July 16, 2021
When considering the career of someone who has been in the business for over thirty years and has a tremendous filmography under his belt, surely I couldn’t cover the topic in one post. Well, not unless that post was pushing 10,000 words. OK, onto part two of my look at the career of Steven Soderbergh. Before we get to my top five films from his iconic career, let’s look at some interesting choices he has made over the years.
Breaking New Ground
Many filmmakers struggle to branch out into new directions after achieving success. Some feel the need to take on a big studio project after success on an independent film. Some will push outside their comfort zone to try new genres. Soderbergh has done anything and everything as a filmmaker, including some very unconventional choices, especially over the last decade. Let’s start with genres. He’s done it all: comedy, drama, suspense, thriller, action, period piece, documentary, biographical picture, science fiction, stripper film. Wait, maybe that last one is not really a genre. I think the only thing he hasn’t done is a musical, unless you want to count some of the production pieces at the strip club in Magic Mike. OK, we’ll give him that one.
Now, let’s talk about technique. Most of his movies feature what I call a “natural feel” to them, with tight shots of characters filmed with handheld cameras, so it looks like a documentary. From Sex, Lies and Videotape to Che (his 4 hour epic drama about Che Guevera) to Erin Brockovich and Traffic (his double shot Oscar-nominated films) and Contagion, many of his movies look like they could have happened in real life. Granted, some of his bigger hits, like the Ocean’s series, Magic Mike, and Logan Lucky, have more of that Hollywood feel. Either way you cut it, he can adapt his style to fit the story he is trying to tell.
Sometimes he even tries something new just to see if it will work. In 2018, Soderbergh filmed Unsane, a psychological thriller about a woman involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, entirely on an iPhone 7. Just for good measure, a year later, he filmed High Flying Bird, the story of a professional basketball player and his agent, on an iPhone 8. Both of these movies were pretty good, but the fact that they were shot on a freaking phone is unbelievable. One thing that Unsane and High Flying Bird have in common is Soderbergh’s tendency to make his movies about more than just the characters in them. They are usually a commentary about the world itself, particularly the capitalist system and its impact on health care (Unsane), professional sports (High Flying Bird), the pharmaceutical industry (Side Effects), the banking industry (The Laundromat) and the big business of food processing (one of my top five, which we’ll get to shortly). He also doesn’t stop his experimentation with his filmmaking style. For Bubble, a small town story about factory workers, he hired non-actors for the main roles to give it a more real-life feel to the movie. For Haywire, he cast Gina Carano, an MMA star with little acting experience, to headline his action film about a government operative being hunted by assassins.
Interesting Hobbies
If experimenting with his movies (which he is paid to make) wasn’t enough, he even experiments with his hobbies. Nope, instead of learning an instrument, painting, or playing golf, Soderbergh’s hobbies include….making movies. There are three projects (that I am aware of) that he has created and made available on his website that are pretty interesting.
- One of Hollywood’s famous catastrophes is Heaven’s Gate, the 3 ½ hour epic Western directed by Michael Cimino in 1980. While it has its admirers (full disclosure – I’ve never seen it), the film was a financial disaster, nearly bankrupting the studio. Soderbergh decided to take the original movie and come up with his own version, editing it down to a tidy one hour and 45 minutes. Just for fun. It’s available on his website to watch here.
- Another example was with the Hitchcock classic horror movie Psycho. You may remember that in 1998, Gus Van Sant directed his own version of Psycho in a virtual shot-for-shot remake of the original, albeit in color. Soderbergh took the two films and mashed them together (but entirely in black and white), alternating back and forth between both versions of the film, so you’d see one scene with Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, followed by a scene with Vince Vaughn as the not-so-friendly hotel manager. For the famous shower scene, Soderbergh shows both versions simultaneously, a dizzying view of two versions of the same scene. It’s a pretty neat experiment, also available on his website here.
- The last experiment is probably my favorite. To emphasize the importance and difficulty of staging every scene in a movie, and how it comes down to many decisions a director has to make, he created a version of Raiders of the Lost Ark with a few changes. He took out certain distractions that might prevent you from appreciating the impressive staging from director Steven Spielberg. Distractions like….color….and dialogue….and the original score. Instead, he inserted the brilliant score to The Social Network, composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Pretty cool way to watch a movie, which you can do here.
