[Film Review] On the Rocks (2020) 5.9/10

First thing first, let me finally get it off my chest, what has on earth happened to Oscar-nominated director Sofia Coppola’s once-rosy career? After contentiously copping Venice’s Golden Lion with SOMEWHERE (2010), a film many finds meritless of such honor, her subsequent offers are met with muted reception at best, even Cannes’ BEST DIRECTOR trophy for THE BEGUILED (2017) doesn’t amount to nothing. Now her seventh feature ON THE ROCKS arrives, reunited with Bill Murray, and further surveys the “father issue” extended from SOMEWHERE, does that bode well?

Unfortunately, the movie will not alter much of her stagnated status quo, it is well-shot (those landscape and cityscape shots are too enthralling for the movie's tepid story), but the whole fuss about a woman’s suspicion of her husband’s infidelity unfolds without any modicum of novelty. Rashida Jones plays Laura Keane, wife of Dean (Wayans), an entrepreneurial upstart, they have two young girls and Laura is cornily stuck in a writer’s block, as her time is chiefly allotted to child-rearing, while Dean frequently hops on business trips as the high-flying breadwinner.

Reaching 40, Laura becomes insecure of her sex appeal and suspects Dean is having an affair with his younger, voluptuous co-worker Fiona (Henwick), unwisely, instead of leveling with her significant other of her sixth sense-driven conjuncture (that would end the movie in 2 minutes), she resorts to the counsel from her father Felix (Murray), a hardened playboy, who left her mother years ago and cast unsolved scars in its aftermath. So the initial cutesy father-daughter binding episodes soon devolve into the dual play of Felix’s faintly haughty mansplaining and Laura’s incessant self-denial with a mild protestation of vexation, which will tediously run out of stream down the line.

The rub is, neither Laura or Felix is an interesting character to begin with, which comes quite a shock to Yours Truly, because Coppola used to be rather adroit in molding her characters with nuances and niceties. But here, all three chief players are showered in the pervasive uppity New York chic, which cannot abate the triteness derived from the facts that they are so clichéd and oblivious from the rest of the world, for instance, Laura cannot even sustain small talk with an elderly woman in a posh party she attends with Felix, and can barely bear with a fellow quibbling mother (Slate).

When Laura finally gives Felix a piece of her mind, Jones acts more like a galled baby than a disaffected, long-suffered sophisticate Laura is designed to be, she is fighting a losing battle before she can finish her sentences, and Murray’s resigned response “why aren’t you funny anymore?” is even more grating, paternalism dies hard, to Felix, a daughter’s paramount asset is fun-inducing, and Murray is in excellent form, unfazed, debonair, persistently gets his own way, though his grand deportment is critically undercut by Felix's repugnant characterization.

Laura never stands a chance to better herself as an independent individual, in the end, she is just passed from one man to another, with the symbolic watch switch, that message doesn’t quite swim with our current tide of woman-empowerment. Sofia, being a female and a member of the Coppola Dynasty, has been wearing a Teflon armor for too long, and the “father issue” she tries to come to terms with is more personal and regressive than we can give its credits for. Since many other budding women directors are finally thick on the ground, perhaps it is high time that we look elsewhere for the next auteur-to-be from the distaff side.

referential entries: Coppola’s SOMEWHERE (2010, 6.6/10); LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003, 8.8/10).