2000s, Action-Adventure, War

Troy (2004)

Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Screenwriter: David Benioff

By Roderick Heath

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) unleashed a strain of big-budget historical epics in a moment that already seems like a strange glitch of modern movie history. A brief renaissance for a hallowed style in both literary and cinematic culture, before being perhaps permanently replaced by its great modern progeny, the cult of the superhero. The notion of a Hollywood studio throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at an adaptation of an archaic Greek poem seems even more bewildering and beguiling now. Upon release, Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy was a middling box office success and met with a largely tepid critical response, including from me, but I found it worth revisiting. One trouble was that attempts to revive the historical epic were curtailed by the much less patient mood of the moment. Two of the more substantive entries in this brief craze, Troy and Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), were both released in edited versions that robbed them of much potential heft only to be seen in a better light when their director’s cuts were released to home viewing. Revisiting Troy recently through the director’s cut, which restored more than half-an-hour minutes missing from the theatrical release, I found Troy aging surprisingly well.

Petersen, the German director best known for vivid work in movies as diverse as Das Boot (1981) and The Neverending Story (1984), took a little time to find his feet when he went Hollywood, but In the Line of Fire (1993) kicked off a string of big hits for him, continuing with the bi-fi thriller Outbreak (1995), the US President-as-action-hero film Air Force One (1997), and the blue collar disaster movie The Perfect Storm (1999). Petersen took on novelist David Benioff’s adaptation of Homer with a huge budget and an impressive battery of actors, with Brad Pitt exalted at its core in the role of Achilles, under pressure to offer up as much beefcake appeal as Russell Crowe had in Gladiator. Benioff had just collaborated with Spike Lee on the much-acclaimed adaptation of his own novel The 25th Hour (2002), and the dizzied, mortified mood of the post-9/11 age explored pervasively in that film was amplified many degrees as Petersen and Benioff sublimated Homer into more pressing perspectives, as well as the straightforward business of making a heavy-duty crowd-pleaser. The film credits itself as “inspired by Homer’s The Iliad,” but draws on a wider survey of the Trojan Cycle to explore events not portrayed in Homer’s poem but expanded on elsewhere by other classical writers. The Iliad remains a unique and immoveable cultural artefact, at once an elegant, fine-woven piece of writing reflecting a cultural sensibility at its zenith, interlaced with near-endless echoes of that culture’s way of seeing and thinking and feeling, and also a fearsome piece of storytelling replete with lushly described violence and action. It feels intrinsically blockbuster-like, and has long wielded mesmeric power for anyone able to penetrate its style through its innumerable translators’ approaches.

That said, The Iliad is also tantalisingly alien in its moral and religious values as well as historical setting. Making the Trojan Cycle conform to modern moral systems is a tall order, containing as it does a radically different sense of relations between people and societies as well as concepts of divinity and agency. The Iliad’s early scenes are propelled by Achilles and Agamemnon fighting over a woman named Briseis, an enslaved spoil of war, and a notable vignette later sees Achilles and Patroclus lounging around with their captured sex slaves as the last word in warrior lifestyle accessorising. And that’s without even approaching the operatic cruelties found in the traditions surrounding the city’s fall and the aftermath, all of which combine an aspect of bloodthirsty glee matched to an exacting sense of consequence in metaphysical terms: fate deals out deserts in remorseless fashion. The interwoven story of human warfare and divine attention and manipulation in The Iliad is crucial, particularly in that it emphasises the great struggle as a level playing-field, attackers and defenders alike aware of the finite balance of chance and fate that comes from fighting under the eyes of keenly interested gods, every permutation of character expressed as a living principle relating to the greater drama of clashing civilisations. Some of the revisions Benioff made in the adapting process simply obeyed modern screenwriting niceties, but others, like completely excising the Gods, had a more fundamental impact on the nature of the story being told. Left as a human story it just looks like a tale of a bunch of meathead aggressors annihilating a neighbouring country.

For Petersen, Troy made an odd yet fitting follow-up to his career breakthrough with Das Boot as a conflicted tale of warriors engaged in a morally questionable undertaking, both obliging identification with those warriors whilst critiquing their attempts to hold onto a sense of personal honour in impossible circumstances. The opening depicts a dog searching for its master on a field of battle and licking his bloodied corpse, striking both a note of pathos and sets up a neat narrative flourish late in the film. The confrontation of the two armies, led by King Agamemnon of Mycenae (Brian Cox) as he tries to conclude the brute process of aligning the Greek city-states under his overlordship, facing off against the horde of Triopas (Julian Glover). The two kings agree to settle the matter with a clash of champions, with Tripoas deploying hulking fighter Boagrius (Nathan Jones) and Agamemnon calling forth the oft-intransigent Achilles. Once he arrives at the battle he easily fells Boagrius with a display of quick and lethal nimbleness. Achilles serves under Agamemnon grudgingly, uninterested in the warlord’s power lusts or patriotic smokescreens, instead servicing only his own, immense talent as a fighter and desire for an appropriate amphitheatre to seek immortality through fame.

