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| Yes, it's another look at teens as materialistic jerks. |
More than a few people have drawn a line between The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers (click
here for my review), and there’s certainly something to that. Both are teen
crime dramas that tread similar thematic ground involving the materialistic
vanity and icy ambivalence of a generation brought up on social media and
reality television. Both come from the A24 Films and feature former child stars
breaking bad. Hell, both even contain show-stopping, single-take robberies from
an exterior vantage point.
However, while the two make for interesting companion
pieces, they are far from the same film. Spring
Breakers, as James Franco put it in his trolling review over
at Vice “is all subtext, bitches.” It’s a lot less concerned with story
than it is with making its critiques and creating a surrealistic experience. As
such, it’s not for everybody. And by everybody, I mean most people.
The Bling Ring
isn’t for everybody either, but it’s certainly more accessible than Spring Breakers. It’s based on real
events, and so there’s more of a story to tell. It revolves around a group of privileged
So-Cal kids who manage to steal over $3 million worth of property from the
homes of celebrities like Paris Hilton, Audrina Partridge and Lindsay Lohan before
getting caught, simply by having the balls to walk up and check if the doors are
unlocked.
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| The Bling Ring has a mansion robbery in which all the action happens while the camera holds this shot. |
“I think we just
wanted to be part of the lifestyle – the lifestyle that everybody kind of
wants,” explains Marc (Israel Broussard), a gay kid with self-confidence issues who
happens to be the lone guy in the titular Bling Ring. The group also consists of
chilly ringleader Rebecca (Katie Chang), wild child Chloe (Claire Julien) and
fame-obsessed sisters Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga).
Acting across the board is uniformly solid, but best in show
is Watson, who, unlike Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens in Spring Breakers, stakes a strong claim for herself as a serious
actress. This is about as far away from Hermione Granger as one can get, and
Watson all but disappears into the role, totally nailing the cadences and mannerisms
of Alexis Neiers, her character’s real-life counterpart who eventually capitalized
on the fame of the robberies and became a reality TV star. If you jointly consider her work here and in This Is The End, Watson may have somehow managed to be the most amusing woman in film this year.
Very little effort is put into explaining the members of the
Bling Ring or even in developing them much as characters, but that’s
intentionally done as a way to hold viewers at a distance. One can imagine a
movie that gives these kids more shading, painting them as victims of the
oppressive consumerism that people like Hilton and Lohan help perpetuate, but
it’s hard to believe Sofia Coppola (Lost
in Translation, Somewhere), a
writer/director with a Luis Vuitton line bearing her name, would hold the fashion
industry accountable like that.
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| The film hints at an intriguing generational divide when it comes to celebrity preoccupations. |
The script does make room to
sympathize with Marc, and that has intriguing gender implications for sure, but, for the most part, these characters are a vapid lot focused almost exclusively
on self promotion and social standing. They spend an awful lot of time taking
selfies and posting them to Facebook to achieve a sort of validation for their
experiences, and it’s interesting that the emotional climax of the movie comes
in a moment when Marc realizes Rebecca has defriended him. It’s the devastating flip-side of the last scene from The
Social Network.
Other than self-actualization through social media, obsession
with celebrity lifestyle is the main focus here, and that’s unsurprising given
Coppola’s oeuvre. Perhaps in part due to her standing as Hollywood royalty,
Coppola has long made an auteur go of dissecting the concept of celebrity from
various angles.
Interestingly enough, despite their fixation on trash
culture, the characters in The Bling Ring
don’t do much celebrity worshipping. That – the movie suggests – is how the
former generation responded to famous people. In one scene, Nicki’s mom (Leslie Mann) annoys her daughters with a
vision board dedicated to Angelina Jolie. When she asks them what they admire
about Jolie, the quick retort is “her husband,” which indicates exactly where
these girls’ heads are at – not on what makes Jolie a celebrity, but on the
spoils that celebrity brings. The film ultimately suggests societal preoccupations
are being warped, and we now have an entitled and vacuous generation that is far
more concerned with recognition than achievement. B+
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