Review: The Bling Ring

Young Israel Broussard is brought into the fold of a group of vacuous teenage girls (Katie Chang, Emma Watson, Taissa Farmiga, Claire Julien) who go online to read the whereabouts of various celebutants (Paris, Lindsay, Rachel Bilson, etc.), and turn up at their houses when they are out of town. There they hang out, goof off, and steal. The cops seem awfully slow on the uptake here, but you know it won’t be long before their larcenous exploits see them in a world of trouble. Leslie Mann plays the spaced-out mother of one of the girls.

 

This true story could’ve made for an interesting and enjoyable motion picture. Instead, writer-director Sofia Coppola (whose “The Virgin Suicides” and “Lost in Translation” underwhelmed me) gives us a vacuous film about vacuous people. That’s not clever, it’s stupid and entirely pointless. Welcome to the emptiest film of 2013. Aside from the fact that one of them is a bloke, one of them is Asian, and one of them is Emma Watson, the characters are empty, interchangeable non-entities whom at no point does Coppola make an attempt to understand or give depth to. I don’t think Coppola was trying to be ironic in making a shallow film, I think the biggest clue to what Coppola has done here lies in the fact that some of it was filmed in Paris Hilton’s house, and the formerly relevant celebutant has a cameo in the film. It says everything you need to know about Ms. Hilton (one wonders what the other celebrity victims think about all of this being dredged up on the big screen), but it also seems to reveal that Ms. Coppola is really just giving us an empty, superficial film for the celebutant-obsessed crowd, and not out of some self-reflexive irony, either. The only ironic thing in the entire film is the casting of Emma Watson as one of the young hooligans. Watson is, although also an actress, a Gen Y fashion icon/celebutant herself.

 

Is Coppola trying to say that these young criminals idolise the celebrities? I don’t think they really do, as they are stealing from them. They want their clothes and their lifestyle, but that doesn’t really mean that they idolise the celebutants themselves. I doubt the real-life girls were actual fans of the people whose property they stole. That’s an overly simplistic cop-out, trying to blame the vacuous celebutant culture for the actions of this youngsters. These kids are crims, not every young celebrity in this modern pop culture has a criminal record. Emma Watson, for instance. What these twits really wanted was the clothes, the material things that these celebrities/celebutants have. And they stole from them. There’s plenty of youngsters out there who idolise rich celebrities, and they don’t all steal, like these kids did. There should be a reason for that. By seemingly not realising this, and by not fleshing out who these kids are and why they are the way they are, Coppola has presented us with 80 minutes of less than nothing. That it could’ve potentially been something is really quite aggravating and frustrating.

 

There’s one line in the film that seems to explain the motivation of the characters (I won’t spoil it), and the fact that Coppola thinks that one line is enough, is disgraceful. Similarly, Watson’s big speech towards the end is pathetically unconvincing, and surely not based on truth. She gets another speech at the very end that’s almost as dumb and unbelievable too. None of these characters are likeable, distinguishable, nor do they have a second dimension among them. Disaffected youth has never been so…empty. “The River’s Edge” it ain’t.

 

Coppola also refuses to show much of how these delinquents managed to get into these homes, for the most part, which is infuriating. The break-in scenes get awfully repetitive after 30 minutes or so. Meanwhile, true story or not, nothing about Leslie Mann’s performance in this film remotely convinces. She plays a complete moron in such caricatured fashion that it almost has the film playing this real-life situation filtered through “Mean Girls”, but minus any laughs whatsoever.

 

What a stupid, empty non-film. I’m sorry, but Sofia Coppola is not a good filmmaker at all. I find her films elusive to the point of emptiness and this one’s not even elusive, just empty. One of the ten worst films of 2013, for sure.

 

Rating: D