But he is lucky in comparison to Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga) who are homeschooled by Nicki’s mother (Leslie Mann) in the spiritual wonders of New Age self-help The Secret nonsense. Whether he is on drugs or freaking out about the cops closing in on the news, his parents at most give an obligatory knock at the door to ask, “Is everything all right,” before carousing the downstairs for food. Main character Marc (Israel Broussard) continues to own fancier and more fabulous brand name clothing that his parents seem to ignore. But how can you make anything but that when your subject IS the superficial? Coppola goes to great pains, in her own selectively subtle way, to highlight how each of these upper middle class-to-rich kids live with absentee parents. Coppola’s recount of this stranger-than-fiction tale about a group of bored Beverly Hills high schoolers who did their shopping in the empty homes of Paris Hilton, Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan and several other celebrities has been accused of being superficial. The Bling Ring, which first premiered to mixed buzz in Cannes last month, is a fascinating film about the vapidity found at the bottom of a frappuccino cup. But perhaps the most interesting attempts to reflect on this shift came in A24’s sister-projects, which try to contextualize millennials and youth culture to wildly varying results: Harmony Korine’s glitter bomb of a movie, Spring Breakers and Sofia Coppola’s now nationwide opening The Bling Ring. Not exactly directors with interchangeable sensibilities. Does it feel like any existential crisis has changed the conversation, much less the way lives are led? This sense of entitlement is so ubiquitous that filmmakers as varied as Martin Scorsese and Michael Bay felt the urgency to comment on it in their 2013 offerings. Consider that five years ago, the global economy nearly was liquidated. A dirty secret that is more than whispered it is screamed from the mountain (or skyscraper) top and heard like a ringing bell throughout a culture whose apathy is the closest thing to consent imaginable. It is but a formality to what we all expect we are owed for existing. One no longer needs greed to drive ambition. It is simply a state of being a part of the American lifestyle. Sure, Stone attempted to revive his anti-villain in an overly sympathetic 2010 sequel, but the truth is that Gekko’s unapologetic uber-capitalism mantra does not properly convey life in the 21 st century. Yet, over 30 years later that line no longer really applies. It is perhaps the greatest irony that so many took Gekko’s words to heart not as a dire prophecy of the direction American life was headed in, but as an inspirational quote to earn, earn and earn. Their seemingly endless array of bling and fabulosity isn't just a lure for a band of high-end thieves, but it also calls into question their own complicity in a culture that celebrates labels, money, and luxury.In 1987, Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko famously decreed, “Greed is good.” Written to be a modern day imagining of Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost, Oliver Stone created Gekko to be a warning of what he saw as the newly burgeoning greed and evil consuming the trading floors of the Reagan years. (Though it has to be said that Coppola's sometime use of webcams to capture the characters' narcissism is virtuoso.) No one comes out unscathed here, not even the celebrities who are ostensibly crime victims. Watching it feels like going on a high-octane shopping trip and then heading home, bags filled, and realizing that your credit cards have yet to be paid. Its main characters keep the audience at a remove, so we're left to observe but not really understand, let alone care, about who they are or why they've done what they have.Īs commentary, The Bling Ring is pretty interesting, if not very deep.
The bling ring movie#
But this movie doesn't have the heart of Lost in Translation, the compassion of Marie Antoinette, or the pathos of The Virgin Suicides. Or at least lives more fabulous than the teens' already privileged existence.
It transports the audience to a world in which California teens can cherry-pick everything they've lusted after from the homes of their idols, whose privacy they've breached in search of the fabulous life. THE BLING RING, like the rest of director Sofia Coppola's filmography, is an intoxicating, beautiful ride.
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