the Virgin Suicides: (1999) *SPOILER ALERT* Right out of the gate, Coppola gives us a film so perfect, so gorgeous and hypnotic, so evocative of difficult truths about the darkness of adolescence, that if she were Harper Lee, everyone would say that Truman Capote wrote it. It's like Huston with the Maltese Falcon: the skills and mastery, and, more dumbfoundingly, the self-assurance, are already there on the maiden voyage.
In fact, this may be her best film to date. In subsequent ventures, she keeps hold of the skills, the imaginative and varying use of technique, the great framing, the inspired casting, a flair for period detail, the flawless choice of music, but she loses the strong backbone found in a great story. This is the only one sprung from a strong novel (by Jeffrey Eugenides), and she's translated it brilliantly into her own vernacular. In her following ventures, the stories will be more fluid, drawn from biography (Marie Antoinette) or from current events (the Bling Ring). Even Lost in Translation, so beloved by many, sees any greatness emerge not from strength of story but from the chemistry between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, between Johansson and Coppola, and between Coppola and Tokyo.
The Virgin Suicides brings to life a sleepy suburb in a late '70s summer, the lazy, mesmeric soundtrack slapping up against an impending sense of doom symbolized by the sickness of the trees in every yard, and the felling notices posted to them. The mystery at the film's heart, the crippling malaise which pulls the girls to their deaths, is never addressed outright, as the boys who grew up obsessing over it never figured it out themselves. Coppola gives us glimpses enough, though: the oldest sister tossing off a comment about being "raffled off" among the football players as Homecoming dates, the youngest sister counting the number of species declared extinct in the year. After the "stone fox" Lux (Kirsten Dunst) is courted, seduced, and abandoned by the school's heartthrob-stoner Trip (Josh Hartnett), she becomes addicted to rousing male desire. The boys who idolize these girls, including Trip, interviewed as an adult in rehab (Michael Pare), use the memory of them to keep alive a dream of romance, whereas the girls themselves have discovered the rot of impossibility at its core.
Marie Antoinette: (2006) Coppola has a strong vision, along with the confidence and technical prowess to display it rather wonderfully before us. That vision, as communicated here, seems to be about how much fun it is shopping, partying, giggling and gossiping with one's girlfriends, and gleaning affection from ugly little lap-dogs when it can't be found from one's husband or in one's surroundings.
As the movie continues, at its own, assured pace, the question seems to become a phenomenological one: what really is worth one's effort? All the agony Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst again) undergoes to master the absurd niceties of the French court and to bear the requisite children, and yet we are in the privileged position of knowing that all her successes will come to nothing. What, then, is worthwhile? She eventually achieves the affection and sex she wants from her husband, finds sexual passion with a Swedish soldier, and some simple contentment in amateur theatricals and on her own miniature farm. Her passion results in nothing but memory, her girl-friendships come across as ultimately shallow and worth very little, and even her final, noble gestures, like standing by her husband when she might still bolt for safety, or bowing before the slavering mob, they both seem, in the end, without much merit beyond the symbolic.
So Coppola isn't giving us a clear answer, unless it's that the journey is the point, and the destination always death, one way or another. Truth be told, she seems to lavish the most attention on the buying of shoes and wearing of fineries, as if that is where her heart really lies.
She has such magnificent abilities, in other words, and apparently no story worth telling.
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