Meanwhile Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), King of Sparta, is feasting the Trojan princes Hector (Eric Bana) and Paris (Orlando Bloom) after concluding a hard-earned pact of amity between the two cities. That pact is immediately endangered as Paris and Menelaus’ wife Helen (Diane Kruger) maintain heavy-duty eye contact throughout the banquet before scurrying off to make love in secret. So smitten are the couple, and so detesting of her boorish husband is Helen, that Paris hides her aboard the ship taking him and Hector back to Troy. When Paris reveals his breach to Hector, the older brother is furious and knows well what the consequences might be, but makes the fateful decision to carry on to Troy as Paris insists if they turn back he will face Menelaus with Helen. Upon arrival in Troy, their father King Priam (Peter O’Toole) greets Helen and resolves to defend his sons’ choices. Menelaus appeals to his brother Agamemnon (Brian Cox), a warlord who’s been waging a relentless campaign to unite Greece under his leadership, and Agamemnon eagerly leads a vast fleet to assault Troy.

The one piece on his chessboard that tends to move itself about is Achilles, so Agamemnon, at the advice of his key vassal and advisor Nestor (John Shrapnel), elects to send another, King Odysseus of Ithaca (Sean Bean), to talk Achilles into coming along. In the director’s cut, Odysseus is first glimpsed being mistaken by Agamemnon’s envoys for a shepherd as he sits on a hillside looking shabby and unroyal and listlessly toying with their expectations, a neat vignette emphasising the Ithacan king’s canniness and lack of pretension. He travels to talk with Achilles, who’s given himself over to training his adolescent cousin Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund). But it’s only the advice of his sagely mother Thetis (Julie Christie) that convinces Achilles to go seek his glory, whilst predicting it will come at the cost of his own life in the end. Making a spectacular show of landing on the beach before Troy, Achilles captures Priam’s niece Briseis (Rose Byrne), a Priestess of Apollo, but his and Agamemnon’s mutual dislike and competitiveness flares into outright hatred when the warlord claims Briseis for himself. Achilles stands aloof as Hector brutalises the Greek horde until Patroclus takes the field dressed in his armour, and gets himself killed by Hector, sparking Achilles’ murderous intent.

The version of Troy that screened in movie theatres in 2004 was solid but overly skewed towards servicing Pitt’s star wattage. The director’s cut recast the film in a more rounded, fleshed-out, better-paced fashion. It also gives a superior survey of Petersen’s self-conscious attempt to make the film a tribute to, and last hurrah for, an older brand of blockbuster cinema, trucking in actors like O’Toole, Christie, Glover, and Nigel Terry (playing the Trojan high priest Archeptolemus) out of David Lean epics and Old Vic heroics. Troy’s take on Homer was reconstructed to fit a fraught moment as the Iraq War was doggedly refusing to prove a neat victory and had unleashed schisms of controversy and political opinion with a heat scarcely felt in the western world since the Vietnam War. From today’s perspective the film also certainly evinces Benioff as a dramatist first testing the waters of metaphor-laden mythological storytelling, on the way to creating and overseeing the TV adaptation of fantasy writer George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (2011-19). That show, at least until the badly received concluding seasons, would dominate pop culture for nearly a decade, and it would carry over cast members Bean and Glover. Troy laid down aspects of the Game of Thrones blueprint, in testing sturdy conventions for moral complexity and a dark sense of political and military power as monsters scarcely controlled by the people who affect to steer them.

Taking on material like Martin’s, already composed with an eye to deconstructing genre canards, proved a more fitting vehicle for such interrogative ends, but Homer’s poems have survived in large part because of their malleability as explorations of conflict and character: everyone from Virgil to Shakespeare to anime makers has applied a new sensibility to them. Benioff’s emphasis on Agamemnon’s bad faith in defending his brother Menelaus and monstrous campaign of empire-building instead steers towards a blunt metaphor for tyrannical warmongering, rather than an inevitable clash of well-matched adversaries. The two brothers are offered not as exemplars of the Greek warrior creed but as a crass and bullish caricature of the less attractive side of macho nature, Agamemnon dedicated to fostering power at all costs and Menelaus portrayed as a hypocritical chauvinist who wants Helen back not, as in the source myths, because of his overwhelming love for her but to kill her with his own hands. They’re pointedly contrasted with other characters, including the romantic and valiant but fatefully callow Paris, and more particularly with Achilles and Odysseus.

Troy was hardly the first film to tackle Homer on film, but there’s still been a significant dearth of major adaptations of The Iliad. Perhaps the most notable earlier versions had been Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1955) and Giorgio Ferroni’s The Trojan Horse (1962). Wise’s film, Hollywood-backed but Italian-shot with a pan-European cast, smartly cast strong, gritty actors like Stanley Baker and Harry Andrews as Achilles and Ajax, but placed most of its emphasis on Helen and Paris as tragically boring lovers. Ferroni’s, whilst in style a regulation entry in the Italian peplum craze, offered a surprisingly acerbic sense of the canonical characters that anticipates Troy in some ways, except for the Trojan prince Aeneas, as nobly played by Steve Reeves: he would reprise the role in an equally enjoyable sequel, The Sword of Aeneas (1962), taken from the second half of Virgil’s The Aeneid. To make the mythology dramatically manageable, Benioff excised many essential figures like Diomedes, Little Ajax, and Cassandra, and passed their story functions onto other figures. The film’s version of Briseis makes her a member of the royal family and Apollonian priestess, and blends together her namesake from the poem, Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Polyxena. Those are some of the greatest characters in literature, and it might be asking too much of role to contain such multitudes, and yet Troy manages to found them into one effective and efficient dramatic alloy. The idea of Cassandra as unheeded prophet is passed on to Hector and Paris, who keep recommending smart courses of action to Prim only to be ignored.

