It ain't worth a thing...

This is a review of The Bling Ring (2013)

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22 July 2013 (revised 7 August 2019)

This is a review of The Bling Ring (2013)

Afterwards, someone was heard describe this film as immoral. It is unlikely that she meant that The Bling Ring (2013) should have been a documentary, but, if she thought that it glorified shameful behaviour ‘inspired by true events’ (as the credits coyly put it), maybe she would have been happier with one : ot might have been less exultant in the burglary / trespass scenes, and, except in a film like The Imposter (2012), could have given greater emphasis to the victims and the sentences delivered…

The Bling Ring did not succeed as an account of matters as a feature film, because there were far too many flaws. For example, people (repeatedly) enter Paris Hilton’s house without her knowledge and, when not scanning through her possessions, smoke cigarettes – whether or not she smokes, is its lingering scent not going to be a strong indication to said Hilton that all is not as it should be, even if care had been taken to dispose of the ash and the butt (somehow unlikely, as this question was not addressed) ?

In another scene involving cigarettes, when Nicki (Nicolette ? played by our own Emma Watson) is in Marc’s (Israel Broussard's) bedroom, hiding a lit one behind her back when the door is opened by his father is not – unless he has no sense of smell – going to conceal anything. She must hide the cigarette because she is not meant to be a smoker or to smoke there, but it makes no credible sense : if someone opens a door into a room where someone else is smoking, it is obvious.

It is as if someone who has no notion of what a cigarette actually is (or of its taint) has observed behaviour and then represents it in the script without knowing what it means. The same is true of how Hilton’s house is depicted. Say 'Aladdin’s Cave', and you would not be far wrong, even down to the guessed means of entry being a substitution for the overheard password – once one is in, one can have and do what one wants, as it is the forty thieves who are the ones looking around…

Hilton, apparently, arranges everything neatly in pairs on racks by colour, no more pairs than there are spaces, and everything else on a hanger and in its place, with a room for this, a room for that. (But no one lives in to maintain this order for these stars, who are without exception methodical and ordered just in this way – apart from having no security, when they look concerned to have everything just so.)

Every other female icon’s house entered is conveniently somewhere we are meant to believe that she lives alone (no live-in staff to prepare that hot meal or snack when she comes in, no alarms, and safes left open), and Hilton even goes off on a trip and leaves her tiny dog behind. Credible, or just a passing resemblance, not thought out beyond how wealthy people might live if really wanting to show these youngsters nosing around and taking a few representative items ?

It’s either insulting to the audience’s intelligence to think that this – although it may be straight from the glossy pages of the celebrity magazines, with which ‘the adventurers’ busy themselves – in either case, is this how these people live their lives or is the film only aimed at those in the audience who would buy into the gang as it invades stars’ homes, but they are none the wiser ?

If so, then Sofia Coppola is too in love with her own vision, and has traded many forms of credibility for the reality that her invaders have nothing much better to say all the time than a wretched O my God !. From this point of view, a film like Spring Breakers (2012) is more honest – here are scantily clad young women doing scandalous things, and there is no moral, but maybe it’s convincing.

In Coppola's film, keys to cars get casually taken, but what happens to the cars themselves (or even the keys) is, as with cigarette smoke and ash, casually ignored. So, early on in Rebecca’s (Katie Chang's) acquaintance with Marc* (whom she certainly chose not for his charms, but to exploit), she asks if he has any friends whose parents are away. On impulse, when they leave that friend’s house, she drives them off in the family car (Car B), with no reference to what happened to the car that she earlier turned up in outside the school to take them there (Car A), both plastered with her fingerprints.

This makes no sense at all on even slight examination : Car B (and where they dispose of it) is a pretty big clue to the home location of the thieves, and to the possibility that the house where it had been parked was burgled first (or, as they say in the States, burglarized !), since it will have been clear that car-keys were used to drive it away.

Unless Rebecca is entitled (by absentee parents) to drive Car A (Marc also magically has a car, though never shown driving before, when he drops her at the airport), the location where it came from also links those who take Car B to it (where Car A is still parked : even if Rebecca had been allowed to drive it, she has abandoned it there, rather than getting Marc to drive it back).

Cozily, it all goes along with Marc the only one who seems to be a bit edgy about what they are doing, although he has his fair share of OMGs, until some injudicious boasting about who has been where (which widens the circle of those in the know), and the initially relatively cautious limit of taking only what might not be noticed missing is abandoned, with paintings lifted from the wall and carried through the gates.

Some star, at last, has invested not in shoe-rack no. 38, but some CCTV, although it seems operated by security staff who think that turning up and apprehending those who have made an entry to their employer’s property is beyond their remit. (The other stars, with as many racks as shoes, must have been in the I-cannot-spot-an-empty-space category, because the outrageous red heels that Marc enjoys sporting (except when his mother is at the door) would scarcely just get overlooked.)

And so it all unravels, and the intermixed Vanity Fair interviews (the media seem to have given the gang its title) leave us uncertain as to what has already happened in the rest of the story. Is the epilogue with Nicky a surprise ? Not really, as the possibility had already presented itself when Marc and Rebecca spoke at the airport, and, by then, the core group of five’s actions were widely known (or even witnessed).

I know little more than anyone brought up on American crime-drama about how plea-bargaining really works and interacts with clear evidence that someone participated more than he or she claims, although any such evidence is going to come from others whom he or she has implicated and who, necessarily, are on the other side of the divide. (Puzzlingly, Rebecca, for all that she seems savvy, waits until the police find stolen items on her before she offers to locate where everything is.)

How who was found guilty of what I do not know, but, cannily, we were spared a court-scene by the expedient of the doors closing and reopening for sentencing. (Presumably a full trial, which would have had to identify these awkward issues.) What does seem apparent was that there was no remand prior to trial, and no prohibition on the gang-members (no doubt for a fee, which would help with restitution) speaking to the press. (For what it is worth, I cannot see the latter being allowed in a case such as this in the UK.)

As to the dialogue, it was not astoundingly bad, but it has to be said that, of all the leaden lines, leadenly delivered, by far the highest percentage came from the mouth of Ms Watson (who also sounded, sometimes, as though she came from The Bronx rather than anywhere near The Bay). She was not, though, helped by the editing, which several times left the ostrich eggs of her utterance exposed in mid-air – to plummet and crash.

The evaluation reportedly made of her performance by Baz Bambagoyne beggars belief, if only on these counts alone. There was nothing that home-grown talent could not have brought to the role of manipulating a home-schooling mother, full of wise saws and inculcating the right image, but incapable of seeing that her adopted daughter, Nicky and their sister were out all hours, snorting coke.

Altogether, never high on the credibility states on many counts, but, as I have already said, those seeking a vicarious thrill of rifling through Hilton’s things – rather than those who have little idea who she might be – could probably and happily have swallowed all the imperfections of what someone doing so inspired.

End-notes

* NB there is not even a whiff of sex between him and any of the four main girls in ‘the ring’, despite copious amounts of dope and of snorting cocaine. Maybe that was something to do with the BBFC certificate that was sought…