Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013)

It is far too early in the year to tell, but I would not be surprised if, for the second year in a row, two Soderbergh films make my best-of list. I don't buy the retirement from film talk for a second, but if this at least closes a chapter on the director's work, it does so with aplomb. The most conventional of Soderbergh's late work is also a dazzling display of what makes him unique, his off-kilter focus on the intricacies of relationships and process that breaks even a turbulent romance down into analytical deconstruction, complete with ever-inventive framings and a great rapport with his actors. Indeed, Douglas and Damon get out early with the male performances to beat this year, Douglas so un-self-conscious in embracing Liberace's pathological vanity and Damon gradually turning infatuation and gee-whiz wonder at his lover's opulence into a coke-addled, paranoid form of Stockholm Syndrome. Despite my love for Soderbergh (and for Douglas, who continues to be one of our finest and most daring leading men), I was on the fence for a TV biopic, but even that is transformed into something original and exciting by this alchemical filmmaker.

Check out my full review at Movie Mezzanine.

The Top 10 Steven Soderbergh Films

[This is my August entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon.]

Steven Soderbergh operates so far under the radar that, for all his auteurist tics and varied filmography, I never thought to rate him among my favorite filmmakers until I took a step back one day and realized how many great films bore his credit. Sometimes it seems as if the film industry looks at him the same way. Soderbergh primarily operates as a workman, though he balances out commercial properties with a series of experimental works that often get folded back into his mainstream gigs, making him ever more idiosyncratic even as he gets trusted with bigger projects.

Soderbergh jump-started the Miramax era of the American indie with his Palme D’Or-winning feature debut sex, lies, and videotape, a film about a man who can only achieve any kind of arousal by watching recorded tapes of others detailing their own sexual desires and experiences. In a way, it is prophetic of his entire canon, in which action unfolds only through its own deconstruction and process becomes the driving force and the principal agent of subverted expectations. This fixation has made the director a member of the digital vanguard, the literal programming of visual information well-suited to his entire approach to storytelling.

Amazingly, he has applied this anti-narrative style to commercially successful properties. What other director in Hollywood today can so routinely boast massive casts populated entirely by A-listers without reducing them to wan rom-com drivel à la New Year’s Eve? And if anyone else could compare to Soderbergh in that respect, how many of them could turn around and make something like Bubble? A studio hand for the postmodern era, Soderbergh has made many fine works, but none better than these 10:

Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004)

Ocean's Twelve is one of my favorite Steven Soderbergh films and the best reflexive takedown of the sequel ever made. It jovially begins as a shameless retread of Ocean's Eleven before spiraling out of control by exaggerating every aspect that made that film a success until the result is a bewildering mess and a giddy commentary on the lazy self-satisfaction of most sequels. Somehow, the in-joke-heavy, pally nature of the acting among Hollywood's A-list does not lapse into pure smugness, perhaps because as much fun as the film has in deconstructing overdone studio mechanics, it also invites the audience to have fun with the cast, provided the viewer can let go of the desire for any kind of fulfillment from the plot. Ocean's Eleven sublimated all of Soderbergh's aesthetic tics into an unexpected crowd pleaser; its first sequel let all the new fans know what they were in for.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

In retrospect, the links between Steven Soderbergh's male stripper movie Magic Mike and The Girlfriend Experience, his 2009 experiment starring a porn star as a high-end prostitute, should have been obvious. Both, in true Soderbergh fashion, explore their unorthodox sex-centric milieux, the director's older film about how the commodification of woman's sexuality, this new one about that of man's. If one plays out as a probing drama and the other a wry comedy, that only speaks to how society perceives the sexuality of the sexes and what is considered a lamentable, if common, situation for one gender and an escapist dream for the other.

Yet Magic Mike, for its many laughs, has as much to say about current economic realities as Soderbergh's Sasha Grey vehicle, which was made in the thick of Wall Street collapse and reflects that panic. Where that film captured a moment, this one exists in the aftermath of a radically shaken-up world. As the titular stud, Channing Tatum represents the post-collapse reality, that of a Millennial with ambitious but ridiculous dreams who must constantly defer his goal with various odd jobs to pay the bills. Working construction or stripping may not be a series of unpaid internships, but their purpose is the same: to offer an increasingly slim hope for a shot at the American Dream.

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

Haywire displays nearly all the traits of a modern Steven Soderbergh movie. It sports an A-list cast seemingly game for anything. It jet sets all over the world even though it hardly needs to, suggesting that the director A) insists on verisimilitude, B) loves studio-paid vacations, or C) both. Its shallow-focus digital cinematography creates paranoid, claustrophobic frames of doubt and suspicion; Haywire even opens with such abstracted, zoomed-in pixellation that the text telling the audience they're watching upstate New York simply must be a gag. And as with the cast of Bubble and Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Haywire features a non-professional actor anchoring the action, in this case retired MMA fighter Gina Carano.

