The Bling Ring (2013)

Starring: Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Emma Watson, Taissa Farmiga, and Leslie Mann, with cameos from Paris Hilton and Kirsten Dunst
Grade: A-

Rebecca’s confidence pisses me off. I haven’t wanted to punch a teenager this bad in years. Did you really think you could get away with stealing Paris Hilton’s dog?

Summary

On a quiet night in Hollywood, California, five teenagers are seen breaking into a house of a celebrity and robbing them blind. Through the credits we see how the group is very influenced by social media and how they are eventually caught, with Nicki (Watson) getting interviewed and talking about how things are a learning lesson and how she wants to run a charitable organization or a country in the future.

One year earlier, Nicki and her best friend Sam (Farmiga) are awakened by their mother Laurie (Mann). The teenagers got in late from partying the night before, but the optimistic Laurie wakes them up because she homeschools them, along with their little sister Emily (Georgia Rock). Elsewhere, the quiet Marc (Broussard) heads to his first day at the “dropout school” Indian Hills High School. Being the new kid, he has to deal with this initial awkwardness and uncomfortable treatment from other kids until Rebecca (Chang) introduces herself and shows him around. He talks about how he’s from Agoura Hills and how he got kicked out of his last school for having too many absences, which is why he’s here. She has no problem in saying that she got kicked out of her last school for having drugs. She invites him to the beach after school with Chloe (Claire Julien) driving. While sitting and smoking on the beach, Rebecca talks about how she wants to graduate so she can go to the Fashion Institute of Design and later have her own show and everything. Marc talks about wanting his own lifestyle brand. After some other friends from school walk over and ask Chloe if she’s going to some party later, Rebecca tells Chloe and Marc that her mom and her mother’s “douchey husband” are out of town if they want to come over later. At the party that night, Marc and Rebecca hang out in her room. As they look through some fashion magazines and talk about their ambitions in New York, Rebecca says her mom is out a lot because she runs a chain of student tutoring centers, which is ironic as hell considering she’s at Indian Hills. Marc’s mom doesn’t work but his father works for a film distribution company. They do a lot of work overseas.

Later during the party, Rebecca asks Marc if he wants to “check some cars”. He goes with her but doesn’t know what she means. Basically, it’s the two going up and down the street of a neighborhood and checking to see if any car left their doors unlocked so they can steal money. That night, they get about $400.

We cut to Vanity Fair journalist Kate (Annie Fitzgerald) interviewing Marc about when he first met Rebecca, how he dealt with a lot of self-loathing and anxiety issues, and how he never felt like he was an “A-List” looking guy.

After school one day, Rebecca gives Marc a ride and she asks if he knows of anyone who’s gone out of town. Marc mentions how he’s been talking to this kid named Evan who went on vacation with his family to Jamaica. He lives in Woodland Hills. Rebecca talks about how she went into an unlocked house a few weeks ago and nabbed a bunch of cash, so they head over to the house. The backdoor is open, so Rebecca walks them in, despite Marc starting to freak out. They grab some money and even steal a car upon exiting. Following this, they go out and buy a bunch of expensive clothes and enjoy the rest of their day, capping it all off with Marc taking a picture of Rebecca as she drives the stolen car. Later, Marc, Rebecca, and Chloe meet up with Nicki and Sam at a club, with Marc meeting them for the first time. This is where Chloe points out that Nicki’s family took in Sam at the age of three, but she doesn’t know what happened to Sam’s mom. As Nicki talks about how Jude Law has been texting her and Kirsten Dunst is spotted, club owner Ricky (Gavin Rossdale) comes over to greet them because Chloe is dating him. Ricky tells Nicki there are some photographers there from Fashion Week and how she might want to meet them. After Marc spots Paris Hilton and is excited, they party and take pictures the rest of the night.

The next day at school, Marc brings Rebecca some coffee and we hear through the voiceover that Marc loved Rebecca almost like a sister and considered her the first person to be his best friend, which only made things so hard, foreshadowing the future.

