‘Let’s go shopping!” — said by a teen girl as she casually steps into an unlocked celebrity home (Orlando Bloom’s) to help herself to whatever jewels and designer clothes catch her eye — is the new “We rob banks,” the shamelessly honest job description delivered by Bonnie Parker in “Bonnie and Clyde.”
Hollywood has been reiterating Bonnie and Clyde-ism — making doomed romantic heroes of dirtbags — for half a century, but “The Bling Ring” plays off the 1967 film much as “GoodFellas” rebutted “The Godfather”: Real criminals are less about Shakespeare than Elmore Leonard.
Taissa Farmiga (from left), Israel Broussard, Emma Watson, Katie Chang and Claire Julien in “The Bling Ring” (
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Or, in this case, more like TMZ than “CSI.” Writer-director Sofia Coppola’s smart, tart, zippy little true-life caper is about four bitchy Valley girls (led by Emma Watson) and a boy who, from 2008-09, Googled around to discover which celebrities would be away from home, discovered their addresses just as easily, then walked in whatever doors were unlocked (or, in Paris Hilton’s case, correctly guessed that the key would be under the doormat) for some casual burglary. They accumulated $3 million in bling and cash before they were caught.
What makes this only slightly fictionalized film so magnetic is, along with Coppola’s skill in staging each micro-heist as its own adventure (some impish, some dark with gunplay), the brazenness of the burglars. All are heedless of either the wrongness of their actions or of the high likelihood of being caught (especially after they brag about the thefts at parties).
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Though on the surface “The Bling Ring” is slight of aim and repetitive of structure, it is actually a slam-dunk conservative critique of American culture: As if with a checklist at hand, Coppola hits the collapse in Judeo-Christian teaching, decaying educational standards, loose ethics, broken families, drugs, Hollywood and a permissive criminal justice system. (Sex is missing — the only boy in the group seems to be gay, or at least more interested in trying on women’s pumps than getting in their pants. But these girls are so in love with themselves it’s tough to imagine anyone else meeting their standards.)
In other words, this punkish, sleek film about beautiful kids wallowing in purloined Prada could have been written by a grumpy 65-year-old white guy in gabardine, provided he had a sense of irony. “The Bling Ring” is the bridge between Coppola and Bill O’Reilly.
Watson, who is amusingly convincing as the vapid Nicki and does a flawless American accent, plays a kid who is being home-schooled by her airhead mom (Leslie Mann). Nicki has a foster sister, Sam (Taissa Farmiga) who is living in the house because her mother washed away on a tide of booze and drugs.
The mother is teaching the girls a goofball religion based on “The Secret” — prayer as catalog shopping — while her idea of moral and social science teaching is holding up a collage of magazine pictures of Angelina Jolie and asking the kids to discuss what’s great about her.
Meanwhile, at a school for dropouts, new boy Marc (Israel Broussard) becomes friends with Rebecca (Katie Chang), another product of a broken home whose idea it is to waltz into Hilton’s house. Later the kids will rob the homes of Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson and Lindsay Lohan.
It’s a delicious element of the crime spree — snotty teens versus pampered celebs makes it a virtual Iran-Iraq war — that the celebs’ lust for publicity is what makes them vulnerable. Hilton can’t resist leaking to the press all the great parties she’s going to, which means the kids know what nights she won’t be home.
Throughout, we know the kids (whose post-capture interviews are interspersed with the action) will be caught — and yet there is a queasy feeling that they won’t really be punished.
When Lohan gets mentioned, the parallel between the two sides becomes explicit: She is as vacuous and degenerate as her burglars, was once nailed for stealing a necklace and yet despite a long string of offenses never does much jail time. In the end, Nicki winds up next to Lohan — a true role model — in prison. The former struts free after only 30 days. And gains celebrity points in the process. That’s today’s LA: The wages of sin are . . . fabulousness.