The film also works as the latest in Soderbergh's never-ending line of genre deconstructions. Despite its lean running time of 93 minutes, Haywire leaves gulfs of space around its revenge plot, Lem Dobbs' script asymptotically approaching exposition, only to flatline in vagueness before reaching it. Dobbs, of course, wrote the screenplays for Soderbergh's Kafka and, somewhat infamously, The Limey. Given the amount of dialogue, it stands to reason more of Dobbs' words remain here than in Soderbergh's masterfully elliptical anti-thriller, but Haywire nevertheless shares many qualities with the director's best film. Both are action thrillers that dismantle the conventions of their niches within the genre, finding beauty and agony in the all-too-single-minded attitudes of so many of these films.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.

Che

Like Steven Spielberg's A.I., Steven Soderbergh's Che is defined by dichotomies. The former split along the lines of the deceptively opposed visions of its two primary auteurs, while Che is openly structured as a dialectic. Split into two parts but originally shown in America only as a whole, Che uses its division more as a marker of contrast, clearly separating the two revolutions in which Ernesto "Che" Guevara participated and the vast difference in their outcomes. Soderbergh shot each part with different actors, in different styles, even in differing aspect ratios, further emphasizing the distinctions between the two.

Of course, few directors' careers are so defined by dialectics as Soderbergh's, who balances mainstream endeavors with experimental features; in 2009 alone, he released a broad comedy about corporate avarice and deception starring an A-list player (The Informant!), and also an avant-garde deadpan satire on the same topic featuring a porn star playing an escort (The Girlfriend Experience). The great Terrence Malick was once assigned to the film before dropping out to make The New World, leaving Benicio del Toro to turn to Soderbergh, who'd originally agreed to helm the project when they collaborated on Traffic, to once more take over the wheel. It was a cunning decision; only Soderbergh could have made a biopic that as blatantly unconcerned with biopic conventions as Malick, though the styles of the two -- poetic elision vs. fussy, detail-oriented deconstruction -- could hardly be more different.

Che's first half, The Argentine, concerns the revolution in Cuba from 1957-58. Soderbergh gives us sparse background for the movement, opening with a verité, grainy 16mm show of a victorious Che conducting an interview in Havana in 1964 and a brief flashback of Guevara meeting Fidel Castro (Demian Bichir) and a handful of other future revolutionaries as they dine in cozy postwar accommodations, wearing button down business shirts that seem so alien compared to the images we have of these figures, ever sporting military uniforms. They speak only fleetingly of their dissatisfaction with Cuba's status as a pawn of American imperialism; this meeting is the final confirmation of plans, not the initial trade of ideas and rhetoric. Soderbergh then cuts to Cuba, studying the manner with which the band of rebels managed to overcome a U.S.-backed dictatorship.

Che with future wife Aleida March (Catalina Sandino Moreno). Isn't it nice when couples like the same things?

As Amy Taubin astutely notes, Soderbergh films Che always in medium- or long-shot, never in close-up, emphasizing his Marxist commitment to being one of the people, as well as the perception of Che as the great rock star of extremist intellectuals. Furthermore, he hasn't yet proven himself among the Cuban soldiers: they refer to him as "Doc," "the Argentine" or "Che" (Argentinian slang for "boy" or "dude"), truly just one of the fighters and an unproven one at that. His asthma occasionally makes him a liability -- one suspenseful sequence involves Guevara attempting to hide from Batista troops while stifling a coughing fit -- and his services as a doctor initially prove far more valuable than his tactics. Indeed, his medical assistance plays a significant part of winning over Cuban citizens as the 26th of July Movement advances through the forest, and many of the farmers he treats regard him with confusion and awe, simply because they've never seen a doctor before. One child remarks after Che tells her mother to eat more meat "That guy's lying. He tells everyone that," but you can see the malnutrition and neglect among the rural populace, a sharp contrast to the wealth enjoyed by Batista's government and the major cities that bustle with American business (somewhere in Havana, Michael Corleone is disinterestedly eyeing a solid gold telephone given as a gift by a corporation to Batista).

Despite the sweeping grandiosity of the beautiful establishing shots of the Cuban forests and the focus on the battles to take Cuba, Soderbergh crafts The Argentine into a strikingly experimental endeavor: he gives us battle scenes but replaces the audio with Che's musings from his Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, the memoir that forms the foundation of this film's narrative, as well as out of sequence clips from his trip to New York in 1964 to speak before the U.N. While the cutting between the two settings can be at times questionable, even borderline haphazard, it allows us to see how Che's actions in the field craft his image, to the point that he can arrive in New York as the toast of bourgeois intellectuals, all of whom would likely be wearing those damn T-shirts with his face on them if they existed then. In fact, their vacuous, obliviously ironic worship of the guerrilla, combined with his natural rock star presence and Soderbergh's decision to shoot these scenes in grainy, monochrome 16mm, makes it all but impossible not to see Che as the predecessor of Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. Che suffers the platitudes of fans who don't understand him and the scorn of conservatives who fear him, and he reacts to his cult of personality with sneering derision. The parties Che attends in New York provide a sharp contrast from the brief, on-point discussion between Che, Fidel and the other founders of the 26th of July Movement at the start of the film: where that meeting showed intellectuals who'd already decided to back up their beliefs with action and merely needed to hear the others voicing support, the well-dressed peons sit around and prattle incessantly, munching too-expensive, too-pretentious finger foods as they attempt to set themselves up as sympathetic to the plight of the poor in Latin America and elsewhere.


