Pampered & Pretty

Somewhere

Directed by Sofia Coppola

Runtime: 98 min.

Little Fockers

Directed by Paul Weitz

Runtime: 98 min.

Sofia Coppola is the authentic Little Focker. As the child of a Hollywood mogul, she makes movies that pamper her own pamperedness. For example: Somewhere, the wan new drama about apathetic movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), who drags his teenage daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) with him to a press junket in Italy. It’s an illustration of how movie people use their children as appendages, exploiting parenthood without truly connecting with their own offspring. Coincidentally, Little Fockers demonstrates the same exploitation, catching up with Greg Focker (Ben Stiller), now the father of twins, as a pretext to continue one of the lamest franchises in contemporary Hollywood history.

The Focker twins Henry (Colin Baiocchi) and Samantha (Daisy Tahan) don’t matter much to the story where Greg and his father-in-law Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) once again clash egos. The willingness of Little Fockers’ writers and directors to take dumb advantage of family life matches Sofia Coppola’s pretense that her own father issues are again (the fourth time around) worthwhile movie content.

No better than a mirthless Hollywood hack, Coppola sentimentalizes her family dilemma in order to pose as an artiste. Her navel-gazings are a boutique indie franchise.

It takes enormous nerve to recycle the same psychotherapy babble as delicate feeling, yet it must be admitted that Coppola has a devious knack: She spreads her own anomie evenly between daddy and daughter character—the Lost in Translation formula. When Johnny sits in his Chauteau Marmont suite watching hired blond twins do their stripper pole act, it’s the same alienation that Cleo exhibits when she ice-skates, a budding lithe young woman. Coppola’s big theme: Boredom Is A Family Trait. Pop culture critic Richard Torres explained Sofia’s motivation: “If you think my daddy’s films are boring, watch this!” The combination of privilege and temerity obviously appeals to the pessimism of trust-fund hipsters who think their own isolation and parental competition are a profound condition.

No wonder Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture flopped. Dunham’s story about a Manhattan artist’s foundering postgraduate daughter (played by Dunham herself) exposed the waywardness of privileged kids and surpassed all Coppola’s fatuous self-indulgence by satirizing it. Admitting its pettiness, Dunham also found its teensy but real universality. Not Coppola. Her filmmaking penchant favors remoteness and repetition: The desert race track that Johnny circles continuously and purposelessly in his roadster in the film’s symbolic-enigmatic opening; the nubile pole-dancers’ act (featuring Sofia’s signature admiration of the female rump, doubled); the estranged marriages; and the anonymous hotel living.

Coppola has a limited range of experience—Italy, hotels, luxury—that most people might envy and then mistakenly enjoy. The Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan is a Continental dream on the order of the Abu Dhabi hotel in Sex and the City 2. As a setting, it teases deluxe consumption while pouting about it. There’s a parallel to this in Little Fockers, when Greg throws a lavish birthday party for his twin toddlers; it’s where the grandparents show up and display their own infantile tediousness. The scene of De Niro and Stiller diving into a balloon pit while the Jaws music theme lampoons their conflict has to be a mutual nadir for two totally opposite careers.

Like Somewhere, Little Fockers is essentially about careerism. It offers the unrewarding spectacle of Stiller, De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand (as grandparents Bernie and Roz Focker) and Jessica Alba, in a thankless sexpot cameo, simply picking up paychecks. Little Fockers, like Somewhere, goes nowhere.