Review: On the Rocks
All ice and no Suntory whisky.
The image of Bill Murray eternalized by Lost in Translation is on weak ground in director Sofia Coppola's uninspired New York version of her first movie. The dramatic structure remains the same – a lonely woman in a marriage, a charming older father figure and a husband that seems to have an affair. While Lost in Translation offered an image of loneliness immersed in the distance of Tokyo, On the Rocks happens in the characters privileged fugue of New York.
The plot of On the Rocks is illusionary. There is no tension of wanting to know what happens next. From the first moment you know that Laura, played by a trudging Rashida Jones, does not really care if her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) is having an affair. She cannot focus on her book which we know nothing about and she feels unsexy thanks to the strain of motherhood. Dean comes and goes, and the tiny amount of lingering suspicion is poofed out with Laura's father, Felix's (Bill Murray) entry.
On the Rocks treats Bill Murray with reverence, at certain moments with too much reverence. His cauliflowered face gets a lot of dull dialogue that almost seems like it's pieced through the trivia section of a newspaper. At one point Bill Murray is singing a song on a Mexican beach which is when I started to wonder, what's the point of the whole thing? On the Rocks is the film equivalent of lounge music, it looks good, doesn't require too much attention and nothing happens in the end while still retaining essential qualities of a film. It's the kind of movie that you can half-watch while you're scrolling through an endless feed or even take a nap and see that you missed nothing.
The only merit of this movie that it has a singing and talking Bill Murray, everything else is glass and ice to his Suntory time.