Mark Reviews Movies: ON THE ROCKS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2020

The premise of writer/director Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks is the stuff of screwball comedy, filled with big personalities and assorted complications and various misunderstandings. Even while going for comedy, the filmmaker takes a more restrained approach, fascinated, not by the overall scenario or isolated comedic situations, but by the characters, their strained relationships, and the melancholy mood of unfulfilled people avoiding what has brought them to this point. The film is still a screwball comedy, yes, but it's played in a minor key.

As contradictory as it may seem in terms of generating laughs and treating these characters' problems with sincerity, that approach works. Coppola walks a fine line here, facing simultaneous jeopardy: to let the humor be overshadowed by the story's more serious concerns and to allow the characters' genuine pain to be undermined by the laughs. In the end, that contradiction feels like the point.

We're supposed to take the characters and their anguish seriously, but we're also meant to see how much of that current aching is self-inflicted or caused by old aches left unresolved. These characters aren't to blame, because the pain is real, but that's no excuse for allowing it to grow and fester as long as it has.

Our first visual introduction to characters and a relationship comes in a scene of immediate post-marital bliss, as Laura (Rashida Jones) and Dean (Marlon Wayans) sneak away from their wedding reception to enjoy a private swim in a pool. The very first impression, though, belongs to Felix (Bill Murray), Laura's father, and his relationship with his daughter.

His voice plays over a black screen during an unseen conversation with Laura. "You're mine," he says with affection and, after a short pause, "until you're married." Following a slightly longer beat, Felix concludes, without losing any of the affection but gaining a bit more severity, "After that, you're still mine."

Years later, Laura and Dean have entered into a comfortable state of domesticity in a New York City apartment. They have two daughters, one in grade school and the other possibly about to enter pre-school.

Laura is a writer, currently not working on a book she already has sold to a publisher. Her life has become a routine—taking one kid to school, listening to the drama of other mothers, sitting at her desk doing nothing, bringing the other daughter to activities, getting the kids to bed, going to sleep, starting the whole thing over again.

Meanwhile, Dean runs a company of his own making. It's succeeding, and that success means multiple business trips across the country and overseas.

The starting point of the drama-played-as-comedy is when Dean returns home late one night from one of those trips. He gets in bed, kisses Laura, and then looks surprised to see and hear his wife on the other end of that affection.

It could be nothing—just exhaustion from a long flight and some medication to calm his nerves. It could mean something—boredom with her, another woman, a lot of love and happiness down the drain.

Laura doesn't want to believe the latter, but the suspicion is mounting. The return of Felix, after another trip for his business as an art dealer, certainly doesn't help. He is a cad—the abandoner of a family, a womanizer extraordinaire, a guy who can't help but flirt with every woman he encounters, an opiner of some outdated notions about men and mostly women—but a charming one, at least. The question is if Dean is a cad. Since it takes one to know one, Felix is basically convinced and sets out to prove it to Laura with a little old-fashioned spying.

The resulting plot, which has Felix imposing himself on Laura's love life and taking her along for the ride (literally in a few instances), could have been played with a high level of wild energy. Coppola, though, insists on keeping it mostly grounded. The humor here occasionally may come from the outlandish lengths the wealthy and free-from-responsibilities Felix takes to prove his suspicions (chasing a cab through the city in his tiny, red, and mechanically faltering convertible—leading him to deflate a police stop without a lick of effort—and arranging a trip to Mexico with Laura to keep an eye Dean's business—or "business"—trip), but it's mostly about the characters.

Coppola's approach feels as breezy as a screwball comedy, primarily because the lead characters are so solidly defined in their personalities and the conflicts that emerge from the clashing of attitudes. The standout, obviously, is Murray, given more than plenty of opportunities to bite down and chew upon Felix's devil-may-care charm and/or arrogance, depending on how much one admires or despises his personality and how far one is willing to excuse either trait for the other. Jones serves as a fine straight woman to Felix's antics, while also communicating the character's assorted conflicts in regards to her thoughts about the two main men in her life (The film's final scene does double duty—answering the final question about Dean's faithfulness and offering a symbolic assertion of Laura's own to one of these men).

For all of the jokes and setpieces, though, what elevates the film's comedic aims is Coppola's focus on the long-standing sadness and current vulnerability of these characters. Laura's is obvious—from issues stemming from a beloved but troublesome father, to her uncertainty about her husband, to her feelings of coming up short in her own life. On the Rocks also makes some room for Felix to be deeper than his outward manner, genuinely mourning the loss of a lover and acknowledging, in his own indirect way, how badly he messed up things. After all, just because something is funny doesn't mean it has to be a joke.

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