To their credit, Petersen and Benioff apply a purposeful sense of psychology and dramatic context in revisiting and revising ancient legend, pausing to consider each major character and their motives and their purpose within the great gallery of mythic occurrence. Troy manages what not so many films like it ever managed, to keep a compelled focus on the human drama within the container of the epic, bolstered in particular by attentive casting, in offering actors like Saffron Burrows as Hector’s anxious wife Andromache and James Cosmo as Glaucus, Priam’s stalwart general. There’s an aspect of double-edged achievement to this, in obliging immortal mythology to subsist within the cramped space of a contemporary realism and naturalism, grinding gears with The Iliad’s description of a pivot of worlds, turning it on many levels into just another war story. The poem’s driving drama, the inevitable march to battle between Achilles, the perfect warrior dedicated to his own fame given a new spur by personal vengeance, against Hector, the valiant defender of his homeland, the warrior-prince who’s also a father and family man, evokes stark oppositions and resolves it in favour of the former, cutting against the grain of contemporary sensibilities which would celebrate the latter.

The poem applied rigorous sense of identity as well as mythic function to the two men: Hector’s tendency to arrogant bellicosity contrasted Achilles’ valuing of honour and lack of interest in merely political motives gave them complexity whilst also pinning them down as exemplars of their respective worlds, and also highlighted traits that both elevate and defeat them. By contrast the film skews Hector into a canny and fretful stalwart, with Bana’s embodiment of strongly rooted and stolid virtue contrasting not just his foes but his mercurial brother and fatalistic yet over-confident father. Casting Pitt as Achilles was the engine for the film’s pitch and advertising, with Pitt trying to stretch his stardom and acting to new zones. Pitt had long shown himself to be an interesting actor, gaining plaudits for his striking grotesques in Kalifornia (1993), Twelve Monkeys (1997), and Fight Club (1999), but his star cachet as the incarnation of the ideal west coast blonde princeling often sharply contrasted his ambitions. As with Tyler Durden, playing Achilles allowed him to try and balance his schismatic star identity and acting sensibility by inhabiting a character defined as the prototypical star, beloved of colleagues and able to swing sexual gymnastics with multiple ladies in properly pimp fashion, the figure whose presence is needed to sell the enterprise to the hoi polloi despite all the efforts of smarter and more driven creative minds, and admired and feared for his impudent physical genius.

Pitt’s Achilles as a fractured antihero with an ironic intellectual streak, a murderous hunk of taut muscle with the mind of a Sartre character, fully aware of the tenuousness and absurdity of mortality and feeling obliged by his own prowess and pessimism to dedicate himself to the extermination of humans as his metier, often delivering lines in alternations of brisk cynicism and stringent honesty in terse asides. Pitt may well have been trying to emulate Marlon Brando as another very American kind of actor who proved himself nonetheless more than capable in classical roles. But Pitt lacks Brando’s deft verbal facility, and he can’t quite defeat a note of awkwardness in trying to play such a conflicted character. Certainly, however, Pitt looks the part, the blessed and magnetic folk hero made in the image of Ares for carving foes into sculptural studies. As the war combusts, Achilles swiftly moves to start cementing his legend status by driving his ship loaded with his Myrmidon warriors ahead of the Greek armada to land on the Trojan beach and carve a path through the defenders.

Achilles and his men sack the Trojan Temple of Apollo, slaying the priests and capturing Briseis, and Achilles taunts Hector when he arrives with a retinue, predicting their clash but letting him flee for the moment. Achilles’ display of warlike prowess, in which only fellow super-warrior Ajax (Taylor Mane) manages to join the action, infuriates Agamemnon, and he tries to bring Achilles down a peg by commandeering Briseis, whom Achilles has promised safe harbour to. Achilles retaliates by refusing to participate in the first great confrontation of the Greek and Trojan armies, which comes before the city walls. Paris elects to meet Menelaus in one-on-one combat, but when Menelaus proves far too strong for him Paris appeals to Hector and rather than let Menelaus kill is brother on the ground Hector slays him and then Ajax, sparking a pitch battle that sees the Greeks retreat in bloodied chaos, the Trojan archers and Hector’s fighting pith proving a deadly combination.