Back in Cuba in '58, Che's confidence grows as he rises through the ranks, and he uses his increasing authority to exert rigid conformity to the ideals of the revolution. Slowly, the darker side Soderbergh never reveals of Che (not even in the second part, but more on that later) begins to seep into the periphery: he uses slurs to mock those whose commitment falters when hardships befall the guerrillas and executes a pair of deserters for stealing harvest from local farmers and raping a young woman, all while posing as high-ranking officers in the movement -- Che's tone of voice suggests the latter tidbit enrages him as much as the actual crimes. Yet he also displays the more egalitarian and populist side of his devotion to Marxist ideals: at the end of the film, after Che and Fidel lead the revolution to victory, Guevara spots some revolutionaries driving a stolen car in the convoy and orders them to return it. Even if it belonged to a loyalist soldier, the movement cannot expect to bring about massive change if they do not hold to their ideals; indeed, following the last major engagement, Che tells one impatient soldier, "We've only won the war. The Revolution starts now."

Those ideals are sorely missing, however, when Che heads to Bolivia in 1965. Part Two of Che, Guerrilla, shows the doctor attempting to start another revolution from scratch in the heart of South America, not too far from his homeland of Argentina. If The Argentine profiled a revolt that succeeded, Guerrilla depicts one that fails catastrophically. Also based on one of Che's memoirs, The Bolivian Diaries, Part Two dissects the mounting troubles of Guevara's attempted coup and the effect of inevitable loss on the fighter. Compared to the epic wide-screen panoramas and lush color scheme of The Argentine, Guerrilla shrinks the frame nearly to a square, boxing in the protagonist as his youthful idealism turns to ruthless pragmatism. Soderbergh slightly mutes the colors and brings the soundtrack to the fore, mixing the faint sounds of chirping birds and running water with Alberto Iglesias' haunting minimalistic score -- at once even more wildly inappropriate for a biopic and even more perfectly suited to the material than his different approach to the first film -- to create an aural isolation to match the somber visuals.

Del Toro performs an about-face with the character in Part Two, and Guerrilla can frustrate at times as the dynamic presence of The Argentine gives way to a somber, increasingly withdrawn and paranoid figure, slumped over and covered in a blanket that distorts his shape. The rainforest exacerbates his asthma, and the ragged beard he allows to envelop that iconic face destroys the last remaining indication of the man we just followed to victory.

If one takes both parts in one sitting, Guerrilla might easily strike the viewer as repetitive: Che arrives in Bolivia more or less as he did in Cuba, as a foreigner who has to convince natives that he's one of them. He cannot capitalize on his image at first, as he must disguise himself as a nobody to prevent attracting attention before he can marshal forces. When he does mount a campaign, the U.S. moves to intervene, sending anti-insurgency forces to train the Bolivian army. And so, while each action never turns out as it did in Cuba, the actions are nevertheless similar, occasionally identical, to ones when saw in the last half. Yet this decision reveals a subtle direction by Soderbergh to delve into the legend without directly commenting on him: the Che of Part Two abandons the ideals he embodied in the first part (the director devotes a telling close-up about halfway through of a Rolex watch Che wears), and his willingness -- eagerness, even -- to renounce his position in the Cuban government at the start of the film to go back to a jungle somewhere and train an army reveals that the intellectual can only truly function as a force of destruction; social revolution is just an excuse to shoot people. The first part of Che was called The Argentine, reflecting how Guevara had to become the legend we know today after starting only with his background. Soderbergh dubbed Part Two Guerrilla, an indicator that he'd cemented his reputation by the time he went to Bolivia but also as a clue of his identity: in the first he was defined by his homeland, here as a guerrilla. Not a political leader or an ideologue, but a guerrilla, a fighter. By essentially restarting the narrative of the first half, Soderbergh shows how Che was willing to throw away everything simply for the chance to keep fighting somewhere, without openly commenting upon Che's more twisted actions.

(I confess I was somewhat peeved that Soderbergh never addresses the mass killings Che headed as the leader of military tribunals in the wake of the victory in Cuba, not even in the brief text scroll preceding Guerrilla. Though he never builds Che up as a saint, he gives us only two vague indications of his more criminal side: at the end of The Argentine, he tells a soldier to spare a prisoner and ominously declares, "He will be judged by tribunal." At the end of Guerrilla, Guevara attempts to dismiss Cuban-American CIA agent Félix Rodriguez by saying "I don't talk to traitors," only for the agent to mention, "You executed my uncle." Considering how well the film mines dialectics, it's disappointing that these are the biggest examples given of Che's cruelty, but then I suppose Soderbergh would have had to have portrayed him openly as heroic in places to balance it out.)


