Somewhere

Coppola does a watered-down paraphrase of her own LOST IN TRANSLATION to more middling effect – Dorff and Fanning are so good inhabiting a believably awkward but compelling father-daughter dynamic that it is almost tempting to raise the score for them alone, but there really is not enough substance to the Dorff character to make much of the surrounding drama inherently compelling, outside of rather cliched observations of the corrosive nature of L.A. life. Some good set pieces (the opening car racing laps was a perfect curtain raiser) and the charisma of the stars keep it watchable.