Troy struggles in its early scenes as it tries to balance its competing urges towards serious adaptation and blockbuster service. The film pays tribute to the sword-and-sandal genre’s hallowed habit of celebrating beefcake to the point of offering Bana and Bloom flouncing about in crop-tops and Pitt in leather kilt, and the tone of the acting takes a while to settle down. Kruger, who quickly went on to prove herself a considerable actress in fare like Inglourious Basterds (2009), was introduced as a fresh face in the role of Helen, but she was still finding her feet as a performer and impressed few at the time as worthy of the role. She still seems watery compared to, say, Irene Papas in Michael Cacoyannis’ version of Euripides’ The Trojan Women (1971), where Helen was a strident, galvanic presence who wields herself with a blend of arrogance and pithy survival smarts. That said, the version of Helen here is true to her portrayal in The Iliad as a flighty creature trapped by her own choices and withering within the ironic space of being considered important enough to both spur a war and caught in a spiral of contempt without and within, building to a scene in which Hector refuses to let her give herself up to the Greeks, assuring her such a gesture would be of far less valuable than the one she know plays as Paris’ supportive influence.

It’s always tempting for romantics to be very forgiving towards Helen and Paris, although they’re supposed to be the kinds of blithe and thoughtless youngsters who cause endless trouble for other people. Bloom, best known for playing the omnicompetent Elf hero Legolas in The Lord of the Rings films until this point, was nonetheless smartly cast as Paris, a man redeemed more by his honest ardour than by his capacity to live up to the standards of a macho warrior age, the archetypal lover-not-a-fighter who nonetheless starts mastering arts of archery as the conflict becomes grimmer and more personal. Cox’s Agamemnon, by contrast, walks close to the edge of ham, but it’s extremely effective ham, playing the outsized engine of imperial bloodlust who gains his own, deeply personal spur to ruthless prosecution of the war in Menelaus’ death. The film finds its feet as the war heats up and the narrative leans more on The Iliad, although not always remaining faithful to familiar legend: the restored introduction for Odysseus in the director’s cut introduces a note of contrast in character and attitude.

Troy copped a deal of critical flack for some of its twists on the classical lore in touches, like the early deaths of Menelaus and Ajax and letting Andromache, Helen, and Paris escape in the end, although given the inconsistencies in the legends – there is after all one strand of the tradition that holds the real Helen was replaced by a simulacrum for the war’s duration whilst she was kidnapped to Egypt – and a long tradition of creatively rewriting the stories this is no hanging matter. Revisions often simply get to the same place sooner. Perhaps a more truly unworthy touch is making Aeneas (Frankie Fitzgerald) some random guy Paris gives the Sword of Troy to in the climax. The film’s reconstituted political context is highlighted as Nestor frets to Agamemnon, after the Greek horde has lost a battle like a Bronze-age CNN pundit: “If we leave now, we’ll lose all credibility – if the Trojans can beat us so easily, how long before the Hittites invade?” War of aggression must be haplessly recommitted to through the prospect of losing the aura of invincibility. Perhaps the film’s most interesting and original spin on the theme of war is the way it acknowledges the way conflicts never obey one specific ideological stream, instead representing communal action informed by many different urges and viewpoints, ranging from monomaniacal strategizing to a deeply personal expression of need. Nestor and Odysseus recognise the necessity of continuing the fight along such lines, requiring Agamemnon to remove his ego from the equation and get Achilles back on side.

Petersen had established himself as a slick and forceful stylist on Das Boot with a palpable sense of atmosphere and a mixture of classical storytelling skill matched to aggressively mobile camerawork, and The Neverending Story wielded a grand and beautiful evocation of fantastic landscapes, a sensibility Petersen couldn’t bring to bear in this naturalistic take on myth. Troy shares something of the same ethos regardless, coming on with great energy, a muscular immediacy strongly contrasting the more popular, highly stylised approach Zack Snyder would unleash on his take on Greek history, 300 (2006). Perhaps to really nail the flavour of the source material might have required something like the mix of elegance and brutalism John Milius gave to Conan the Barbarian (1982), or what John Woo accomplished with The Battle of Red Cliff (2009), managing to balance vast spectacle with a sense of the individual potency of great fighters in a most Homeric fashion. But Petersen imbues an elemental sense of pallid sunrises and blood-soaked sand, alive to flesh and grit, appropriate for a story set at the dawn of western history. He pulls off some visual coups, particularly in the first confrontation of the two armies, and the grand overhead shot of the Greek horde charging through the opened city gates in the climax. The fight sequences have appropriate sense of pulverising force and ferocity where Achilles’ near-acrobatic style contrasts the more earthbound foes he contends with, although the beach attack scene reflects the pervasive influence of the Normandy opening of Saving Private Ryan (1998) to an unseemly degree.

Patroclus dies at Hector’s hand whilst pretending to be Achilles, dressed in his armour and leading the Myrmidons into battle when the Trojans attack the Greek beachhead, earning the martial valour he craves in the most brutal fashion and delivering to Achilles a wrath-inducing shock. Whereas in The Iliad Patroclus’ death finally gives him a personal spur that amplifies his talent to the level of genius and world-shatterer, Troy sees him slowly forced to concede the value of his human attachments, in the loss of Patroclus and the spectacle of his own impact on Priam and his caring for Briseis, which proves at once his downfall and also a last, salutary gift, a humanising urge that also obliges his destruction. The build-up to the duel of Achilles and Hector is particularly well-done, as Achilles, glaze-eyed in his merciless fury, wheels up to the city gates and demands Hector come out and fight. Petersen’s build-up for the sequence, expertly drawing out the tension, also successful locates the primal roots of every gunfighter and swordsman duel in popular art. The two well-matched men meet in a fight decided as much by character as physical strength, Achilles’ monomaniacal focus overwhelming Hector’s more scrupulous purpose, before Achilles brutalises his body by dragging it behind his chariot. It’s a testimony to how good storytelling doesn’t dim that I distinctly recall, when seeing this film in the movie theatre, hearing audience members groan in shock when Achilles kills Hector.

