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Peasants

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

The Bling Ring
dir. Sofia Coppola
115 minutes

Seven years ago, Sofia Coppola made a movie called Marie Antoinette. Spoiler alert: at the end of the movie, Marie Antoinette gets robbed in a pretty major way. The peasants storm the château, ruin her stuff, make off with her head. We don’t get to see the revolutionaries lopping the chandelier from the ceiling, just the shot of a bunch of crystals in pieces on the ground.

A couple years ago, a handful of upper-middle-class teenagers burgled the homes of Hollywood people like Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, and Audrina Partridge. Then, on a tip from a classmate who heard them bragging about stealing Rachel Bilson’s shit, they were arrested. Nancy Jo Sales covered the hullabaloo for Vanity Fair in an article called “The Suspects Wore Louboutins”; in the full-length book that came after the article, she compared the teenagers’ thievery to the 18th century peasants who stormed Versailles.

Coppola must have noticed the connection. In The Bling Ring, the chandelier is back up, sparkling over a rack of cocktail dresses and Louis Vuitton jewelry cases as a small gaggle of girls (plus one boy) scavenge for treasure in Paris Hilton’s mansion. Our contemporary Marie Antoinettes appear in a montage of pixelated TMZ snapshots. The peasants take selfies and put them up on Facebook with captions like “Who’s stepping out with me tonight :)” and “Wanna smoke a bluuunt?”

First: The Bling Ring has more than a few funny moments. The comedy, intermittent though it may be, is the product of the actors, most of them unknowns, who spout marblemouthed adolescent blandishments as if programmed to do so. “That’s chilllll,” they say. “I love Chanellllll.” “So hottt.” “Ooh, this is Balmaainnn,” the raspy blonde coos, holding a gunmetal dress up to her abdomen. Watching these actors interact with each other produces the same effect as listening to teenagers talk on subways or park benches: contact embarrassment and intrigue.

They drive to the beach, yelling over Rick Ross’s guest spot on “9 Piece”. They smoke their joints dramatically, shuffle around to EDM in six-inch heels, insult each other’s outfits or tell each other they look sooo hotttttttttt. They are the children of Laguna Beach and The Hills, only less wistful and more nihilistic. You could wreak serious havoc with characters like these.

As an interpretation of a piece of journalism in a glossy magazine, the film is only sporadically faithful. Quotes are reproduced verbatim, and the narrative progresses much in the way Sales documented it — Marc (Israel Broussard) meets cute, troubled Rebecca (Katie Chang), Rebecca introduces Marc to celebrity kleptomania, more people get involved, everyone gets caught, Marc spills the whole story. But for readers of the Sales story, something is missing.

One major element of the original Bling Ring story absent from the movie is the reality television factor. Alexis Neiers, the young woman who appears as “Nicki” in the film and whom Emma Watson plays, was being filmed for an E! reality show called Pretty Wild at the time of the burglaries, though for reasons that had nothing to do with the burglaries. Her apprehension and trial were major plot points on the show. Real-life Neiers, as she appears on Pretty Wild, is actually kind of fascinating. She’s a mess, an addict, a model who saunters around her house with her “sister” Tess, both girls exuding a sexuality that is, in a single word, terrifying.

Everyone knows that reality television isn’t real. Neither are movies. Still, in the vacuum of unreality, movies have the ability to take the idea of a real person and further animate it, tell another side of the story, make that person even more real somehow. The Bling Ring misses this opportunity. Coppola’s version of Neiers is Watson looking cold and brittle in a pink Juicy sweatsuit, executing one excellent spin around a stripper pole that looks like it took three weeks to perfect. Her reality television background is nonexistent; the only camera that follows her around is the camera on her own iPhone.

So if you’re receiving the story firsthand from Coppola, you probably wouldn’t catch anything significant about the delusional nature of reality TV, nor would you know about the complications of Marc’s status as the rat of the investigation. You’d just see the stuff. So much stuff.

The first two-thirds of the movie are devoted to the stuff. The dresses, the gilded bracelets, the piled-on necklaces, the pillows with Paris Hilton’s face on them, the crystal bottles of vodka, the rolled-up wads of cash stuffed in leather trunks and metal cases, the Ziploc baggie of cocaine, the pistol on Megan Fox’s fiancé’s nightstand. It’s all so shiny and beautiful. It turns the audience into magpies. It made me want to go shopping.

We rarely see any of the kids do anything with the stuff. The few scenes when they do — when the crew’s ringleader smiles to herself in the mirror through a mist of perfume, when the initially hesitant Marc tries on a pair of Hilton’s hot pink heels and falls in love with them, when one of the tertiary characters picks up the gun and briefly becomes a maniac—are magic. The rest is just stuff.

Maybe the problem is the lack of suspense. We all saw what happened to the kids. The Antoinettes became victims and received their restitution. Between Sales, Pretty Wild and TMZ, there are no unknowns. Even when a story’s out there, a handful of explosive characters can make for a good story. Coppola defuses them. We know these kids are shallow, vapid, superficial. That’s why we want to watch them. It’s too bad the movie, which could have been dynamite, doesn’t rise above those same descriptors.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the king. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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