"Somewhere" (2010) review

I’ve often cited Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) as one of my favorite movies. I’d never dug much into Coppola’s other work, so imagine my delight to discover that she’s made another movie, Somewhere (2010) with a similar premise.

I excitedly got to watching it, but was ultimately disappointed. There’s room for two movies to have similar premises, but Somewhere takes that to another level. It’s functionally the same film.

The macro/themes are the same – disengaged, burned-out actor stays long-term at a hotel. A young woman comes into his life with whom he feels a genuine human connection. She helps break his sad routine and rediscover joy. One is in Tokyo, one is in LA. In one the woman is a much younger stranger, in the other his daughter.

But overarching story aside, even specific scenes are strongly derivative:

• There’s an absurdist foreign interview of the lead in each.
• Both heavily feature scenes of characters lying in beds.
• Each has meta-scenes of leads watching TV.
• Both include a scene of another woman sleeping over with the lead, and the awkward morning after interaction with the young woman about it.
• There are scenes of the characters swimming around in upscale hotel pools.
• Each has a scene of the lead watching strippers.

I understand having a few callbacks in there to the filmmaker’s previous work, but this is something else.

Lost in Translation is clearly the distantly better movie. My takeaway is that although it had a good script, Bill Murray and the overwhelming chemistry between him and Scarlett Johansson carried that movie. Switch out those two leads, and it’s very possible that like Somewhere, almost no one would have heard of it.