The subsequent scene in which Priam sneaks into Achilles’ tent to beg for his son’s body is a moment for O’Toole, aged and haggard and yet still with his old thespian talent undimmed, to make a mark, especially in the moment when he answers Achilles’ comment, “You will still be my enemy in the morning” with the hard retort “You are still my enemy tonight,” the fire buried under his snowy locks allowed a momentary flare amidst the necessary moment of mollifying. Achilles’ own sense of emotional crisis crystallises in relenting as he weeps over Hector’s corpse, conscious of how much he’s lost in gaining what he long wanted, shocked out of his haughty zone of philosophical butchery. Achilles’ contentious relationship with Briseis is also a surprisingly strong element, the captive priestess’s contempt for the invader, and his disinterest in her sense of humanist and religious offence, mediated by potent attraction. Following Achilles saving Briseis from gang rape after Agamemnon gives her to the troops, their flashing wilfulness culminates in a sexual tussle, before Briseis tries in hopeless desperation to hold him back from taking the fight to Hector after Patroclus’ death, and then giving a moan of horror and grief when she sees Achilles return from his fight, with an appropriately cruel evocation of madly clashing emotional impulses.

It might be said that the film emphasises Achilles and Briseis’ relationship as a nicety in stepping around what many have taken for Achilles and Patroclus’s romantic attachment, although nothing like that is explicitly portrayed in The Iliad. Achilles resolves to depart the battle, only to be obliged to stay when Odysseus dreams up a plan to break the military deadlock between the two camps. Euripides notoriously disliked Odysseus as a character intensely, despite his valorising in Homer, often portraying him as a man who turned is great intellect towards manipulative and cynical ends. Petersen and Benioff rather see his cagey, meditative intelligence as crucial in a vital way: personalities like Agamemnon start wars and those like Achilles fight them, but only one like Odysseus can win one. Odysseus dreams up the ploy of the Trojan Horse, and the script deftly sidesteps the complex web of circumstances that made the Trojans fall for it in the source myths through having the Greeks falsify an outbreak of plague, revealed as a fraud in a revisit to the opening as a dog licks a corpse’s arm of fake lesions. The climactic sack of the city is a tremendous piece of spectacle, and the director’s cut is particularly revealing in the longer, more savage and lingering depiction of the Greek invaders engaged in mass rape, vandalism, and slaughter.

It’s unsparing as a portrayal and indictment of the dark side of war that sharply contrasts the attitude of martial vainglory that’s generally been more popular in new millennium cinema in the likes of Gladiator and The Lord of the Rings films, aggressive conquest envisaged as a general degradation and a succession of ugly consequences to prior choices wrapped in high-flown concepts. Petersen also delivers the right kind of grandiose theatre, with Cox’s Agamemnon at full throttle, revelling in his destruction of the city and slaying of the stricken Priam, before catching Briseis and promising her degradations beyond parallel. Whereupon the cunning priestess shoves a dagger in his neck. Achilles rescues here from Agamemnon’s vengeful bodyguards, only to be riddled with arrows by Paris when he thinks Achilles is attacking her. Again the film manages a surprisingly good job here of conflating the far-flung routes of mythology into a potent and logical climax, hitting the key ironic beats, the great warlord felled by a woman, the mighty duellist brought down by love and a wielder of the unmanly bow, leaving Odysseus as the one to put coins on the eyes of the dead and invoke the names of the fallen amidst the ash and ruins and fetid sighs of exhausted passion. Troy doesn’t rise to the heights of the greatest historical epics and mythological movies, but it’s a full-blooded and intelligent work.

2010s, Comedy, Crime/Detective, Drama

The Bling Ring (2013)

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Director/Screenwriter: Sofia Coppola

