2. The Restraint
The Bling Ring would have worked extremely well as a blacker than black comedy, with ribald parody throughout, and the kind of knowing winks to camera that make film-makers like Christopher Guest so enduringly successful. Sadly, Coppola is not Guest, and while she does infuse her story with moments of comedy (some without intent, one suspects) and Emma Watson in particular manages an impressive comic turn when her character ignores moral logic and makes herself the victim of the situation, she doesn't push it hard enough. We shouldn't be invited to see these characters as aspirational - they are wholly irredeemable brats, spoiled by the burgeoning sense of invincibility inspired in that generation by awful "crazes" like YOLO that have created a Generation Y Not out of supposedly disaffected youths burdened only by privilege and a victim mentality that is wholly unsuited to their condition. We should be mocking them, showing them, through parody how ridiculous they all are, with their peace signs and duck-mouth Facebook poses, and I had hoped Coppola would do that. But she didn't. She chose instead to present that life as something to aspire to, through her framing of the scenes and the glossy production of the partying on screen. And while she might claim to be breaking down that sub-culture from the inside, it simply doesn't ring true - one suspects that if Coppola were that age now, she'd be leading a pack of these characters, not poking fun at them.