At the Bling Ring advance screening I attended, press members were given samples of Sofia Mini wine, possibly because the presenters suspected we could write the same review for both the 187-milliliter can and the 90-minute movie: short, dry, classy, fun, forgettable.
Sofia Coppola’s new film is based on the true story of the Los Angeles teenagers who stole $3 million worth of property from the homes of multiple celebrities in 2008 and 2009. The most obvious way to treat this material would be as broad satire. Coppola, though, signals her approach to the material by selecting for her title the classiest nickname given to the criminals—who were also known by such monikers as “the Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch,” a title the Farrelly Brothers might have chosen for their adaptation of this story.
Coppola’s most notable characteristic as a filmmaker is restraint, a patient eye for disciplined observation that gives her movies a rich flavor but also renders them liable to run into the ground when there isn’t enough plot and conflict to keep things moving along. Such was the case with her previous film Somewhere, an interminable drag where even the (cigarette) drags were…interminable. In contrast, The Bling Ring percolates along nicely, generating a perfectly polite amount of tension with the escalating hubris of the characters’ crimes and the mildly developing relationship between the two ringleaders.
I say “mildly” because, for a screenplay (written by Coppola) that would seem to have the relationship between Rebecca (Katie Chang) and Marc (Israel Broussard) at its center, The Bling Ring doesn’t actually tell us very much about what goes on between the two of them. They don’t seem to be hooking up (Marc enjoys wearing Paris Hilton’s heels around the house, which might or might not be an indication of anything else regarding his character), but do Marc and Rebecca ever even have conversations that aren’t about stealing from celebrities? Coppola seems to think we can figure that out for ourselves.
The obvious points of comparison here are Spring Breakers, this year’s previous indie movie about mainstream girls gone wild; and Bling Ring, a 2011 Lifetime movie about the same events depicted in Coppola’s film. Whereas Coppola regards her characters with a distant mix of affection and condescension, Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers) and Michael Lembeck (Lifetime’s Bling Ring) get down and dirty with their wayward teens. If the earlier two movies are guiltier pleasures, they’re also more compelling because they’re not afraid to tempt the audience to identify with their characters. Coppola keeps us at a safe remove, so we never care very much about what actually happens to the characters.
In that sense, watching The Bling Ring is not unlike people-watching at, say, a high-end mall: it’s not particularly dramatic, but it’s fairly entertaining. Coppola has a nice way with her characters’ conversations; though these actors are playing stereotypes, they keep it low-key and believable. Best of all—the best part of the movie, really—is Emma Watson’s performance as Nicki, one of the co-conspirators. Watson plays more broadly than any of her costars, which might distract if her performance wasn’t so rich in detail and nuance that the only distraction is how neatly she slips the entire movie into her designer handbag and quietly steals away with it.
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