By Roderick Heath

The ’00s are already starting to feel like a long time ago. The first decade of the new millennium, an age of gorging excess for a select number which ended up in a giant socioeconomic car crash from which we’re still recovering, is going to look ever stranger for people as they look back on the time—its naked money worship, the War on Terror hysteria, the gaping voids of thought and substance all too ably recorded for posterity by reality TV, and the new internet-fuelled super-pop culture. Just lately, I’ve started to get the feeling that filmmakers, particularly those from the independent scenes, have become canaries in the cultural mines the way poets used to be, registering changes in the zeitgeist with a peculiar speed that is perhaps indicative of how much quicker cinema production can be today and how much more engaged filmmakers are with the evolving social discourse. Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring throws its mind and mood back to around 2008-9, when the bogus rhetoric of “aspiration” as justification for incredible greed and new forms of social exclusion was both at its height and about to meet the cold reality of boom-bust cycles, which here comes in the form an even more immediate, pitiless wake-up call.
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The Bling Ring adapts a real incident, via a Vanity Fair article that was called “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” a jaunty title that identifies the brand-name-emblazoned mindset of the criminal gang whose activities comprise a weird mixture of delinquency and absurdity. A group of teenage friends, all children of affluence and times of plenty, engaged in a string of comically easy robberies of the houses of celebrities like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom, and Megan Fox, filching money, jewellery, and clothes. This allowed them to hit the L.A. highlife, where everybody’s a wannabe, with impudent élan. Fox famously has a freely quoted line from King Lear tattooed on her shoulder, “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies,” a jab in the original context at the kinds of well-dressed empty vessels who flock around the flames of power. Are The Bling Ring the butterflies, or the laughers? Is there a difference anymore, in a time when everyone is both complicit and detached, observer and observed?
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This crime wave is sparked by Asian-American high schooler Rebecca Ahn (Katie Chang), who sees nothing wrong with stealing cash from parked cars and random houses in prosperous suburbs, even jacking a Porsche with blithe confidence. The ring begins to take shape when she ventures into Hilton’s manse when her pal Marc Hall (Israel Broussard) finds out online that she’s out of town. Marc, gay, dowdy, and awkward, is socially adopted by Rebecca when, like her, he’s forced to attend a public school after being kicked out of a private one. Rebecca offers Marc the chance to make glamorous associations and become a cool kid, as she’s friends with would-be model and fashionista Nicki Moore (Emma Watson). Nicky is enthused about the idea of stealing, and she brings her pal Chloe (Claire Julien), her younger sister Emily (Georgia Rock), and adopted sister Sam (Taissa Farmiga) into the ring.
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After returning to Hilton’s house multiple times, the ring begins to branch out and target other celebrities’ houses, after Marc does his quick research on the net to make sure when they’re away. Sam’s boyfriend Rob (Carlos Miranda) joins them on some raids, whilst Chloe and Marc sell some of Orlando Bloom’s Rolex watches to Chloe’s boyfriend, sleazy nightclub manager Ricky (Gavin Rossdale). Emily joins the gang when they need someone small to slide through Fox’s dog door. Their raids on Hilton’s house go undetected for a long time, because the owner leaves the keys under the welcome mat and they resist stealing any major items. Later, when robbing the house of TV host Audrina Patridge, they’re caught on camera as shadowy invaders. Their crimes become an open secret amongst the people they know and the scenes where they hang out, and they even display their exploits on social media. Finally, they’re rounded up and prosecuted after Rebecca, fleeing from tension at home to live with her father in Las Vegas, unwittingly makes Marc her accomplice in taking stolen goods over state lines.
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Fragments of interviews taking place in the future with the ring, particularly Marc, give some context and perspective. Marc’s shift from teenage dirtbag to budding fabulousness is glimpsed in casually employed shots of him hovering before his webcam wearing lipstick and lounging about in a pair of stolen pumps, offering the only real signs of traditional character growth and identification, and a mischievous understanding of the protean forces at work for such a person. But Coppola really only gives us these bones because Marc is the gateway. Otherwise, the Bling Ring members are shallow, deliberately so. There’s little point in listening to them talk, because they talk crap; they’re well versed in brand names and designers but empty of other concerns. They’re pretty average young people, actually, save for the circumstances of their youth as citizens of L.A. and therefore faced with constant proximity to the promise of the high life in an imperial capital. Watching The Bling Ring, I had an insight into the way “we” morally respond to movies, via an element that has haunted Coppola with particular doggedness since her directing career began—that she’s a spoilt rich girl making films about same. Her perspective on the rapacious abyss that certain aspects of capitalist triumphalism conceal has become plainer and less generous since the playfully sardonic Marie Antoinette (2006) was infamously jeered at Cannes for making the link between modern consumerism and imperial downfall not just bitingly plain, but genuinely funny. The Bling Ring, whilst dealing with immediate, almost ripped-from-the-headlines fare, is certainly a thematic follow-up.
