The Bling Ring is a pervasive examination of the rise of instant celebrity through reality TV and paparazzi-captured scandal. Inspired by the real life Hollywood Hills burglaries, Sofia Coppola focuses her film about vapid teenagers robbing celebrity homes for status on Marc, a self-conscious gay teenager. He becomes best friends with Rebecca, a rebellious seasoned burglar, when he enrolls in a last chance high school. He's inducted into the party life and is taught to fund it through theft. Rebecca starts him on unlocked cars and works him up to mansions belonging to Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom. They sell whatever they don't want to keep and snort whatever can be crushed into a powder.
Sofia Coppola has a wealth of shallow characters to work through in this film. Aside from paranoid Marc and sociopath Rebecca, she focuses a good chunk of the film on the delusional Nicki. Nicki (Emma Watson in a masterful comedic performance) is obsessed with celebrity. She's home-schooled by her mom using the curriculum in The Secret and parties every night to try to grab the eye of just the right person to give her instant fame. Her mother hands her and her sisters Adderal like it's Pez throughout the day. Nicki is a total mess and that makes her the most compelling character in The Bling Ring.
The Bling Ring commits hard to the instant fame/reality TV glam lifestyle of the characters, which can make it a trying experience. The characters are just so superficial and ignorant. For everything they do right (walking backwards towards houses so cameras can't catch their faces), they do something really stupid (touch every shiny surface in every house they rob). Once the characters are all introduced, the story spins its wheels for the better part of an hour. You just can't sustain momentum in a film about people so lacking in depth, famous only for their frivolous crime spree with no strategy involved beyond hitting empty houses.
Without a counterbalance of substance somewhere in this kind of story, it becomes an exercise in preaching what the audience already knows. The wannabe Marc, Rebecca, and Nickis of the world aren't going to seek out a biting social critique of the reality TV generation, while the audience open to this kind of social critique is going to expect a much more nuanced take on the story.
Coppola intentionally spins The Bling Ring in place to point out how ridiculous the circumstances are. There's at least a laugh in every scene and the transitional device of real paparazzi shots and tabloid stories about celebutantes behaving poorly raise the discourse just enough to call this satire. The Bling Ring, by intentional design choices, lacks the structure or variety of emotional or narrative content to fit together as a film.
Rating: 4/10
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