Sofia Coppola was given an extremely hard time when her father, the once great Francis Ford Coppola, put her in the third and very disappointing instalment of his Godfather trilogy. “Nepotism” was the word used, though, oddly, it’s seldom mentioned when successful – no one complained about nepotism when Tim Robbins cast his longtime-love Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking, for instance.
At any rate, Sofia Coppola has now followed her father into directing movies, and she’s a better director than actor, though The Virgin Suicides, her first movie, has notable flaws alongside its real achievements. The movie is visually appealing and Coppola Junior draws some affecting performances from much of her cast, but her script is thin in places and some of her characters underdeveloped.
Based on Jeffrey Eugenides’s acclaimed novel, the story revolves around the Lisbon family, which is blessed or cursed with five daughters, one of whom is busy committing suicide as the movie begins. The girls’ seductiveness for the local lads is counterbalanced, or perhaps enhanced, by their parents’ – particularly their mother’s – rigid and repressive Catholic morality. You know, the kind that equates libido and the devil, permeating all sex or even the merest hint thereof with guilt. Mr and Mrs Lisbon are ordinary, decent, caring – and quite horrible.
Coppola depicts this stultifying domestic regime with finesse, supported by great performances from Kathleen Turner and James Woods as mom and dad, and with a keen eye for the details of Catholic kitsch.
Coppola gives a strong sense of the whole milieu, surrounding the tragedies of the Lisbon family with the susurrus of gossiping neighbourhood voices and the chatter of television reporters. Kirsten Dunst is excellent as Lux, the oldest of the Lisbon girls – her name means “light” (in Latin), and she is often bathed in luminosity, seeming almost diaphanous in the fantasies of the dazzled boys. Josh Hartnett, as her chief paramour (the delightfully named Trip Fontaine), perfectly captures his rebellious character with a rock-star walk and Prince Valiant hair.
Where the film fails is in its portrayal of the four boys who are so enchanted and haunted by the Lisbon girls. One of them is the guiding voice-over, but we’re never sure which one; they are insufficiently individuated, never emerging as real characters in their own right, which rather blurs the focus of the movie. One keeps getting confused between them, unsure whether the boy who has an awkward dinner at the Lisbons near the start is one of the four or not, and uncertain as to how those four overlap or don’t overlap with the quartet finally allowed to take the girls to the homecoming dance.
If we are meant to identify with these passionate observers, letting their consciousnesses shape our reactions, we should have more to encourage and anchor us. The mystery of The Virgin Suicides is inadvertently displaced from the sad girls on to these blank boys, and we come out of the movie with a feeling of something missing. And not just in Mr and Mrs Lisbon’s hearts.