The Bling Ring
Based on a 2010 Vanity Fair article about teenagers who went around Hollywood merrily burgling their favourite stars, I was looking forward to The Bling Ring with appalling glee. Sparkly things! Emma Watson! Glamorous teenagers running around being awful! It all sounded very Clueless with crime.
But oh my goodness, how boring was the reality. While Clueless’s teens were easily as airheaded as the ones here, at least they had character, and were affectionately sent up. The Bling Ring’s five wannabe stars exist in a personality-free vacuum, living only to burgle, swear and party, and they are archly skewered by dialogue taken from their real-life selves. This isn’t a caper. It’s not social comment. Director Sofia Coppola presents her hand blankly, almost as though piecing a documentary together from numbers. What it’s missing, in spades, is chemistry.
Sofia Coppola is perfectly placed to make a film about celebrity worship. She is part of a cinematic dynasty, has Kirsten Dunst on speed dial, and even has her own fashion line (Japan only – so chic).
From The Virgin Suicides to Marie Antoinette, Coppola’s CV drips with jewels, celebrity and teenage malaise, but even with all three circled here, it’s not clear what her aim is, if anything.
The kids are just boring: a major letdown to cinematic teenagers. We get no idea of what’s going on in their heads beyond what’s posted on Facebook, which makes them more like The Sims, the artificial-reality game. Did they have any interests? Thoughts? Character? Or, God forbid, were they all really as boring as they come across here? Coppola clicks them around her screen, and feeds them lines taken verbatim from their real-life counterparts but they never feel credible.
Each member of the gang gets the bare bones of character, with only Emma Watson’s Nicki getting any insight into her home life: her amazingly daft mum (Leslie Mann) home-schools her, a sister and a semi-adopted friend, according to the tenets of the self-help book The Secret. Newcomer Katie Chang turns the charisma up to 11 as ringleader Rebecca, but her sudden friendship with loner Marc (Israel Broussard, given little to do other than look anxious), soon to be her partnerin- crime, is as abrupt as her decision to go a-burgling.
You need depth to be this superficial and The Bling Ring doesn’t deliver. It’s outrageously good-looking, as slick as the lipgloss that Nicki is constantly applying – Coppola’s shots of the burglaries look as gorgeous as the things being taken – but there is absolutely nothing going on below the surface.
What’s the point here? If Coppola is trying to shame her audience into realising they are as celebrity-hungry as the thieves, it doesn’t work. If she’s trying to entertain, well, that doesn’t work either.
Whatever its flaws, four years after the crimes, The Bling Ring is depressingly current. Google ‘Emma Watson Nicki’, and the first result is a breathless article on how to get the exact lip gloss she wears in the film. Still, it’s not a guide to burglary and that’s some small consolation.
But oh my goodness, how boring was the reality. While Clueless’s teens were easily as airheaded as the ones here, at least they had character, and were affectionately sent up. The Bling Ring’s five wannabe stars exist in a personality-free vacuum, living only to burgle, swear and party, and they are archly skewered by dialogue taken from their real-life selves. This isn’t a caper. It’s not social comment. Director Sofia Coppola presents her hand blankly, almost as though piecing a documentary together from numbers. What it’s missing, in spades, is chemistry.
Sofia Coppola is perfectly placed to make a film about celebrity worship. She is part of a cinematic dynasty, has Kirsten Dunst on speed dial, and even has her own fashion line (Japan only – so chic).
From The Virgin Suicides to Marie Antoinette, Coppola’s CV drips with jewels, celebrity and teenage malaise, but even with all three circled here, it’s not clear what her aim is, if anything.
The kids are just boring: a major letdown to cinematic teenagers. We get no idea of what’s going on in their heads beyond what’s posted on Facebook, which makes them more like The Sims, the artificial-reality game. Did they have any interests? Thoughts? Character? Or, God forbid, were they all really as boring as they come across here? Coppola clicks them around her screen, and feeds them lines taken verbatim from their real-life counterparts but they never feel credible.
Each member of the gang gets the bare bones of character, with only Emma Watson’s Nicki getting any insight into her home life: her amazingly daft mum (Leslie Mann) home-schools her, a sister and a semi-adopted friend, according to the tenets of the self-help book The Secret. Newcomer Katie Chang turns the charisma up to 11 as ringleader Rebecca, but her sudden friendship with loner Marc (Israel Broussard, given little to do other than look anxious), soon to be her partnerin- crime, is as abrupt as her decision to go a-burgling.
You need depth to be this superficial and The Bling Ring doesn’t deliver. It’s outrageously good-looking, as slick as the lipgloss that Nicki is constantly applying – Coppola’s shots of the burglaries look as gorgeous as the things being taken – but there is absolutely nothing going on below the surface.
What’s the point here? If Coppola is trying to shame her audience into realising they are as celebrity-hungry as the thieves, it doesn’t work. If she’s trying to entertain, well, that doesn’t work either.
Whatever its flaws, four years after the crimes, The Bling Ring is depressingly current. Google ‘Emma Watson Nicki’, and the first result is a breathless article on how to get the exact lip gloss she wears in the film. Still, it’s not a guide to burglary and that’s some small consolation.