By lingering just a little too long on these vapid kids and their late night activities, a certain emotional emptiness emerges. Yet, all the scenes play long and real, pausing for awkward silences and rarely rattling through story beats for the sake of screenplay structure. Coppola uses her cameras to flaunt the ritzy lifestyles of the rich and famous and the illicit thrills her characters get out of merely pretending to live the lives they idolize. This concept might make for satire, but the fact that it’s real adds a layer of tragedy. Even when what happens in the frame might be humorous, she shoots the material rather beautifully in the style an emotionally detached art film.
There’s a serious and relevant core to The Bling Ring that Coppola never ignores. She’s a comedy highlight along with the dependently hilarious Leslie Mann, but thankfully no one else in the cast leans on the comedy button too hard. Her character is a hilarious airhead with skewed values and wonderful way with misplaced words. Emma Watson might take a surprisingly small role, but it is the best in the film. The cast she’s collected are all perfect at presenting this current brand of lost youth and even if there is an occasional wooden line reading, it indeliberately fits the characters’ vacant nature. None of that is lost on Coppola whose film is never heavy handed in delivering it’s message, but gets it all across clearly by depicting the story honestly. The fact that it’s created a generation of kids who idolize someone like Paris Hilton is pathetic and the fact that the media would turn similar kids who rob her into brief celebrities themselves is even more disturbing.
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In an age of TMZ stalker television and celebrity bloggers like Perez Hilton, the collective American obsession with treating TV fame like royalty has spiraled completely out of control. The group rob the likes of Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, and Megan Fox, before inevitably getting caught and serving time for being celebrity obsessed morons. The celeb heisting becomes a hobby for the duo and soon they add a small gang of fellow celeb-robbers including a hilarious bubble-headed teen (Emma Watson) whose mother (Leslie Mann) home schools her and her sisters based on the The Secret. After finding out Paris Hilton will be out of town for some predictably stupid reason, they track down her address on Google Maps and break into her mansion to steal some stuff and ogle her expensive lifestyle. They bound over a shared love of casual theft and celebrity gossip, starting small with petty crimes like taking cash out of unlocked cars and using it for Bell Air shopping sprees. He soon makes friends and becomes infatuated with the empty beauty Rebecca (Katie Chang).
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From there, we flashback and are introduced to Marc (Israel Broussard), a troubled teen whose sent to an LA dropout high school full of kids who got there only after expulsion. The film opens with a nightfall robbery as a collection of teens quietly break into a celebrity’s home and fill up their Hello Kitty backpacks and Prada purses with clothing, jewelry, and cash from an unnamed celebrity who may or may not even notice it’s gone. Only Coppola could take that material and not only make it as funny as should be, but craft it into as poignant a study of America’s poisonous celebrity obsession as it needs to be.
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It makes sense, if someone was going to make a movie about the bizarre true story of a handful of celebrity obsessed and over-privileged LA high school kids who broke into trash celebrity homes to steal their clothes thanks to Google and a perverse sense of entitlement, it should be her. Thankfully, her latest effort The Bling Ring falls comfortably into the first category. When it’s off, her movies can feel as dull as their empty headed/hearted protagonists ( Marie Antoinette). When she’s on her A-game that material can be fascinating and strike an unexpectedly universal chord ( Lost in Translation). Her films always tend to be about the secret pain of privileged people whose decadent lifestyle is matched only by the emptiness at their cores. Sofia Coppola is an undeniably talented filmmaker, but she’s one with a fairly limited milieu.
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