Film review: The Bling Ring

Sofia Coppola’s latest and highly publicized film, The Bling Ring, is hard to critique, but not due to its lack of flaws (for it has many). It has more to do with the film’s ambiguous nature.

The movie centers on a group of teenagers who came to be known as The Bling Ring in Calabasas, California, once they robbed the houses of affluent celebrities. Perhaps you’re familiar with the news stories of 2008 and 2009. If you’re not, here is the unnecessarily long story short: A new kid named Marc (Israel Broussard) moves to town. He wants to fit in, but ends up fitting in with the wrong crowd. His new friend Rebecca (Katie Chang) drags him around, and eventually convinces him to break and enter into Paris Hilton’s house. They rob her. They party. Soon, their other friends become involved. This includes Nicki (Emma Watson), Sam (Taissa Farmiga), and Chloe (Claire Julien). Together, they rob Paris Hilton again, as well as a bunch of other celebrities, including Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson, Audrina Patridge, Orlando Bloom, and Lindsay Lohan. They party some more. Rebecca and Marc almost get caught. When they don’t get caught, they rob some more. Eventually, all of the teens do get caught. They are convicted and serve time in prison (some more than others).

The characters of The Bling Ring are unintelligent, vapid, and irritating, but they are nothing if not real. The ringleader of the bunch, Rebecca, is at times so unbearable to watch that I was holding my breath until she left the frame. Either the real Rebecca Lee is an a horrible human being, or Katie Chung is a terrible actress… come to think of it, maybe it’s both.

Most of the entertaining lines in the movie come from Emma Watson’s character, the ditziest of the bunch. She has some great one-liners, including: “I want to rob” and “I’m a firm believer in karma.” My personal favorite Nicki moment occurs when Marc is freaking out because he realizes he has been caught on tape.

Instead of showing any sympathy for him whatsoever, she exclaims, “You’re stressing me out!” before taking a drag from her cigarette.

Fabulous.

As for Marc, I couldn’t help but pity him, especially in the end. He was the only one who felt any remorse for his actions and who tried to stop his partners-in-crime from going too far. However, my sympathy is probably due to the movie’s portrayal of him as a loner boy who got caught up in something that he was ill-prepared to handle.

I had to remind myself that these characters are real people, especially when I felt infuriated at their careless actions. So instead of being disgusted at the director’s choices, I felt disgusted with humanity, which I think is even worse. The characters might have been relatable had they not been well-off to start with, but I suppose that’s what makes this story so pertinent: in today’s culture, nothing is ever good enough. It was not enough that The Bling Ring was rich, they had to become famous, too. Moreover, their pure narcissism did not allow them to consider the possibility of getting caught until it was far too late.

As for the film’s cinematography, it’s hard to find a reason to complain. Christopher Blauvelt and the late Harris Savides did an incredible job mastering a movie that is purposefully empty. Most of the scenes are slow-building, exuding a dreamlike quality and focussing on the characters’ limited perspective. This fits in well with Coppola’s direction, as she aims to expose The Bling Ring without outwardly condemning them. She simply documents life like it is, which is the mark of a great filmmaker. As an audience member, I appreciate not being told how to feel; that is Coppola’s greatest accomplishment with The Bling Ring. However, I find it hard to have any strong opinion about the film. It was kind of funny. It was kind of sad. It was mostly unsettling. Unlike the year’s earlier Spring Breakers, which also exposes corrupted youth culture, The Bling Ring sits firmly in a middle ground of ambiguity and thus does not allow the audience to have much fun. Whereas Spring Breakers is an entertaining guilty pleasure, The Bling Ring is difficult to relate to. Strangely enough, only the latter is based on true events and real people.

The Bling Ring is aesthetically pleasing and true to its time, but the film could have been a mere 20 minutes long had Coppola spared her audience long scenes with little to no dialogue or action, when the characters exclaim “Oh my God!” at clothes or take photos of themselves in lavish clubs. To be fair, the dialogue and the photo-taking is so accurate it hurts – I just wish there was more going on to compensate.

Coppola captured the empty, materialistic obsessions of the over-sexualized millennial generation and portrayed today’s youth with harsh accuracy. The Bling Ring was definitely not bad … but Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers did it first, and did it better.

But hey, who cares … we all paid to see Emma Watson play Paris Hilton and drop it like it’s hot, didn’t we?