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Coppola’s emotionally immediate, but conceptually slightly laboured Somewhere (2010) indicated that she had listened to her critics on one level, and adopted a more distanced and elusive take on the “white people problems” she was portraying, but in a manner that felt hackneyed on some levels. The Bling Ring benefits from both intimate knowledge of what she speaks and also definite, ironic amusement, delivering her least conventional narrative yet, shorn of many external complications and dramatic niceties. The film received a largely admiring but cool reception, and part of me began to wonder as I watched it if this wasn’t due to how successfully ambiguous is Coppola’s stance towards her teenage anti-Robin Hoods. The Bling Ringers engage in criminal acts according to sketchy, but carefully hinted personal needs and desires that are channelled into an official, overarching project of socioeconomic parasitism. If they were doing what they were doing for, say, the reasons that the rich-kid anarchists of this year’s The East do what they do, or rebelling or bringing down their idols with any purpose, or even acting out lodes of emotional disquiet that can’t be repressed by affluent suburban conformity a la Rebel Without a Cause (1955), they would immediately become heroes for the audience—naughty, nonviolent Dadaists making a mockery of wealth and fame and the pretences to possessors of such to exceptionalism, finding keys under the doormat to multimillion-dollar mansions and paltry security defending the castles of the new elite.
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But the Bling Ringers remain well beyond the easy empathy of the audience because they seem, at least superficially, to be moving like baleen whales, sucking in both their sustenance and other people’s property thoughtlessly on a kind of emotional-moral autopilot. Not that they’re amoral or even particularly mean-spirited, though there are flashes of such qualities, especially when the temptation to posture according to the pop culture stricture toward ironclad egocentrism, arises. In just about the film’s only scene of traditional tension, Sam takes hold of a pistol Nicki finds in a house and waves it in Marc’s face, shifting into a movie-derived attitude of untouchable self-righteousness and threatening cool, and there’s momentary uncertainty of just how far Sam wants to take the act, if it is an act. She then sneaks into Rob’s bedroom to do the same thing with him, only for the gun to go off, luckily only putting a hole in his mattress.
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Rebecca’s early larcenous behaviour seems the more familiar behaviour of a troubled teen, but it swiftly transforms into a much less common project. The ring tend to believe, not without some justification, that the world of the rich and famous is a smorgasbord from which they can partake without consequence, because everyone has plenty, and they’re entitled to a piece of it. Rebecca, for example, hopes to be a successful fashion designer—nay, intends and expects it—but in the meantime, finds that many of the privileges and perks of the level to which she wants to be elevated can be more easily obtained simply by stealing them. When the ring raid Patridge’s house, Coppola’s camera notes it all in a slow, inward-zooming longshot, framing the glowing house against the L.A. skyline like some temple of money, touching this and other midnight odysseys with a near-religious awe. There is an added layer here in that the camera also mimics the vantage of a CCTV camera, and the film segues into eerily green-tinged surveillance shots that turn what from a distance seemed to be a cubist delight of space and light into a trap.
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For Marc, in particular, these ventures offers the chance to invent himself free of social judgment. The ring engage in acts that look and feel quite anarchic, illicit, and subversive, but only accidentally: their actual desire and intent is to enjoy the lifestyle without any concept of critiquing it or subverting it as class rebels. From a distance, and even pretty close up, they’re vacuous rich kids getting off on being naughty. Coppola’s already made withering mirth from a particular species of Hollywood dipstick—Anna Faris’ starlet Kelly—in Lost in Translation (2003), but here the likeable, witty audience avatars Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson provided are missing; even a figure like Somewhere’s Johnny Marco, who was suffocating in an empty existence, has been excised. The closest thing to a substantive adult presence in The Bling Ring is Nicki’s mother Laurie (Leslie Mann), who home-schools Nicki and her sisters in deliciously, deliriously Californian New Age fashion, complete with prayer circles in which vaguely religious bromides-cum-pep talks are delivered. Laurie, far from a countervailing presence, is the film’s purest vehicle of satirical humour: when one of her home-schooling sessions is glimpsed, she holds up a handmade chart festooned with pictures of Angelina Jolie as an example of an inspiring role model, except that when she prods the girls why they might admire her, Sam suggests, “Her husband.” Other parents do appear, but they’re mostly onlookers, dissociated from their children’s lives. Marc has a father who’s “in the biz” as a film marketer. Jessica’s broken home seems to have played a part in her blithely larcenous behaviour. But Coppola avoids as much as possible making a cautionary tale of wild amoral teens with ignorant parents, like every teen crime flick going back to the Ed Wood-scribed The Violent Years (1956) and including another of this year’s films, the lauded but laboured Spring Breakers, which stands at a fascinatingly fantastical remove from The Bling Ring. Spring Breakers offers a (middle-aged, male, “edgy”) filmmaker’s take on a similar motif of teen girls becoming criminals for profit and fun, except that everything in it is made to circle back to the filmmaker’s sexual fetishism of their actions—just like The Violent Years.
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In The Bling Ring, Coppola tries to avoid as many clichéd stances as possible. Rather than give us a malefic sense of things spinning out of control as the Ringers indulge in cocaine-charged nightclub partying, she makes them dreamily beautiful. There’s an implicit link to her The Virgin Suicides (1999) even as it seems to be making a directly opposite point. Whereas in the earlier film, adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’ pseudo-mythopoeic novel, the young women were innocent nymphs wilting from being caged by outdated moralism, here the girls are unscrupulous sexpots free both to mimic and exemplify immediate cultural maxims of louche self-indulgence. What unites them, however, is Coppola’s manner of shooting them, daubed in rich light and colour and vibrating to furiously onanistic club beats, in a style that makes clear that the fresh bloom of youth is a fleeting moment of protean wonder. Of course the Bling Ringers want to get high, dance, and be rich: these are pretty familiar and commonplace impulses, and when they’re loose in their moments of heedless joy, however they’ve paid for it, they are like everyone else rejoicing in the moment of their youth. Laurie does, accidentally almost, introduce one important idea to The Bling Ring when she advises her children, “We have to be really careful who we surround ourselves with, because we wind up being the average of those people.” Nicki later tries to use this as her out when justice comes knocking, trying to blame the company she’s kept for getting involved with crime, but finally being convicted for just that reason, indicted by her own propensities.