During one of Laurie’s home school lessons to her girls, she talks about “character development”, the Laws of Attraction, and how they need to be careful who they hang around with because they become the average of those people. The girls aren’t taking the lesson very seriously, but Laurie is trying. Meanwhile, Marc and Rebecca are hanging out and Marc is searching for celebrity news. He sees that Paris Hilton is hosting a party in Las Vegas that night. Rebecca has Marc search Hilton’s address, and they decide to try and break in. Rebecca thinks Hilton would probably leave her keys under the mat, and she’s actually right. They break into Paris Hilton’s house! Marc is a little nervous about the whole thing, but Rebecca convinces him to continue on through the house with her. They search through the luxurious house, take what they can, and even go through Hilton’s night club room. Before they leave, Rebecca has Marc take a picture of her playing with Hilton’s phone. The two go to a party and meet up with Nicki, Sam, and Chloe and tell them about it while Rebecca shows off the priceless bracelet she stole. They’re all astounded as to how they pulled it off, but Marc tells them how it was easy it was since the key was right under the mat. They can go back whenever they want. They just have to see when Hilton is going out of town next. They all hang out and the girls try on clothes, with Marc giving them advice on what works and what doesn’t. At the same time, he sees on the internet that Paris Hilton is hosting a party in Miami. Nicki turns to Rebecca and says she wants to go to Hilton’s house because “I want to rob”.

Next, we cut to Nicki being interviewed by some unknown figure after they got caught where she lies through her teeth, saying she didn’t know what they were doing and she thought they were her friends.

Going back to that night, the group breaks into Paris Hilton’s house again. They try on and steal clothes, jewelry, makeup, and whatever else and party in the night club room and get drunk. Eventually, they leave and party at the club, celebrating another exhilarating night of robbing the rich and famous. As time moves on, the group can’t stop. They continue their criminal habits and expand further into different houses and celebrities, which only leads to a tragic downfall for the teenage troublemakers.

My Thoughts:

The life of the rich and famous is an attractive one. For those in the teen phase of their lives, it’s everything. No matter what part of the country you live in, there will be a time in your life when you think about how awesome it would be to a beloved movie star, a musician loved by millions, or a celebrity of any kind. It’s about being seen, not having a care in the world, and satisfying the expensive tastes you may have before life hits you in the face in your early 20s. This craving for attention and to be considered a person of status is something that consumes the younger generation and is only intensified if you’re from Hollywood or neighboring cities because the possibility of this happening increases exponentially if you find yourself in the right situation or with the right people. On that note, fame can still happen if you meet the wrong people just as well. Based off the real-life story covered in a Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins”, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring depicts these true events about a group of carefree, party-focused teenagers whose obsession with the celebrity lifestyle results in them making criminal decisions that affect them for the rest of their lives.

For those who don’t live in the West Coast, the lifestyle of those who grew up in that environment are vastly different from anywhere else in the continental United States. If you showed this film to anyone from the Midwest, South, or parts of the East Coast, they would say aloud, “You see? That’s why those kids are fucked up”. Our principal cast of characters are the epitome of this. First, there’s the shy, lonely, and impressionable Marc who just wants to fit in at the resident “bad kid” school, and the smart and low-key devious Rebecca, who can sense Marc’s relative innocence and uses it to her advantage, basically starting them on their path to prison. Then, you have the household of Laurie Moore. She homeschools her three daughters (one of them being adopted) in Nicki, Sam, and the younger Emily. Clearly a well-intentioned mother, Laurie tries her best to focus her homeschooling techniques in an experimental, Montessori type of way, but it’s obvious that the girls are taking advantage of the situation and their mother’s kindness. They’re going out drinking and partying at the clubs while being underage, meeting with guys much older than them, and not giving a single fuck. Laurie knows they go out and mess around, but she tries to be hands off as a parent to the point where she’s almost completely lost control on guiding them. Even when she tries to teach them, doing them a favor with the pressure-less atmosphere of homeschooling, they half-ass everything and joke around, while feigning innocence if trouble looms. Unfortunately, the lackadaisical culture Laurie has cultivated in the house with her unproved teaching methods combined with the alternative West Coast lifestyle and their access to many different hangout spots and such that aren’t seen in other areas of the country has resulted in both a lack of motivation in her girls and an instilled focus on leisure activities.