Compared to the jumping timeline of its predecessor, Guerrilla progresses in such a linear fashion that it even gives us the day of operations every few scenes to break down the passage of time. Soderbergh also uses more handheld shots instead of the more formal ones in The Argentine, the grittier look better suited to capturing the slow downfall of a myth in what is, basically, a horror film. Following the initial recruitment, Che never seems to attract any more followers, only losing the few he commands to fatigue, capture and death. Yet he still retains that certain charisma even in his frailty and fear: when Bolivian forces capture him, he subtly intimidates and goads the brasher officers and nearly charms one young guard into releasing him. This moment, as well as an ill-advised POV shot of Che's execution that depicts Guevara falling to the ground before the frame fades to white, serves to rebuild Che's image enough to point toward his ensuing martyrdom among the intellectuals and the genuinely oppressed throughout the world. For my money, though, Soderbergh's final shot is a more appropriate ending: he returns to the brief moment at the start of The Argentine, as Che rides a boat to Cuba from Mexico with Fidel and the other revolutionaries. As he gazes over the ocean and his eyes dart nervously to Castro, we can see the doctor wondering just what he'd gotten himself into, and though he never openly communicates such doubt again, we see how his fears were justified; he just felt them for the wrong revolution.

With Che, Soderbergh eschews the great pitfall of the biopic genre -- the tendency to inadvertently shift attention from the subject to the events that happened around him or her -- by simply placing focus on three chief events in Che's life. This decision allows him to spend enough time in Cuba, Bolivia, even New York, to see how the character truly responds, adapts and acts to each situation. The procedural structure of the two films, the intent focus not on speechifying and Big Moments that go out of their way to define themselves as such but the mechanics of the warfare Che helped orchestrate, is highly original but should come as no surprise to Soderbergh fans. His films typically focus on how things work, from the giddily technical breakdown of the heists in the Oceans films (what makes them enjoyable in relation to their occasionally asphyxiating postmodern sense of cool) to the experimental deconstructions of narrative and film with The Limey and Schizopolis. The Eisensteinian montage that precedes the decisive Battle of Santa Clara in Cuba (a comment not only on the propagandic nature of Che's radio address but the townspeople who are at stake in the coming fight), the way that battle is structured to reveal Che's tactical brilliance, the aforementioned shot of the Rolex Che wears in Bolivia, these shots manage to communicate fundamental truths about Che through his actions.

Soderbergh's use of dialectics in the film reflects not only his wont as a restless filmmaker who loves contrast but of the Marxist idea of advancement through dialectics: we see Che the victor and Che the martyr, warm yellows and drab blue-greens, inspiring wide-screen and stifling full-frame. The dialectic between his objective, matter-of-fact visuals and the use of Che's personal diaries as a means of voiceover and of general mood allows for a revealing portrait of the figure outside of the equally hysterical views of him on both sides of the political spectrum. So, yes, while the omission of his role in executions is lamentable, we're allowed a much subtler presentation of Che as someone who just loves a good fight with the structure of Guerrilla.

The director captures all of this with the Red One camera, having received the latest prototypes mere hours before shooting began, and if Red wants to attract business it should host clips of the film and perhaps send out copies of Criterion's Blu-Ray to convince potential buyers. It handles the gorgeous textures of Cuba's countryside and the stark portrayal of Bolivia with equal clarity and beauty, at times nearly impossible to differentiate from ordinary film stock. Its 4K master and fantastic audio track place the film on the fast-track to becoming reference material for home theater systems.

Like so many of Soderbergh's films, Che is ambitious, technically marvelous and often frustrating. Like his subject, Soderbergh is both rebellious and mainstream, somehow able to $60 million for a two-film, foreign language biopic so off the beaten stylistic path that it barely found distribution despite Del Toro's deserved win of the Best Actor award at Cannes. Yet Soderbergh also remains a figure of Hollywood, crafting star vehicles and campaigning against movie piracy. He manages to juggle his entire career, his varying styles and auterial concerns, with Che; its tone is one of curiosity, not hagiography. The director doesn't seek to sanctify or vilify Guevara, instead only to study his process and glean something of the man through it. To bring back the tenuous connection I made to A.I. at the beginning of this review, Che is downright sloppy at times, but it's better for it: the second part opens with photos of miners without any context. Soderbergh wants us to go out and research for ourselves to delve into the story of the Siglo XX miners, and of the other aspects of Che's life and the events he influenced. When Soderbergh made Traffic, he offered no real answers to the drug problem because he felt that Hollywood could not adequately cover enough of the topic to provide a serious and viable solution; here, he does not attempt to offer a definitive conclusion of the man, which will likely remain impossible as opinion is still so sharply divided among conflicting ideologues. That's what irks me about one aspect of Criterion's otherwise spectacular packaging. It comes with a miniature poster of Del Toro adopting the famous pose of Alberto Korda's timeless photograph, and if Che can be said to have any sociopolitical aspirations, it wants only to grab every snot-nosed, lackadaisically rebellious teenager by the ear and shout "Take off that fucking T-shirt."

