96 min | R | October 2, 2020 | A24
A successful entrepreneur suspects her husband is cheating. Her charming, exasperating father insists on investigating, and turns the whole thing into a martini-fueled stakeout across Manhattan. The mystery is a pretext. The real subject is a daughter who never stopped waiting for her father to take her seriously.
Laura is a writer and mother in a comfortable SoHo loft, and her marriage has gone quiet. Her husband Dean travels constantly for his startup, comes home late, and packs his bag with another woman’s toiletries. Her father Felix decides the marriage is in crisis and appoints himself the lead detective. Sofia Coppola builds the film around a thin premise of infidelity, but the actual concern is the gap between a daughter and the aging charmer who shaped her. The investigation is the excuse Felix needs to spend time with a daughter he never fully showed up for.
Bill Murray plays Felix as a man who has talked his way out of every consequence and expects to keep doing it. He name-drops, flirts with waitresses, and lectures Laura on evolutionary biology to justify his own failures as a husband. Murray never asks for sympathy, which is what makes the performance work. Rashida Jones plays Laura with a fatigue that sits under every scene. She watches her father charm the room and remembers exactly why her mother left him. Marlon Wayans plays Dean as pleasant and unreadable, and the film keeps his guilt deliberately uncertain. Jenny Slate plays a school-gate acquaintance who narrates her own dating disasters in unbroken monologue, and the bit lands as a sharp portrait of the noise Laura tunes out.
Coppola writes and directs with the same restraint she brings to her best work. The camera stays still and lets conversations play in long takes inside cabs and restaurants. Cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd lights the city at night in soft amber, and the red convertible Felix drives through Manhattan turns the surveillance into a private joke between father and daughter. The score by Phoenix and Chet Baker keeps the tone light when the material threatens to turn maudlin. Coppola trusts silence and reaction shots more than plot, and the film moves at the unhurried pace of a long lunch that neither party wants to end.
This is Coppola in a minor key, and she knows it. The film never reaches for the ache of her earlier portraits of disconnection, and the central mystery resolves with a shrug rather than a revelation. What remains is a precise study of a specific kind of father. The man who is wonderful company and a disaster as a parent, and who confuses the two. Coppola lets Felix off easier than he deserves, but she understands exactly why Laura cannot.