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The Bling Ring, as a title, has ironic inferences: “bling,” of course, is probably the most popular phrase to emerge from hip-hop slang (and it comes, in turn, from comic book representation, a kind of visual onomatopoeia that could easily be projected onto Coppola’s colourful, epic surveys of jewels and designer shoes without making them anymore cartoonish). The ring, especially when Jo finds that gun, almost manage to live up to a peculiar schism that underlies a lot of contemporary pop culture: the rejoicing of flashy wealth coexisting with trashier values of physical strength and fitness, pistol-packing invulnerability, and posse-trailing imperiousness that also comes from hip-hop and represents a driving force behind the popularity of the Fast and Furious movies. Lana Del Ray and Frank Ocean are a couple of pop musicians who had made notable inquiries into this spirit lately. Del Ray’s upper-class jeune filles delighting in becoming concubines to blaxploitation villains could represent the fantasy lives of the ring, whilst Ocean’s druggy “Super Rich Kids” turns up, almost inevitably, over the end credits. The ring don’t physically hurt anyone, because they’re actually all wusses, and their criminal success occurs only because the people they’re targeting don’t believe criminals would dare rob them. Indeed, the culturally ingrained barriers, the aura of awe and distance that surrounds the modern media celebrity as the new aristocracy, is more effective than CCTV cameras and burglar alarms, a barrier that only a gang of kids from the same world would dare violate. Of course, many of the pleasures the ring derive from their actions are eminently, classically criminal: they can live beyond their means after brief spells of risky work, feel important and illicitly clever, and enjoy the notoriety their transgressions earn them.
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It’s entirely apt that the ring’s first and repeated target is Paris Hilton, an ideal celebrity of a new brand of aristocracy famous for absolutely nothing other than being rich and telegenic enough to profitably show it off, whose house is revealed as a distressing trap of narcissism and tawdriness, complete with at-home pole dancing parlour (a common motif of Coppola’s fascination/repulsion for the modern highlife). Hilton, unlike the Bling Ring themselves, seems to know that she’s an interloper without talent whose only trick is the willingness to turn her entire existence into an act of pop art—or she’s completely blind to her own existence. The cleverest aspect of Coppola’s narrative patterning, though it’s one that contributes to the film’s slightly imbalanced quality, is that she largely reduces the middle hour to a flow of instant gratification: little small talk, minimal character development, just a series of criminal forays that offer the illicit thrills of exploration, like a sort of pirate edition of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” and the payoff of hard partying and private delight in shiny things. Coppola makes the audience complicit in their adventures, offering racks of designer goods for the eye-dazzling pleasure of plenty, and the repetitive acts of incursion, theft, and escape.
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When the cops do come knocking, there’s an obvious affinity again with Coppola’s earlier work, this time with the climax of Marie Antoinette when the revolution calls: paradise lost, lives ruined, and the plenty that came so easily suddenly, cruelly severed. Rebecca tries to fake her way through a police interview, confident she’s disposed of all the booty after Marc called to warn her of their impending arrival, but her smug smile disappears when they turn up items she’d forgotten. Nicki screams with panicky despair as she’s handcuffed and hauled away. Marc is branded as a rat by the media, because after being arrested, he carelessly told the cops about his accomplices. But once arrested and indicted, Nicki treats it all like an audition as she tries to decide on the perfect outfit for a court date, and the infamy their arrest brings them is registered by Nicki only as the fame she’s always planned for. She’s interviewed for the Vanity Fair profile, fending off her mother’s goofily agreeable attempts to interject and add details, irritated that Leslie keeps trying to get in on her media moment. The law, historically arranged to powerfully favour property owners and now carefully tailored to the needs of modern consumerist society, falls upon the kids with such heaviness that they become exactly what they would never seem to be: martyrs for the sake of offended people of wealth. Concluding shots of Marc being hustled away with other orange-jumpsuited convicts, strike a surprising note of melancholy, the awareness that the fun and games have ruined lives, and the slightly bitter volte face that notes that a bunch of dumb kids have been hit with the full force of law.
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Given the quality of The Bling Ring, it’s hard to admit, but also certain that the film doesn’t always sustain its best ideas: the observational sharpness that defines Nicki, Marc and Laurie doesn’t touch the other characters. Coppola’s last two films bear signs that she’s trying annex aspects of the more aloof, pseudo-objective filmmaking that art house figures have leavened in the past decade or so. But this affectation works against her own best qualities as the Molière of San Fernando, capable of both smiling as a ruthless satirist but also offering expansive empathy and cinematic expressivity. Nonetheless, to a great extent, Coppola’s decision to pare back standard dramatic development helps emphasize the film’s sociological qualities, the precise sense of how aspects of modern youth culture are branded; thus character is expressed through the accumulation of affectations rather than actual personality.
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Broussard, Chang, and Farmiga are excellently naturalistic, whilst Watson leaves behind Hermione Granger here in playing the most polar opposite temperament her age bracket could offer, giving a convincing performance as a merrily vain moon unit. If the last sight of Marc suggests surprising tragedy, Nicki, bound to emerge from every situation as the winner because she’s been programmed to, rounds off the film with unsurprising gall. She’s last seen being interviewed about her arduous 30 days in prison, relieved by the fact that the girls’ idol and robbery target, Lindsay Lohan, was in the same boat, and leaves off with a plug for her website, NickiMooreForever.com.