Schizopolis

A warped blend of Luis Buñuel, Richard Lester and the Dada movement (and much, much more), Steven Soderbergh's Schizopolis is such an oddball movie that I'm stepping into a minefield by reviewing it with only one viewing under my belt. Featuring fractured narratives, extraneous footage, perversely cogent gibberish, different film stocks, conflicting perspectives, bountiful sight gags, freewheeling satire...where was I?

Schizopolis opens with Soderbergh speaking to the audience, a Cecil B. DeMille parody added after a less-than-enthusiastic reception at Cannes. In it, he jokingly stakes a claim for the film's brilliance: "In the event that you find certain sequences or ideas confusing," he calmly informs us, "please bear in mind that this is your fault, not ours. You will need to see the picture again and again until you understand everything."

Soderbergh plays the protagonist, Fletcher Munson, a pencil-pusher working for L. Ron Hubbard stand-in T. Azimuth Schwitters and his corporate way of being Eventualism. Schwitters' speechwriter, Lester Richards (guess), dies of a heart attack and Munson, so bored and boring that no one in the company has anything against him, moves up to the position. The rest of the office is currently wracked in paranoia over reports of a mole, which leads to a running gag of "Who's on first?" confusion: some take the term "mole" literally. When a worker explains that a mole is a spy, it only makes matters worse, as someone interprets this explanation to mean that there is not only a mole but a spy for that mole. "That's twice as many as a minute ago!" exclaims one perturbed desk jockey. Before long, everyone in the office is so worked up over finding the mole that a number of employees begin to suspect even themselves.

Perhaps as a result of the corporatization of religion (or whatever it is Eventualists wish to label their cause), personal relationships in this world have been reduced to basic, bureaucratic exchanges; Fletcher comes home and yells, "Generic greeting!" to which his wife (Betsy Brantley) responds, "Generic greeting returned." People also don't seem to have any social filter: at Lester's funeral, the chaplain begins the eulogy with "Lester Richards is dead, and aren't you glad it wasn't you?" Of course, Soderbergh tells Schizopolis through the mind of its mysterious, silent and piercingly perceptive protagonist, so we might infer that he simply gazes through the B.S. of the world.

But the director does not stop with simply painting a world broken by ennui; no, when he hits the second part of the film, all hell breaks loose. Fletcher meets his doppëlganger in a parking garage and becomes the man, Dr. Jeffrey Korchek (still Soderbergh), dentist and Muzak lover. While in Korchek's body, Fletcher discovers that his wife was in an affair with the dentist -- I'm struggling to find a funnier line in Soderbergh's canon than "I'm having an affair with my own wife. To further complicate matters -- matters can always be further complicated in this film, it seems -- Fletcher/Korchek falls in love with a client (dubbed Attractive Woman #2) who looks just like his estranged wife.

It's not hard to determine that Schizopolis is a comedy, but nailing down precisely what it's meant to be attacking is as tricky as bomb disposal. The bare conversations between Fletcher and his wife suggest a lack of communication, a theme exacerbated in the film's final section, which shifts POV onto Mrs. Munson, who hears dialogue coming from the other characters in foreign languages. A subplot involving an exterminator, Elmo Oxygen, takes this idea one step further: the exterminator works his way through the suburbs, bedding all the bored housewives who answer the door and using cameras inside the houses to take naughty pictures of himself (a nod to Soderbergh's sex, lies & videotape, perhaps?). Elmo's duologues with these women are some form of jumbled approximation of the words that they should be saying -- "nose army" for hello, "smell sign" for goodbye -- yet everyone understands each other perfectly. He even shags Schwitters' wife and sends the guru the videotape. One of his assistants watches it with him and offers blunt explanations for Schwitters' bemused questions. "It looks like he's getting ready to screw your wife," the man says, but Schwitters is too caught up in his own boring ethos to react. "Hmm," he finally offers, "I wonder what that's like." Elmo's scenes recast the film as a breakdown of semiotics, a destruction of the basic meaning behind the symbols and language in a Dada-esque frenzy.

Yet Soderbergh stuffs every crack of the film with so many random asides one wonders if such a reading can be trusted. Schizopolis takes on a Pythonesque tone at times, such as a random aside to a man holding a press conference to redress the slanderous implications of the phrase "I've got to piss like a racehorse" on thoroughbreds. Each day ends with a nonsensical news report announcing bits of information with no application to the rest of the film: at the end, a reporter tells us that a New Mexico woman was chosen to be the "Final Arbiter of Taste and Justice" and would have the final word on all matters of life. As the director is wont to do, he messes with the film's diegesis, playing a rapid montage of a doctor describing Lester's heart attack as Fletcher reflects upon the dietary habits that match his own, replacing the sounds of humans eating with pigs grunting and squealing. The stock switches between gorgeous 35mm and grainy Super 8, though this perhaps isn't a completely honest clue between Fletcher's reality and reverie as so much of the world around him is off-kilter.

