On the Rocks

by Julian Spivey

Photo: A24/AppleTV

Director: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Rashida Jones, Bill Murray & Marlon Wayans
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 hour & 36 minutes

Ever since I heard writer/director Sofia Coppola and actor Bill Murray were re-teaming for a movie it’s been at the top of my most anticipated movies of the year list.
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Their first collaboration 2003’s “Lost in Translation,” Coppola’s second feature film and breakthrough, is one of my favorite films of the last two decades.

“Lost in Translation” earned Coppola an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and she became just the third female ever nominated for Best Director at the Oscars at that time. Murray’s performance as a has-been actor in Japan to film a whiskey commercial who befriends a young and lonely new bride garnered him the only Academy Award nomination of his career.

I really identified with “Lost in Translation,” which truly captures the feelings of boredom, loneliness and just being a fish out of water. Some of these feelings Coppola captured once again in her 2010 film “Somewhere,” which I quite enjoyed as well.

The latest teaming of Coppola and Murray, “On the Rocks,” is certainly the lightest of the three Coppola films I’ve seen thus far, but nevertheless a really good watch – and because of the lighter quality toward it may be the most accessible to a wider audience than “Lost in Translation” and “Somewhere.”

Where as some viewers may have found the storylines to “Lost in Translation,” and especially “Somewhere” to be slow or boring there’s more of a chance that the fun father-daughter on a stakeout storyline of “On the Rocks” will appeal to more folks.
In “On the Rocks,” Laura (Rashida Jones) is a writer, mother of two and wife to a husband (Marlon Wayans) who’s away on business more and more lately. Their relationship has grown a bit stale and when he returns from a London business trip with a woman’s toiletry bag in his luggage, she suspects that he’s having an affair. To get a man’s perspective on it she asks her playboy father Felix, who definitely believes her husband is cheating on her.

Laura and Felix end up tailing Dean, the husband, to figure out the truth of whether or not he’s having an affair and truly sets up the best parts of the film. Murray is as charming as he’s ever been on film, likely even more so than his Oscar-nominated turn in “Lost in Translation.” The father-daughter chemistry Murray and Jones have is pretty terrific, especially because you can always feel the love between the two, while also Laura’s disappointment in her father’s philandering always hanging in the air through Jones’s performance.

I would really like to see Jones have more leading roles in films, especially dramedies of this sort. She’s mostly done television work (good work at that) throughout her career, but really belongs more on the big screen. There’s a realness to her performance here that just shows me she can really crush a mixture of drama with some humor thrown in.

Ultimately, “On the Rocks” is certainly worth watching for the onscreen chemistry of Murray and Jones and Murray giving one of the best performances of a now 40-year film career that definitely has many highlights. “On the Rocks” isn’t likely to be the awards darling that “Lost in Translation” was (although it appears to be a slight year for film with the pandemic doing so much damage to theaters and film releases) and it’s not at quite the substance level of Coppola’s earlier modern masterpiece, and it’s certainly a film that shows off a bit of an upper-class privilege to it that might not be of interest to some, especially this year, but the leads make it a breezy, fun watch.

“On the Rocks” is streaming on AppleTV+.