Murray shines in Coppola’s wistful, funny father-daughter story
With many Bay Area movie theaters still closed, film fans may be looking for viewing experiences that are better suited to small screen, home viewing. On the Rocks, which is available to stream on Apple TV+ today, is the perfect film to watch from the comfort of your living room. Writer/director Sofia Coppola has crafted an intimate, tightly constructed character-driven story that doesn’t need the multiplex treatment to be enjoyed.
Coppola re-teams here with Bill Murray, her leading man from 2003’s Oscar-winning Lost in Translation. In that film, Coppola channeled Murray’s melancholic, wry persona to an Oscar nomination, and she may do so again in this second project. Murray is at his sardonic, world-weary best here, as Felix, the wealthy playboy father of the worried and exhausted Laura (Rashida Jones). Felix’s natural charm and unabashed flirations with women of all ages belies certain regrets and sadness. Murray plays Felix as a lover of life who tries not to dwell on past mistakes unless forced to, preferring instead late night jaunts in his Alfa Romeo with caviar and champagne. He’s adept at using his long history of connections and good will to ease his way out of traffic tickets and cajole his daughter into unwise travel.
Those jaunts and that travel are the main elements of Coppola’s spare screenplay, which is thin on plot, but rich with character. Laura, a novelist with writer’s block and a harried mother of two, starts feeling unexciting and frumpy when her husband Dean’s (an underused Marlon Wayans) professional star begins to rise. As he spends more time on business trips and with attractive colleagues, Laura can’t help but think he may be having an affair (why, for example, is a woman’s toiletries bag in his suitcase?). When she shares her suspicions with her father, Felix is quick to fear the worst, and engages the reluctant Laura in the kind of covert surveillance of Dean that normally would be left to more capable private detectives.
The plot is slight, yes, but it yields some moments both cringeworthy and laugh-out-loud funny. And its real purpose is to let Murray showcase his low-key, dry delivery, which are off the charts fantastic here. He and Jones have a lived-in, realistic chemistry, and we absolutely buy them as father and daughter. The film’s climactic scene, in which Laura confronts her father about decisions from his past that have weighed heavily on her, seems tailor-made for an Oscar clip, but deservedly so. To see Felix’s nonchalance crumble under Laura’s raw emotion is to see Murray masterfully showcase a dramatic depth that only few other directors have been able to bring out to great effect (see Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, for example).
Jones, of course, has the unenviable task of holding her own against Murray, but she acquits herself well, and brings a lived-in authenticity to Laura that often is startling in its veracity. Laura feels like someone we all know, and her relationships – with her father, her husband, her kids, and even the other parents at her kids’ school – are conveyed with the sort of distracted dispiritedness many of us will easily recognize.
Speaking of the other parents at Laura’s kids’ school, Jenny Slate has a small but hilarious role as an exceptionally self-absorbed acquaintance of Laura’s, who obliviously talks Laura’s ear off every time she sees her. Annoying and narcissistic, Slate’s character is an effective counterpoint to both Laura and Felix, two warm and loving souls who are struggling to do right by each other, despite their flaws, both perceived and imagined.
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On the Rocks, an Apple Original Films and A24 Release, opens today in select San Francisco Bay Area theaters, and is also available on Apple TV+.