All in all, Schizopolis is some sort of sophist nightmare, daring you to figure it out by hiding its illogic and lies in plain sight. No one interpretation is right, and I have a nagging suspicion that they might all be wrong. At least it's honest about its deceit: at one point the words "IDEA MISSING" appear on-screen, admitting that the director didn't bother. I flipped through the accompanying Criterion essay and was amused to see contributing writer Dennis Lim noting that even the fans consider this "an intellectual indulgence," as that's what I'm sorely tempted to call it. Yet there is a dizzying fun to be had here, and Schizopolis is not, as Lim (writing in the voice of a reserved supporter) describes it, a "belated student film" that Soderbergh -- then stuck in a critical and commercial drought following his beloved debut -- needed to get his act together; it's too cheeky to be such a self-serious project.

I was struck recently (and more so now) by Soderbergh's testimony to Congress concerning Internet piracy and his desire to curb it; I'm not saying he's wrong for expecting payment for his work, but his film, especially Schizopolis, seems to be born of cinema. He plays with the conventions so much that it seems odd he would side with the studios on any matter, even one that benefits him as well. But that's neither here nor there: Schizopolis is rough around the edges but gleeful where it counts, and as a depiction of communication breakdown for people it's as effective as Lost in Translation (though it replaces that film's affecting heart with anarchic silliness). What's perhaps most incredible about this insane ride is how much he could recycle for decidedly more mainstream features like The Limey and Out of Sight.

Out of Sight

Out of Sight's opening sequence is one of the most delightfully witty heist scenes you'll ever see: a suave man dressed in business attire approaches the counter and charmingly tells the clerk that his partner, currently speaking to one of the managers as if opening an account, will shoot the man in the head if she makes one false move. The plan goes off without a hitch -- the robber knows not to take the bills at the bottom of the register, does his best to keep the clerk calm, and he walks out of the bank without anyone the wise. Then his getaway car doesn't start.

That's Out of Sight in a nutshell: a deftly cool comedy of errors, one whose characters have all the details in place save the most basic. Jack Foley (George Clooney) has been robbing banks since adolescence, so many he's lost count, and he views prison as more of a timeout than a punishment. Enlisting the help of two of his buddies -- well, maybe just one buddy and a mutual acquaintance -- Jack stages a break-out and ensures his success by ratting out another potential escapee to divert attention.

In his escape, he happens to meet U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), who is stuffed into the trunk of her own car along with Foley while his accomplice Buddy (Ving Rhames) drives them to safety. Because this is a film, Karen and Jack develop an instant attraction to each other. Because this film is based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it is somehow brilliant.

Soderbergh captures Leonard's deft characterizations, witty dialogue and involving plot with aplomb: Clooney and Lopez have such believable sexual tension that your TV will probably give off static electricity when you're done watching the film. The dynamic between them, and the question of whether Sisco pursues Foley out of love or to take him down, creates a sexual tension rarely felt in your average, manufactured rom-com, a genre that, for all of Out of Sight's crime elements and Soderbergh's inventive camera trickery, seems to be the best fit for the film.

The rest of the cast excels with the material as well; Rhames then had numerous thug/crime boss roles under his belt, but here he serves as Jack's conscience, practically begging Foley to, just once, think before he acts but unfailing in his support for his friend. Only on a second viewing did I even recognize Albert Brooks as a millionaire we meet in a flashback of one of Foley's stints of prison, using his finances to ensure his safety, particularly from Don Cheadle's Snoopy Miller, a sadistic thug who milks the terrified white-collar criminal for all he can.

Steve Zahn shows up as Glenn, the accomplice nobody wants on his team but always knows just enough to justify his position in the crew. Zahn steals most of his scenes, because he's Steve Zahn; his goofy charm provides overt comic relief in a film already bouncing with cleverness, but he brings enough paranoia and self-awareness to the stoned fool to anchor him to the story. Perhaps my pro-Zahn bias influenced my perception of the character: I adore Steve Zahn, and he makes every film he graces with his presence just that much better. Hell, I even enjoyed the National Treasure movies because Justin Bartha's character reminded me of Steve Zahn.

Soderbergh does not simply rely on these killer performances to see him through to the end, however. With editor Anne V. Coates, who also photographed Lawrence of Arabia(!), Soderbergh enacts a creative rebirth after being largely cast aside through the early '90s. Shots end in freeze-frames and softly fade into the next one. As he would do in his future films, Soderbergh plays audio from some other shot under another; is the audio a memory? A dream? If so, whose memory or dream is it? The editing adds to the mystery of the relationship, so that when Jack and Karen meet in a bar, it's anyone's guess whether the scene will end with the two shagging, in a car returning Jack to prison, or with one character jolting out of bed sweating from that crazy dream they just had. Soderbergh further displays his off-kilter and often brilliant cinematic sensibilities by casting Michael Keaton as FBI Agent Ray Nicolette, the same role he played in Jackie Brown. I don't know if this is the only time that an actor has played the same role in two unlinked films made by separate directors, but there's something so exciting about the way Soderbergh makes cinema a part of his movies.

