Available on DVD: “Somewhere”

Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning in Somewhere

Somewhere is largely set in a hotel, so it’s perhaps no surprise that it’s a film about a form of vacancy.

The film centers on Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a handsome, fit and apparently conscience-free fellow whose sybaritic proclivities are fueled by his success as a Hollywood star (“actor”’ might be pushing it). Johnny drives fast cars, lives in a suite at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel, sleeps indiscriminately with beautiful women, and spends time airlessly, heedlessly, thoughtlessly.

His life is directed by a publicist who harangues him on the phone; his idleness is abetted by an old friend who hangs around playing video games; he converses mainly with waiters and parking valets and the strippers he hires to visit his rooms; he ducks paparazzi while he’s driving and spurned women much of the rest of the time.

The only thing that provides meaningful sensation for him is his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning), whom he sees on regular visits that he can’t remember in advance. But when the girl’s mother requires some unscheduled time alone, Johnny must find space to fit Cleo into his life. It’s not a burden: Cleo is apt, self-reliant, funny, sweet. But Johnny is a hollow man, and even as he seems capable of carrying the burden of his responsibilities, they might nevertheless be too much to ask of him.

The film is written and directed by Sofia Coppola, and it’s the third time she has centered a movie on a hotel, after Life Without Zoe, the chapter of 1989’s New York Stories which she co-wrote with her father, Francis Ford Coppola, and the Oscar-winning 2003 Lost in Translation (we might also count her 2006 Marie Antoinette if we allow that the palace at Versailles was a kind of luxury hotel, which isn’t a stretch).

Clearly Coppola has talent and ideas, and she’s also the kind of filmmaker who seems most comfortable imposing a particular aesthetic vision and structure on her work. Here, she and her visual team (especially cinematographer Harris Savides and editor Sarah Flack) have worked in the vein of Bela Tarr, Clair Denis and Gus Van Sant to create the film out of long, often still and empty, and often silent takes.

The result imparts something of the emptiness of Johnny’s existence and, if you’re not partial to either the fellow or the technique, might very well drive you up a tree. Not only do we wallow in Johnny’s vacancy, but we wallow in it for what sometimes seems almost comically long episodes: racing in circles around an automobile course, watching dead-eyed strippers gyrate, staring into dimly-lit space, and so on. There’s a dimension of voyeurism to this sort of filmmaking — we feel like we’re staring at someone who can’t see us — and it’s not clear that anything about Johnny merits the attention.

Dorff, an actor whose limits are rather unfortunately apt to project Johnny’s state of static non-being, springs to life, along with the rest of the film, with the arrival of Cleo. Like her older sister, Dakota, Fanning is a natural: funny, loose, intrepid and substantial (she can even figure skate, which is revealed in a slightly queasy scene that echoes, unfortunately, the performances of Johnny’s stripper friends). Her vim and spirit buoy the film just as Cleo’s presence is meant to open Johnny to more and truer feelings. But Coppola has written the fellow so thinly — by choice, but still — that it’s no surprise that an open Johnny is just as much a cipher as a shut one.