Sofia Coppola’s “On The Rocks” is a cathartic diary about the impacts of fathers on daughters. It’s beautiful, affecting, magical and makes me well up many weeks after watching.
Rashida Jones and Marlon Wayans play a happily married couple with a family and busy life. When she feels like there’s something amiss, she starts to fear that her husband is unfaithful and confides in her raconteur father (Bill Murray). Rather than dissuading her and providing comfort, the father convinces her that she’s right and creates a caper for the pair to catch Dean in the act.
Coppola is a filmmaker that has a real talent for colliding romance, glamour and fairytale into a sharp and affecting emotional reality. The opening scene is a wonder as the pair get married and tactically escape, enjoying their reprieve from the action to take stock of the euphoria of the moment with each other.
Coppola expresses the real magic of New York City here. There’s something intangible and indescribable about the effect the city can have on you. The snow slicked streets, the neon reflective mirror maze – Coppola shoots New York in a way that registers at the frequency of seeing it for a first time. The creative forces, the defining cultural artefacts of our time, all reverberate through this space and in a split second, you can feel overwhelmed and wholly embraced.
From that dizzying unreality, Jones’ character comes crashing back to reality – lonely nights flicking through internal and never-ending checklists to keep the family engine rolling. She is sapped of her creative energy and there’s an obvious deficit in the increased role vacated in her husband’s absence.
Rashida Jones is the perfect vessel for the character Laura. She’s got the industry miles, in front of and behind the camera and makes her feels like she is someone who is impossible to bullshit. She knows how the sausage is made. As Laura, she’s experienced and acclaimed in her profession as a writer (one assumes).
Coppola is careful and patient in showing the drain from the family life alongside her creative pursuits. Jones is so great at showing the toll of the chaotic school drop off, the taxing wait in school lines with over-sharing mothers like Vanessa (a suitably hilarious Jenny Slate).
There are several times where Laura has fastidiously prepared her creative space to be ready for the muse to strike. The right light, the beautiful aspect, the hum of the city below.. and yet the keys on her laptop keyboard are dormant. Day after day, hour after hour. That nothingness makes the creative in all of us cringe. It’s in this deafening void that those fears begin to plague you.
Marlon Wayans is such a surprise packet as Dean. Wayans, an under-utilised dramatic actor, finds the perfect role to commute people from his often farcical other efforts. Here Wayans is charming, attractive, sweet around the family, yet his samurai physical instincts create awkward moments and crystallise Laura’s feelings that something isn’t right.
Enter Bill Murray’s Felix, a perfect figure to get carried away with. The world that Felix lives in is not real. A wealthy art broker, enduring flirtatious bachelor and party boy – his longest relationship is with the art that makes his commerce. Felix is also a very relatable deficient, boomer. These kind of characters are the ‘do as I do and not as I say’ figures that have shaped multigenerational Gen-Xers and elder millennials. Those spawned by the boomers have often used them as a guide of how not to be.
Laura and Felix’s connection is perfect in transient doses. When he returns to visit his grandchildren for special occasions or to see her celebrate birthday milestones – the relationship has the right portion control. In these circumstances, his flaws are an amusement. Coppola’s brilliance as a screenwriter is on show as she’s distributing the revelations of what Dean has been up to in tandem with Laura and Felix’s increased tension as a result of their proximity. The underlying emotional toil in his years of absence and the pain he caused her mother that starts to penetrate through the haze of this caper the longer that they’re around one another.
Early on in the film, there’s a line playing over a black screen. It’s Murray’s Felix telling his daughter Laura in her early life – ‘Don’t give your heart to any boys…except me.’ It’s a typical reflex, a possession that fathers must unburden themselves of as their little girls grow into women. Felix’s words, thanks to the emotion in Murray’s voice, load it with an additional dose of melancholy. Laura and Dean’s beautiful girls, bursting with love and the harmony of their family stand as a reminder of the potential collateral damage that Laura lives with.
In so many ways “On The Rocks” is a story of reclaiming lost love. The love between a father and daughter, love perceived lost in the bustle of an ambitious self-made life. “On the Rocks” is a delightful, emotional time-bomb.