I can't find much to criticize about Out of Sight. It's dense and it folds back on itself more than once, but that only adds to the film's intrigue. It has all the wit and cheek of the Ocean's films without their narcissism, giving each character their foibles to balance out their first-impression personalities. The cast uniformly excels, and they look like they're having fun with the material without forgetting why they're there. But for all the bouncy quality of the actors and the wit that flows freely from their mouths, Out of Sight occasionally puts forward a moment of simple, effective truth. How many other heist films would allow their protagonist the clarity to ask of their plan, "Do you know anyone who did one last big score and then gone on to live the good life?"

The Limey

Steven Soderbergh's The Limey might be the acid test entry in his filmography, by which I mean any old fool might faintly recognize names like Traffic or Che, but The Limey is curiously absent in discussions of the director's work even, as I'm increasingly finding, it's one of his most popular films among the fans. I don't know what it is about this movie, but you need to know the cinephile's equivalent of a Masonic handshake just to get a wink and a nod pointing you to some backroom where a man says, "That Limey's good, innit?"

Why it's so bizarrely underrepresented escapes me, as The Limey plays like a captivating cross between his mainstream crime thriller Out of Sight mixed with his more dangerous and experimental side. That more avant-garde element does not interfere with the film's enjoyment, however, instead enhancing the tension and emotion of a story of a man looking for vengeance for his daughter's death.

The man in question is Wilson (Terence Stamp) who, if you are too stupid to figure this out for yourself, is English. Recently released from prison, he travels to Los Angeles after receiving word of his family tragedy. The official report says she died in a crash on Mullholland, but he doesn't accept this explanation. Maybe he already knows something we don't, as The Limey leaps forward and backward, the fractured thoughts and memories of its protagonist fluttering across the screen without any concrete sense of a timeline; often, one thought plays over another one, so the sound of a shower plays over Wilson on a plane.

This inventive style of placing the film's sense of time directly in someone's head isn't as fully formed as Christopher Nolan would depict it with Memento, but it's an interesting progression from Soderbergh's playfulness time distortion in Out of Sight. It also adds dimensions to what would otherwise be a routine revenge thriller: Wilson tracks down leads, beats up hired thugs and stalks Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), the record producer who was dating Jenny when she died. He uncovers a drug operation, contends with a hitman, but all of these things are means only to the end of the plot.

Where The Limey excels, however, is in the subtext of these actions. Terence Stamp speaks in a thick accent spouting indecipherable Cockney slang, but he's also a heartbroken father just looking, in his own, hyperviolent way, for some answers. He's also the only person who handles himself in a fight with any aplomb, disposing of the tanned, buff youth Valentine and his partner Avery (Barry Newman) send to do their dirty work. It's a display of virility and fortitude in elder years every bit as invigorating as a dose of Viagra.

At times, though, Soderbergh's narrative flourishes distract from the story. A subplot involving the DEA is so murky it works neither as a part of Wilson's personal story of toppling Valentine nor as a potential commentary on the agency (Wilson does hypothesize to the agent in charge that Valentine probably offered them some sort of deal, be it bribes for leniency or information for safety, but his spoken musings simply fade from his lips, never to inform any other part of the story). The hitman, Stacy (Nicky Katt), fits into the theme of the grizzled oldster emerging victorious in a battle with the pampered youth whose muscles and menace are just for show, but one still must wonder how and when Avery ever first came into contact with this dopey buffoon and why on Earth he would hire him for something as serious and discreet as an orchestrated killing.

Nevertheless, The Limey is a wonderfully straightforward revenge story made non-linear through directorial touches which call attention to themselves but in a sly way that I'm quickly becoming used to with Soderbergh's work. By pitting two aged icons from across the pond, both known for "dangerous" (in that Hollywood sense) youth images, against each other, Soderbergh tests the mettle of the rebellion of the '60s in its later years, and it is interesting to note that the villain attempts to mask his own age by dressing as a younger man and dating barely adult women. That image of chasing youth is juxtaposed with Soderbergh's wildly inventive, oddly touching usage of footage from Ken Loach's 1967 debut Poor Cow, in which a young Terence Stamp starred. The story of Stamp's character in that film provides the background for Wilson, whose youthful charm in that film rubs like sandpaper against the terrifying and implacable vision of that man in his 60s.

Ocean's Eleven

The original Ocean's Eleven was the first of the Rat Pack films, a star vehicle meant to turn its stars into even bigger ones. Steven Soderbergh, indie darling that he is, found something appealing about that. Hot off the heels of his two most mainstream films to date, Erin Brokovich and Traffic, the director of sex, lies & videotape and Schizopolis went for the whole hog, creating what would become the star vehicle franchise of the decade. Whatever became of the sequels, though, Ocean's Eleven still holds up as a deliriously fun, completely self-aware heist comedy, a sleek but engaging trawl through the Las Vegas underworld, which is just as unremittingly glitzy as the surface level.

