Coppola should get respect an auteur deserves

Award-winning filmmaker with distinct world view, sensibility creates more than ‘girlie’ movies Sofia Coppola is the most celebrated U.S. filmmaker under 50.

Writer-director Sofia Coppola, fortune’s child, is blessed and cursed for reasons beyond her control. Is it an advantage or disadvantage to have a supportive, larger-than-life father who is a world-famous filmmaker?

While it’s no stretch to rank Coppola alongside Kathryn Bigelow as the two women with the most longevity on the movie industry’s A-list, it should be noted that on the basis of six features she’s directed since 1999, she’s the most celebrated American filmmaker under 50. (Paul Thomas Anderson is the only other contender.)

She won an Oscar for writing Lost in Translation and a New York Film Critics Circle award for directing it. She received the Gold Lion award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival for Somewhere and was named best director at Cannes for her 2017 remake of The Beguiled, the dark comedy of manners inspired by Don Siegel’s overwrought male gothic.

Coppola is a true auteur — a filmmaker with a distinct world view and sensibility and a personal set of quasi-autobiographical interests. Where Bigelow works in genres that have been dominated by men, Coppola’s are, to use her own term, “girlie.” Her protagonists are generally strong-willed women, whether as individuals ( Marie Antoinette) or in groups ( The Virgin Suicides, The Bling Ring, The Beguiled) or as part of an older man-younger woman pairing ( Lost in Translation, Somewhere). Drawn to father-daughter situations, she is at work on another — her current project, On the Rocks, is about a young mother (Rashida Jones) reconnecting with her playboy father (Bill Murray).

Her characters are typically privileged, often afflicted with ennui, if not affluenza. Her movies are usually set in protective, even rarefied surroundings: comfortable suburbs in The Virgin Suicides, exclusive hotels in Lost in Translation, a boarding school for young women in The Beguiled and Versailles in Marie Antoinette.

Having grown up as Hollywood royalty, Coppola, 47, takes these insular worlds for granted. The prologue to her oeuvre is the script she contributed to a short directed by her father in the 1989 anthology film New York Stories; its star, an adorable, doted-upon schoolgirl (Heather McComb), lives with her of- ten-absent parents at the Sherry-Netherland hotel and rewards a homeless man with chocolate kisses. (The prevailing message, Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review, is “more or less Marie Antoinette’s.”)

On the other hand, no director has greater access, emotionally or physically, to the rich and famous. It’s hard to say which is more remarkable, Coppola’s ability to do extensive filming at Versailles for Marie Antoinette or Paris Hilton’s mad narcissism in letting Coppola use her home as a major location for The Bling Ring, a movie about the actual burglarizing of Hilton’s home by a gang of well-off, star-struck teenagers.

The Bling Ring is uncompromising in its portrayal of banality and shallowness. In a sense there hasn’t been anything quite like it since Andy Warhol filmed Edie Sedgwick in Poor Little Rich Girl.