With just one line, Coppola presents to us the Hollywood mindset of this family with Laurie waking up Nicki and Sam saying, “Girls, time for your Adderall!”. I love it. It’s a funny line, but it’s also a great way to explain the daughters and their upbringing without saying too much.

Growing up near celebrities and regularly coming into contact with stars like Jude Law and Kirsten Dunst, the audience can see the adulation this group of wannabe degenerates have for the glitz and glamor of the celebrity life. Again, they are obsessed with status. It consumes their lives. When they’re at the club, they want to feel like equals to the celebrities that frequent the place and act accordingly. They take pictures and post them to social media to flaunt how cool they are and how jealous others should be, as if to say, “Don’t you wish you were me?”. In reality, they are the ones who wish they were someone else. They want to be considered peers by the stars themselves. It’s evident in Rebecca’s face when she’s told by the cops that they spoke to Lindsay Lohan about her, with her ears perking up to the news and completely disregarding the seriousness of her situation of being under arrest. When others would be quiet about robbing million dollar houses blind, this group of friends can’t help but flaunt it, showing off their outfits or items they stole. Sure, they want to make some money selling the items so they can party like rockstars, but they keep a lot of items themselves because it puts them on the level of a rich celebrity if they possess it. They also can’t help themselves because they love the attention. Because of this, they routinely tell anyone near at these parties how they randomly broke into Paris Hilton’s house or somewhere else because everyone was treating them like superstars. The always honest Marc says it himself, “When we went out, everyone loved us”. For a shy kid with not many friends, this attention becomes addicting, so it becomes even harder to stop. This is why he’s the likable one out of the crew because his remorse his real and it’s understood that he admits his wrongdoing. He just appreciated finally being loved by others and didn’t want it to end.

You know things are bad when you bring in little Emily to reach into smaller spaces to help them rob.

Unfortunately, when you’re in too deep and with friends, it gets hard to remove yourself from the situation. It’s hard to deny the peer pressure here because as we see them partying, flashing money at the clubs, taking pictures, getting bottle service (which is not cheap), and doing cocaine (which is definitely not cheap), Marc and the girls can’t stop and won’t stop. Finally, they have reached the invigorating feeling of being a celebrity, much like how they feel for the actual stars they have stolen from. The obsession drives them deeper and deeper, and they love the “Live fast, die young” attitude, not caring about the consequences. In fact, there’s a sequence where fellow bad girl Chloe leads the singing of M.I.A.’s anthem “Bad Girls” before crashing the car they’re in, which is a really good representation for the movie as a whole when you think about it. The rapid and realistic turn from gaining status because of their criminal activity and turning into serial thieves is an exciting one, and Sofia Coppola’s direction is what keeps it all together in this brisk but eventful runtime. We know these characters are going to get in trouble, as it’s revealed early with the inserts of the characters being questioned after the fact, but that’s not what The Bling Ring is about. It’s all about the “Celeb-reality” this group of teenagers have become infatuated with, its influence on the decisions they make, and how no matter how insignificant the attention they initially get for what they’re doing is to us, it turns into an addiction and need for being considered popular or cool. It’s the growing feeling of being unstoppable, how they have become stars in their own right, and how they have no intention of stopping because of their success. It’s too easy, they’re young, and they are invincible, or so they thought.