We are even led into this shimmering criminal world by a refined gentleman. Danny Ocean (George Clooney), a thief who got sloppy after his wife left him, is released from prison on parole which he wastes no time violating. Ocean travels to Los Angeles to find his old partner Rusty (Brad Pitt), now laying low and fleecing clueless celebrities of their money by teaching them poker -- nothing else in the whole movie is as funny as Topher Grace triumphantly laying down his hand and declaring "All. Reds." to the whistling awe of his equally moronic buddies. Ocean looks somewhat deflated by his time in prison, and he's simply too dapper to make you think of him as a thief, which makes it all the more surprising when he announces his intention to rob the vault containing the money of three casinos, the three casinos: the Bellagio, The Mirage and the MGM Grand.

Rusty and Danny know that the heist will be the biggest in history, and they need to lock down the best damn crew in the world. Somehow, perhaps through sheer charm, they convince nine men -- demolitions experts, confidence men, bank-rollers, electronic wizards, and one very small, very talented Chinese acrobat -- to participate in this suicidal venture. The payoff? A cool $160 million, which judging by the continuing spiral of the U.S. dollar might be enough to buy a Pepsi ten years from now. The heist is particularly dangerous because robbing these casinos means indirectly robbing their owner, Tony Benedict (Andy Garcia), a ruthless businessman who sees any attempt to cheat his casinos as a personal attack. Soon, we learn that Ocean wants to rob this man not for the massive payout but because Benedict "stole" his ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts, here pretty much in name only).

You may hate this film's sense of self-assured cool, but there's no denying that Soderbergh clearly understands the "Vegas movie" and he shoots Ocean's Eleven accordingly. His camera never seems to stop, mounting a blitzkrieg of Michael Mann-like technical details, witty banter, swanky five-star hotel rooms, casino backrooms filled with walls of surveillance monitors, and the mad jungle of the casino floor, a hive of desperate gamblers swarming to and fro losing their children's college funds.

It's the sort of surreal world that's stranger than fiction, befitting the over-the-top personae of the characters who seek to shake it up. Scott Caan and Casey Affleck play two Mormon man-children with intense sibling rivalry that explodes often making for great distractions in the casino but equally annoying outbursts among the crew. Bernie Mac slides headlong into the wearisome role of the Angry Black Man, but the idea that Mac's character is the one playing that card, combined with Mac's innate ability to make the most tepid and hackneyed material in the world sound as funny as a Bill Hicks rant, takes the sting out of that egregiously overused stereotype. My personal favorite of the 11 has to be Matt Damon's Linus Caldwell, a crack pickpocket who becomes the tail for whatever mark he assigned. Linus always finds himself in the middle of the minor but openly acknowledged power struggle between Danny and Rusty: like the child enduring his parents' messy divorce, Linus must field the feelings of distrust one has for the other, even as neither Danny nor Rusty gives poor Linus an ounce of important information. Damon is one of the most underrated actors working (along with his admittedly less talented buddy, Ben Affleck), and his portrayal of Linus as equal parts clueless dope and capable member of the team is the only aspect of the franchise that remains interesting through all three films.
Ocean's Eleven is meticulous, far too meticulous for such an implausible scenario; Danny and Rusty's plan for the heist makes The Joker's schemes in The Dark Knight seem about as complicated as finishing a half-solved Sudoku puzzle. Yet somehow Soderbergh makes it work, and there's actually a bit of fun in seeing the film a second time and looking out for all the barely noticeable setups for the ultimate payoff. For all its sidelining details, Ocean's Eleven maintains a constant level of fun that makes revisiting it a nice, relaxing experience rather than a tedious exercise in dramatic setup leading to an unsatisfying conclusion (that film has already been made, and it's called The Usual Suspects).

In my review of The Girlfriend Experience I mentioned how I often got bored at some stage. Even for a film as upbeat as Ocean's Eleven, that's true; this film moves as such a brisk pace that whenever it slows, even for a moment, it feels like the entire plot comes to a standstill (I believe this is called relativistic momentum, but looking at the precariousness of my current grade in Physics II I am unwilling to comment at this time). Nevertheless, Ocean's Eleven is a hip, finger-snapping salute to the city that defines American artifice. Compared to its glossy sequels, this often comes alive, especially when Soderbergh inserts brief shots of hand-held camera movement that act as adrenaline shocks just as you're thinking that the film is settling into too comfortable a groove, a groove that the sequels wore out until they cut clean through the vinyl. My biggest single complaint with the film is Julia Roberts' inability to do anything other than stand around in a few scenes; she would receive a bigger part in the next film, which sounds great on paper until you get to the matter of her playing a character who at one point poses as Julia Roberts, a failed gag that tried to go meta and nearly brought down cinema with it. But in all the places that its sequels created a noxious cloud of smug, Ocean's Eleven is bouncy and fun, and if there's something wrong with that I don't want to be right.