The Bling Ring

Spring Breakers is my favorite film of 2013 to this point. It is a film that still gets at me when I least expect it. I think about it often and I find myself wanting to talk about it more and wanting to watch it again and again and again. I am not saying that The Bling Ring is having the same effect on me, but there is something similar there. Thematically sure, they are films about bored teenagers obsessed with being someone they are not, so they go to extremes to distance themselves from their boredom through illegal means. Both casts are loaded with attractive people and the characters all do love their drugs. There is a message in both films about modern youth culture, with Spring Breakers certainly pushing it much further and much darker. The Bling Ring might be scarier though, because, well it actually happened. There really was a group of bored, young, well off white kids who broke into the houses of celebrities and stole 3 million dollars worth of stuff. Now, how much of the movie is fact is up for debate. The one actual criminal from the Bling Ring who is talking about it says it is mostly fiction. However, there are details the movie gets straight from what happened. How you ask? Well, social media. Yes, these kids were posting pictures of themselves in the designer clothing the stole, flaunting the cash they stole and posting about how they were big time. Also, because they are teenagers, they could not keep their mouths shut about what was going on. At least, that is how it seems.

Marc (Isreal Brussard) is the new kid at a high school for kids who have been kicked out of other high schools. His crime was never attending class. He quickly forms a friendship with the super bored, and very trendy Rebecca (Katie Chang). Chang is hosting a party at her house and she and Marc leave the house and start trying to see if any people left their cars unlocked with cash in them. This is how it starts. Soon, Marc and Rebecca are entering the house of a friend of Marc's who is on vacation. Rebecca steals a purse and a car. Once they get away with it, the stakes get raised and Marc and Rebecca find out where Paris Hilton lives through Google and through celebrity gossip sites they discover when she will be out of town and before you know, they are in her house robbing her of small things, and hanging out in her house. Before long they are bringing friends along. Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga)are best friends and basically sisters. Emma's mother (Leslie Mann) is a religious nut who home schools the kids and preaches around the basic principles of the book the Secret. Nicki and Sam are too busy trying to be models and too busy reading up on celebrity gossip to notice and they are easily roped into being a part of the Bling Ring. Chloe (Claire Julien) is a disaffected youth who is seriously too cool for everything until she becomes part of the ring of teenage thieves. Together these girls burgle Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr's place, Rachel Bilson's home, Audrina Patridge, and they enter Paris Hilton's home countless times to drink, do drugs, grind on her stripper pole and rob her of thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. Once they hit Aurdina's house things start to go a bit sour because Audrina releases security footage, but since no can see the faces, Rebecca pushes for more. She cannot stop herself and Marc, who has never had such a close friend, is powerless to stop it. Rebecca's biggest goal is to get inside Lindsay Lohan's place. She worships Lohan's style and attitude.

The Bling Ring is a fascinating and excellent portrayal of a celebrity obsessed youth. It is an incredibly in the moment film that shows the reality of desire. These kids desire something more so they just take it. It is the same message examined in Pain and Gain earlier this year. These teenagers had information at their fingertips, and a lack of moral center. They saw this stuff as being neglected by the stars, so they decided they should have it. It made them super fashionable and made it easier to get in all the great clubs and get bottle service and be noticed by all the right people. In real life the Nicki and Sam characters had a short lived E! reality show that happened during the arrest and trial. By trying to achieve fame, they achieved infamy. These teenagers became a huge story, got an article written about them and now have a movie made about them, and none of them are too happy about it. These kids cannot make money off their crime, so in the story, the names of the characters are changed. Their motives are purely superficial. For Marc, he always felt unattractive. He was constantly comparing himself to how celebrities looked and by upgrading his wardrobe by robbing these people, he started to feel as attractive as the celebrities. Rebecca was purely bored by her life. She wanted to add something to it and these robberies sufficed. She was manipulative of her friends, but when the excitement came crashing down, she thought she could outsmart it. Nicki uses her moment of fame to try and rehabilitate herself. She talks about charity and how she wants to learn from the mistakes. Her platitudes are insincere as she mugs the camera trying to always be the center of the light.

Sophia Coppola is kind of obsessed with aiming her lens at the celebrity culture. She examined it in a few ways in Lost in Translation and it was very much the focus of Somewhere, but here, she is getting flack for not digging deep enough, for making The Bling Ring much more of a face value kind of movie. I do not understand the criticism. I find that she aims her lens deeply into this bored white culture. The dialog is minimal, but when the kids speak, it is often with a shocking apathy at what is going on. Everything is chill, everything is okay, when in reality, nothing is chill and everything is certainly not okay. The non-linear structure of the film feels like false drama right at first, but as the film builds upon the interviews that are spliced with the scenes, everything unfolds in this great logical way. An early scene shows Marc trying on a shirt and being unsure of if he should button it or not and he is not pleased with how he looks. This scene, in that moment feels like a throwaway, but as the voice over interview comes on and Marc talks about feeling uncomfortable in his skin when he compares himself to famous people, the entire scope of this character comes into stark focus. We see his motives clear as day. He is not as cool as he wants to be and all of this stuff makes him cool. He takes pictures with the hot girls at the cool clubs wearing the cool clothes. This is exactly what he wanted. He is somewhat our point of view character, but he never once elicits sympathy. In fact, none of the characters do. They are all very loathsome. The actors are all good, with Emma Watson being a clear standout. She takes over the film when she gets going. Her Nicki is certainly the most interesting of the group because Watson is magnetic.

Coppola's cinematographer, Harris Savides, passed away before the film was finished, so the film is dedicated to him, but the man who picked up, Christopher Blauvelt, does an excellent job. The film looks stunning. There are two just absolutely incredible sequences that are so brilliant because of how they are shot. When Marc and Rebecca are robbing Audrina's house, the camera is stationary and at a wide angle and it just sits there. The entire scene is in one take and we hear nothing, and only see the two characters as they are running in and out of room. We see them in night vision and right before the scene ends, the camera slowly zooms in. It is an incredibly effective moment. My heart was racing through the entire scene. Another one comes not much later as Rebecca and Marc are driving late at night and the camera is behind them with almost completely obscured vision as it focuses on the road which we only see through the headlights. The entire scene the two are talking, but it is so hard to focus because we can barely see anything. I kept waiting for them to crash, or for them to swerve, but no everything goes exactly as they planned. It is a haunting wonderful moment.

The Bling Ring lets the audience make up their individual minds about what is going on here. Do you feel sorry for the famous people who had a few purses stolen when they have an entire room full of them? Is it the violation of privacy that rubs you the wrong way or perhaps just how reckless these teenagers are with the possessions of other people? Who is to say. Everyone is probably going to get something completely different out of it. I was shocked at how easy all of this was for them. There was essentially not a single moral issue raised. None of the characters really stop to question if this is something they should be doing. It was just what they did. Rebecca wanted Chanel and Rachel Bilson had it, so they went and took it. It was just that simple. None of the parents had any clue. In fact, Nicki's mom was about the only parent in the lives of any of these kids and she was so out of touch with reality that she never noticed what was happening. Is this an indictment on the parenting of these bored white teenagers? To a certain extent, yes it probably is. Now bored white teenage movies are not new. Havoc is a truly terrifying look at rich bored white teenagers, but this is a real story. The Bling Ring was this big story that swept popular culture for months. Without any hesitation these kids entered the homes of other people and just took from them. Does the fact that many of the houses were unlocked say something about the entitlement of the famous? Does it make a statement about how they feel above everyone else? Who knows. The Bling Ring is not out to make easy assumptions or give us easy answers. What fun would that be?

Final Grade: A-