wears its adultery subplot poorly. A contrivance designed to thrust Laura and Felix together ends up feeling precisely like what it is. We can see through the movie’s skin to its creaking bones.
None of this is to say, of course, that On the Rocks is without serious pleasures. Chief among these is the excellent work done by Murray, but the film also boasts a political perspective that is increasingly rare in U.S. cinema. Not for Coppola are the “1%” mere villains to be skewered or sinners in need of atonement. Instead, the director proceeds as if the Manhattan of the very rich is a noteworthy thread in the tapestry of existence. Predictably, this has led to grumbling in some quarters: The Slate headline “What Is the Bougiest Status Symbol in Sofia Coppola’s New Movie?” is a masterpiece of click-bait condescension. My own guess, however, is that audiences who have yet to transform themselves into woke automatons will rather enjoy the choice.
Indeed, the only substantial problem that attends On the Rocks is the restrictedness of its distribution. As is now the way of things, Coppola’s new film has migrated to a streaming service after a limited run in select theaters. That the service in question is the relatively obscure Apple+ only compounds the difficulty. Though not exactly a tragedy, this contemporary dispensation is nevertheless a shame. A significant U.S. filmmaker has paired with a movie star at the peak of his powers. How many viewers will ever know or care?
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