One interesting point made in the movie is how easy this all was. Just because even the smallest of stars have to post everything they do publicly, this group of kids are able to figure out within minutes if a star will be out of town because entertainment news sites have literally nothing else to do and will post about anyone who’s considered a celebrity regardless of how far up the food chain they actually are. With an additional Google search, they can find any address too. It’s all public. This allows for them to take the chance and attempt to break in to pretty much anyone’s place. It’s really that easy, especially back then. Obviously, we know they were eventually going to run into some sort of security or an alarm, as the opening of the film shows them on security camera footage, but the ride up until the point they get caught is kind of crazy to think about. In a comical moment, playing up Paris Hilton’s persona of being a moron, Rebecca guesses that Hilton left her key under the doormat, and she ends up being right. It’s just wild to think about how far literal kids were able to go by robbing millionaires with such ease, and yet, it actually happened. The saddest part is how avoidable all this was. These kids had good lives and lived in such a fun atmosphere. For the most part, they had good households too. Chloe was probably the biggest “problem child” out of all of them, but the kicker was that she had a well-off family. When the sirens are heard and Chloe comes to the realization of what’s about to happen, she’s sitting at her kitchen table with her unknowing family in the room. A rush of questions will surely enter your mind, as it probably did Chloe. How did it come to this? Why did they go that far? Why do you want to be bad when you don’t have to?

Well, that’s a question we’ve never had answered, but it happens with every generation. Some kids just get influenced by the wrong things and that’s the way life goes. Is it wanting to be looked at as cool, having status of some sort, getting attention, or being looked at as a “star” in some regard? Is it a combination of it all because they’re all connected in some way to one another?

Yeah, it’s probably the latter.

Israel Broussard did a solid job as our sympathetic protagonist, and Emma Watson was fantastic as the full-of-shit friend who got her hand caught in the cookie jar and goes all-in on her fake humanitarian/role model persona to try and gain sympathy from the media. She steals the show in the third act and the final scene where she speaks to the camera about her website after receiving the lightest sentence out of everyone was a chef’s kiss of an ending. Additionally, the courtroom scene ending in seconds and the door re-opening was a very nice touch to the climax. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before, especially with such effectiveness. Katie Chang’s performance was a bit robotic. I’m not sure if she was trying to play up the unemotional and “I’ll screw any one of you” aspects of the character, but it felt a little off compared to the others.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give Sofia Coppola the credit that she deserves for making this film as engrossing and entertaining as it is, with such a small amount of material to go off of. It’s not dialogue heavy, but it’s very personable, unconventional in some regard, uniquely shot, and visually alluring. Sofia Coppola has become one of the best filmmakers of the last twenty years or so, living up to the Coppola name. She has this enigmatic style and visual flare to her movies that is matched by very few working filmmakers today, and it adds so much to the overall presentation of her films, with The Bling Ring being a prime example. Her specific style really mixes in well with modern stories and themes. When given carte blanche over a production, she more often than not nails every aspect of a feature from the writing to the presentation, to accurately portraying the themes she wants to explore in a satisfying, cinematic fashion. She may not be able to act worth a shit (I’ll never forgive her for The Godfather Part III), but she is an outstanding director and one of the very few who’s projects I will continue to look out for. Honestly, she should be given a lifetime contract with A24. They are a match made in heaven. Going along with this, the cinematography is beautiful. It really feels as if Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt looked at the concept of “Hollywood” according to non-movie stars and regular people under a microscope and somehow captured the essence of it. When we see Marc and Rebecca driving a stolen convertible and carelessly taking pictures with stolen items and shopping with credit cards owned by someone else, the viewer feels the relaxed West Coast vibes of the Hollywood teenager who doesn’t have a care in the world.

The combination of music, slow-motion sequences, and the natural lighting from the California sun captures the spirit of youth and the live-fast present. Tomorrow doesn’t enter their minds. The characters just want to ride this thing until the wheels fall off, and we know they will. In fact, we’re counting on it. Until then, we’ll enjoy the rush of what they’re doing along with them, and Sofia Coppola’s handling of it all make sense of this real-life narrative, captures the energy of the “Hollywood bad kids” impressively well, and shines the spotlight on America’s obsession with the celebrity and its influence on the younger generation. The Bling Ring is really well done. It’s got hiccups in areas character/narrative-wise, and its offbeat style takes a bit to get into, but once it gets deeper, it can be pretty entertaining.