Sofia Coppola’s latest film On the Rocks contemplates the compromises of marriage.
“And remember. Don’t give your heart to any boys. You’re mine. Until you’re married. And then you’re still mine.” Bill Murray’s instantly recognizable voice launches Sofia Coppola’s latest film On the Rocks to a black screen as he dispenses these words of wisdom to a skeptical young daughter. The scene opens on two lovers stealing away from the reception on their wedding day.
Several years and two children later, wife Laura, played by Rashida Jones, has given her heart to this boy. Early one morning, after husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) creeps into their bed after returning from a business trip to greet her with an affectionate kiss before heading off once more to work, she lies awake wondering: was something off about the kiss?
The question clearly nags at her as she goes about her day: dropping the kids off at school, hurriedly chatting with the other moms, stumbling through a morning of writer’s block. Later, she finds a woman’s body oil kit in her husband’s suitcase before rushing, exhausted and disheveled, to a business work function where she meets Dean’s associate manager, the young, tall, beautiful Fiona, who gushes sympathetically over her amidst a sea of awkwardly silent co-workers.
Though Dean has a ready answer for the body oil, which does in fact turn out to belong to Fiona, Laura can’t help but feel suspicious. Finding little insight and facing fear of judgment from the women in her circle of family and friends, she turns to her father (Murray), a smooth talking jet set art dealer who knows the city like the back of his hand and makes friends wherever he goes. He shows up and whisks Laura into a whirlwind mystery adventure, tramping all over the city to spy on Dean in between cocktails and deserts at some of Manhattan’s finest establishments, bonding with his daughter over marriage advice and a taste of the high life she’s been missing while cooped up with the kids and slaving over an unresponsive word processor.
“You’ve got to start thinking like a man,” he tells her. This advice seems to appeal to her as she considers her other options. Wearily tolerant of the impracticality of the other moms at her daughters’ school who chemically burn their faces off for their looks and naively fall into affairs, and guarded towards her impeccable sister and grandmother who tag team her with admonishments about her casual appearance and questions about the attractiveness of Dean’s work associate, Laura struggles not only with the written word but to find a solid definition of her femininity, her role in the marriage, and ultimately of herself. You can feel her frustration as she swaps her younger daughter’s princess shoes for more practical sneakers, advises them on prioritizing strength over beauty, or foregoes morning intimacy with her husband as the children call for her. When her father arrives, he brings with him the feeling of someone she can count on to usher her through this rut.
Clues of an affair begin to stack up: a lack of texts from close work colleagues whom she knows text him constantly; a work trip on her birthday; a possible purchase of jewelry which she never receives; a last minute trip to Mexico. Laura’s father perpetually drops pearls of wisdom about the nature of man: the evolution of sexual attraction as a function of breasts that look like haunches; the primordial drive to dominate and impregnate all females; monogamy and marriage as a concept of property. As he convinces Laura to drop the emotional filter that he believes is keeping her from seeing the objective truth of the situation, he and Laura dive deeper and closer into some intimate and revealing conversations about the philandering that ended his marriage. Meanwhile, he’s flirting with every ballerina and waitress in town, and waxing poetically about the moments when he knew that he was falling in love with Laura’s mother.
At one point her father drags her off to a cocktail party at the home of some Manhattan socialites where he knows there to be a Monet that reminds him of her mother. Before he secrets her away for a clandestine viewing, an older woman imparts some worldly and perhaps suitably cynical marriage advice of her own, likening marriage to a bank account where, after many years of making deposits, you build enough interest to start making withdrawals. As the trail of clues leads to a climactic confrontation, and as Laura begins to untangle what it is that her father sees in women as he continues to offer justifications for why men stray, she asks him for the foil: how a woman maintains her attractiveness to a man. He responds that it is confidence in her affect on him. Laura’s perception of her own sense of power in her relationship begins to shift as she realizes that men cheat out of a crisis of confidence in themselves.
Director of photography Phillipe la Sourd hides city lights in depth of field, presenting shadow-and-light compositions and glorious location shots in a fetching display of why 35mm remains relevant in an industry that relies increasingly on production streamlining and the marketable timing of content relevance. Kudos to director Sofia Coppola for presenting a vision of womanhood and of man’s redemption that, though it may involve compromise, sacrifices neither feminism nor femininity, and to Rashida Jones for balancing the role with introspective certainty. Though the emotional arc suffers a bit from flattened curve syndrome for lack of high drama, it’s more than offset by the pacing, with twist after twist pulling the psychological mystery of a possible affair into more of a city-wide and globe trotting adventure, and the expertly navigated internal struggle of the characters, not to mention the sheer ephemeral delight of watching Bill Murray engage the camera, the art world, and everyone else that falls into his orbit.
The tradeoff between emotional arc and the pacing of the adventure here differentiates On the Rocks from Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 masterpiece In the Mood For Love, whose characters conduct an emotional (and arguably, ultimately consummated) affair while wondering whether their partners are cheating on them. In In the Mood For Love, the characters catapult from denial to longing to guilt in the narrow spaces between their apartments and an alley leading to a noodle shop, where in On the Rocks, Laura navigates her emotional response to the same question, but in a much wider geographical space, joining her father in a journey that temporarily frees her from the internal headspace of work-at-home mother. In both films, the question of the affair is never resolved onscreen, although the evidence seems overwhelming. In Wong’s version, the characters go through all the paces of emotion as if suffering the Khubler-Rossian cycle of grief, while the pacing falls off a bit in the third act. Here, it’s the opposite — Laura remains grounded almost to a fault, and though the protagonists in both films are engaged in non-sexual partnerships while being seduced by a cynical view of marriage, Coppola’s version of seduction involves giving in more to practicalities and realism than passion and longing. Both, ultimately, hint at an aching sense of triumph through compromise, and perhaps loss.
That both films ultimately land on compromises between an idyllic view of marital fidelity and femininity and the more seductive view parallels themes found in a handful of films shot on 35mm and released in 2020. Of the ten such films, four, including this one, were directed by women — a powerful showing in a traditionally male dominated field. The others: Wonder Woman 1984 (directed by Patty Jenkins), Radha Blank’s 40-Year-Old Version, and Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman) feature women navigating the razor blade of compromise between their success and their desires, their visions of themselves as artist, and their sexuality and sense of power over their lives in a world that may prefer to see them as victim. That this past year’s crop of woman-directed films should reflect the compromises that women must make in order to achieve success, whether in their careers or in their relationships, and especially in a year that saw more women displaced from work by childcare responsibilities in a pandemic, seems to at last begin to scratch the surface of women finding their voices in this medium. Let’s hope that this trend leads to more uncompromising artistic triumphs in the future.
