Sofia Coppola’s career behind the camera began aged 17 with Life Without Zoe, a thin slice of Big Apple whimsy that she co-wrote with her father Francis (who directed it) and that formed part of the 1989 portmanteau film New York Stories along with shorts by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. The Coppolas’ yarn, about a precocious, Chanel-wearing adolescent girl, was widely agreed to be the weakest panel of the triptych. Combine that with the damning reviews she received the following year for her callow performance in The Godfather Part III, which also takes place in New York, and it is easy to see why Coppola has never set one of her own films in that city.
Until now. On the Rocks represents a homecoming to the place where her filmmaking career had its faltering start. It follows the template of her hit Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray again playing a witty sage who dispenses advice and consolation to a younger woman (Scarlett Johansson in the earlier movie, Rashida Jones here) unappreciated by her husband. But the indulgent affection for upper- middle-class Manhattanites, the presence of jazz on the soundtrack, the May-December pseudo-romance (Murray and Jones play father and daughter but keep being mistaken for a couple and even pose briefly as lovers) and the caper-like plot all suggest a Woody Allen bagatelle rather than one of Coppola’s trademark bleary daydreams.
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