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The truth is, as I sit down to type this post, I have no idea what I even want to say about this photo of Sofia Coppola and Josh Hartnett except that when I saw it a couple weeks ago, it filled me with warm fuzzies. It was snapped at the Museum of Modern Art’s annual film benefit which this year honored Coppola. She spoke at the event and in doing so, took the piss out of herself for being both a nepo baby and the person who “single-handedly ruined the Godfather films.” If it was a solid bit of self-deprecating humor, it also made me reflect how she never would have done the latter had she not been the former, which is to say only a nepo baby could have been pilloried by the public on account of her father’s decision to put his daughter in a position for which she was manifestly unequipped. And even though her father undoubtedly gave her leg up on getting started in the late 90s as a filmmaker, upon succeeding right out of the gate, she was subject to industry gossip that her famous father must have somehow been involved in her creative success. It cuts both ways, is what I’m saying, and I’ve often thought about why we – both the royal we and me, myself – tend to refer to Sofia Coppola by her given name rather than her surname. I don’t think it’s meant to be infantilizing or possessive but distinguishing; we refer to Sofia Coppola as Sofia because she transcended the family name a long, long time ago.
Josh Hartnett’s route to Hollywood was a little different. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota he crisscrossed the country, briefly studying to be an actor in New York before lighting out for L.A. and eventually landing Coppola’s debut “The Virgin Suicides” as he would sweetly recount on the MoMA red carpet not on the strength of his name, since nobody really knew who he was, but by audition tape. I don’t want to overstate the case here and say that Hartnett was ever anything like my favorite actor, but his searching earnestness opposite Eric Bana’s zero f*cks air in “Black Hawk Down” always stuck with me, as did his work in “The Virgin Suicides” where he is sort of evincing a Me Decade Jordan Catalano, or something, and I always respected that he was on his own journey, turning down superhero roles. And it’s why for a while there in the twenty-tens I thought we might have lost him, in a manner of speaking, to wandering the wilderness in indifferent VOD dreck for the rest of his career. I hesitate to call what he’s experiencing a comeback, maybe more like a rejuvenation, appearing in a Best Picture, cutting loose in a couple Guy Ritchie joints, fronting some middling thrillers with an ebullient gleam in his eye, and starring opposite Anne Hathaway in next year’s “Verity.”
They are two Gen-Xers, which as a Gen-Xer myself counts for something here, and they’ve both been through it, in ways alike and not alike at all, and yet, in an industry that has no qualms about chewing you up or spitting you out, whether you’re of the Coppolas or the Hartnetts, there they both were, still standing.
