'Somewhere' review: Compelling look at celebrity

Drama. Starring Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning. Directed by Sofia Coppola. (R. 97 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

The question about "Somewhere" is whether anyone will like it for the right reasons. That is, for pure reasons, for how it was intended. Or will they enjoy it for the way it allows them to press their noses to the glass and see how the other ... not half, but privileged sliver-of-a-percentage ... lives?

For 15 minutes, this new film from Sofia Coppola is blase and deadpan, slightly precious and not particularly interesting. The movie follows a scruffy fellow played by Stephen Dorff as he goes about his life. He tests a sports car. (Coppola shows us lap after lap after lap). He watches twins do pole dances in his hotel room. (Coppola gives us two whole pole dances.) Whenever he steps outside, women smile at him, even though he looks like an unshaven slob. One wonders why, and then the reason is revealed. He's a movie star. As in a big one, like bigger than Stephen Dorff. More like Brad Pitt, when he was single.

With that revelation, "Somewhere" suddenly becomes riveting. But do we actually care about this man? Do we feel sorry for him when he calls his ex-wife weeping about how he's "nothing" and "not even a person"? Maybe we do, if the "we" in this case includes other movie stars and people who travel in that world. But I suspect most other people will think, gee, too bad, huh? What a hard life, poor baby, having to talk to the press and have sex with lots of women and accept all those awards and all. It must be a living hell.

This is a winning formula for Coppola, all the more winning because it's arrived at sincerely: First she shows us people who are enormously well off. Then she assures us, lest we begin to resent them and, by extension, her, that every one of these people is absolutely miserable. What's more, she gives us enough specifics, in terms of manners, mores and functional details, that we completely understand why they easily could be miserable. After all, it gets stuffy in those hotel rooms, and it's a little irritating having everybody laugh at your jokes when you're not funny or jump into bed with you just so they can gossip about it later. There are worse and more dignified ways of being unhappy, of course, but in a way that's part of the misery, too. That's part of feeling like you're "not even a person."

Elle Fanning plays the star's 11-year-old daughter, another child of privilege in the Coppola oeuvre (like Marie Antoinette) and another witness to the inside world of celebrity (like Scarlett Johansson in "Lost in Translation"). Forced by circumstances to stay with him for a few weeks, she lives in the various hotels playing high-end video games, travels with him to Milan to promote a film, and wakes up to have breakfast with his latest one-night stand. She stares daggers at her father across the table.

The emotion in "Somewhere" is diffused, as if the characters are feeling things but not completely, not as other people feel them. There's a disconnect or a distance that perhaps comes from overstimulation. To have access to everything means to feel less, and to have so many people in one's life and so much distraction and so many temptations of the ego and the flesh is to find oneself on the outside of normal things, like family. Personal relationships just doesn't mean as much, even if you want them to, or need them to.

Indeed, it could be a disservice to Coppola to believe that she wants us to care about this father and daughter and we don't. Coppola's ambitions may not be so conventional. I suspect her real intention, and what she reinforces stylistically (and what she could never admit on a talk show, or else people will get mad at her) is for us to watch this relationship from a cool distance and observe where it's real and where it's distorted, to see it as a modern-day curiosity with some residual human elements.

Whatever the intention, "Somewhere," in its odd, detached way, is compelling viewing.

By the way, did you know that, if you're a big shot, and you check out of a hotel, you don't have to pack your bags? You don't even have to have an assistant pack your bags. The hotel will do it for you and store your stuff until you come back. Impressive.

-- Advisory: Sexual situations, nudity, drug use and strong language.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle