Bill Murray looks his best in Sofia Coppola’s ‘On The Rocks’

Perhaps Sofia Coppolas’ greatest achievement (so far) has been discovering that Bill Murray is Generation X’s Marcello Mastroianni. Like Federico Fellini, a sad clown who feels lonely in the crowd, Murrays la vie of the party but there was always a distant desire in his eyes. The former ghostbuster has found a formidable second act as a deadpan counterculture totem in the films of Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch, but it’s his collaborations with Coppola that make the most of his ironic recklessness and unexpected depths. . On the Rocks is Murrays’ best performance since Lost in Translation and his loosest work in ages, wandering irresistibly through his latest gossamer-hearted comedy.

Coppola makes films about princesses living in hotels instead of castles, or in this case a luxury SoHo condominium in a New York fairy tale. Rashida Jones plays Laura, a stay-at-home mom we sometimes see from the streets, framed by her floor-to-ceiling windows like Rapunzel in the Tower. Visual storytelling shows up quickly in this image – her opening credit streak goes from a sultry follow-up shot on clothes thrown on Lauras’ wedding night to identical camera movement as she clears a full cluttered floor. dirty laundry and children’s toys. From romance to a rut with just a few tweaks.

With her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) traveling all the time for work, life with Laura and her two daughters seems like one big endless montage of hours of bathing and ballet lessons, constantly cornered at school by a Another mom (the very funny Jenny Slate) buzzing over her relationship struggles despite zero encouragement from Jones to the poker face, pacing back and forth before returning over and over to that same stroke of picking up more toys and more laundry. It’s a feeling of constant movement and of never going anywhere. Even when Laura finally gets the chance to take a nap, we watch Roomba scrub the bedroom rug in circles, bumping into the furniture.

The Deans have been acting weird lately, and Laura finds the worst sounding board imaginable for her suspicions in her father, Felix – a retired art gallery owner played by Murray with a playful twinkle in his eyes. Expert in extramarital affairs, Félix is ​​an irrepressible scamp, complimenting street women by reflex and making all the waitresses blush. He’s neither scary nor mocking about it, he truly appreciates beautiful women in a way his daughter endlessly finds embarrassing. Unusually, dressed in seersucker suits and scarves, Murray walks into each room as if he owns the building and knows the names of all the doormen in town. The conspiratorial relationship he inspires in an audience has rarely been deployed with so much expertise.

Laura is soon drawn into her father’s wacky plan to spy on her husband, and what follows is a prank played at half speed in an incredibly elegant New York City fantasy. It’s a throwback to the dream Manhattan Carlyle Hotel of Murray and Coppolas 2015 Netflix special A Very Murray Christmas, a place where martinis still flow and you can still sit at the old Bogie and Bacalls table at 21. New York like this? Of course not, except in the airy 1930s champagne comedies that Coppolas tries to emulate here. (The last movie I can think of that tried the same thing was Arthur from the 1981s, and I’m half-convinced that the title On the Rocks could be a nod to that poorly-taken sequel.) At the center of it all Murray is easy going poise. his way out of tickets and all kinds of other problems. Félix brings caviar to their establishment, but the whole world is his oyster.

Coppola may have too dreamy a disposition for the vicious comedy cliché, as a filmmaker has always been more interested in the mood than the mechanics of the plot. On the Rocks has a great slapstick, but also allows you to study the ripples that a tear makes in a half-empty martini glass. It’s an alluring personal image, with the first daughter in American cinema making a film about a woman trying to find her own light in the shadow of a larger than life father. It can’t be a coincidence that she chose child Quincy Jones as her on-screen surrogate, who even dresses like her director in the cool-mom Beastie Boys and Run-DMC t-shirts. (I could swear I saw Coppola wearing one of these sweaters the last time she appeared in the Harvard Film Archive.)

In some ways, it’s a sequel to his 2010 film Somewhere, in which Stephen Dorff played a movie star dad in skirt pursuit strolling with his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) at the unwelcoming Chateau Marmont. for children, slowly realizing that he has no idea how to be a father. There is a stunning scene here in which Laura confronts Felix at the price their family paid for his behavior, and Coppola boldly stages it in opposition to all the established rules of cinema. The actors are seated across from each other but disorientingly photographed in the same direction – as if staring at each other at the distant transgressions they ultimately face. Much of On the Rocks is designed to be bubbly and play in a minor key, but in those sneaky little moments, it feels like something major.

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On the Rocks starts broadcasting on Apple TV + Friday October 23.