Those are just the projects that I’m aware of. I’m sure there are many more in various states of creation on his laptop. One last point on his website. Every January he publishes his “culture diaries” where he lists out (in a meticulous, some might say crazy, way) everything he has read or watched every day of the previous year. Let’s just say he consumes a lot of cultural content. As I’ve said all along, the man either doesn’t sleep or lives in a world with more than 24 hours in a day. On to my top five.
#5 – The Informant! (2009)
A dark comedy about a price-fixing scandal at a company that manufactures a food additive? That’s what I’m recommending to start my top five Soderbergh films? You betcha. This is one of the few movies in my top ten that I had no relationship with and saw for the first time in preparation for this post, and boy did it pay off. Matt Damon stars in the true story of Mark Whitacre, a business executive with Archer Daniels Midland, who worked with the FBI to blow the whistle on price fixing at his company in the early 1990s. It seems that ADM was conspiring with competitors to control the price of lysine, a food additive. Based on that plot description, you’re probably thinking that this could be a suspenseful thriller, along the lines of The Insider, the Russel Crowe film about the man who blew the whistle on the tobacco industry. Well, it seems that Whitacre wasn’t completely transparent and honest with the FBI when he started working with them. This movie gives new meaning to the term “unreliable narrator.” As his story starts to unravel, we see the absurdity of the whole situation and the dark comedy starts to emerge. I’ve been unable to figure out why there is an exclamation point at the end of the movie’s title, other than to emphasize that this is a dark comedy, not a suspenseful thriller. Damon is outstanding in this performance, portraying Whitacre as the bumbling fool that doesn’t quite understand that when he does something wrong, it’s just as bad as everyone else at the company doing something wrong. Don’t be lulled into thinking a movie about price-fixing in the food additive industry is boring, The Informant! Is a good one.
#4 – Traffic (2000)
Gritty. If I had to pick one word to describe Soderbergh’s film about the sprawling impact of illegal drugs on society, it would be gritty. Soderbergh won Best Director for Traffic and the movie also won three other Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (Benicio Del Toro), Best Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay (Stephen Gaghan, who would go on to write and direct Syriana, a similar style film about the oil industry in 2005). If you’re looking for a movie with a happy ending, you’ll have to look elsewhere, because there are no happy endings in any part of this story. But if you want to see brilliant filmmaking and outstanding performances across the board, Traffic delivers. Soderbergh mixes together the stories of the President’s new drug czar (Michael Douglas), his daughter (Erika Christensen) who is becoming addicted to heroin, a drug kingpin’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) dealing with the aftermath of her husband’s arrest, DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) trying to break up the kingpin’s network, and a Mexican cop (Del Toro) fighting the hopeless drug dealing running rampant throughout his country. There are a host of other big-name actors in Traffic, once again demonstrating Soderbergh’s ability to gather top talent for a project. While the storylines can be a little depressing at times (especially when compared to our current environment where drug use is still a major problem in this country), Traffic is still an excellent film demonstrating the talents of Soderbergh as a director.
#3 – Erin Brockovich (2000)
It’s hard enough to get a nomination for Best Director when there are only five slots available and there are hundreds of films released each year. It’s even harder to be nominated multiple times in your career. How about twice in the SAME YEAR? That’s exactly what happened in 2000, when Soderbergh received Best Director nominations for both Traffic and Erin Brockovich. While he won for Traffic, his other big film that year didn’t go home empty handed – of course, this was the movie that finally gave Julia Roberts the awards recognition with a Best Actress Oscar. It was also the role that Roberts enjoyed so much that she declared that she would work with Soderbergh whenever he calls. She answered that phone a year later for a film which I’ll get to in a bit.
While the story of an underdog taking on a big evil corporation features some excellent supporting actors (including Albert Finney and Aaron Eckhart), this movie has no shot of working if not for the incredible performance of Roberts. She stars as the real-life law office assistant, who takes it upon herself to investigate the mysterious illnesses of a town’s citizens caused by the environmental negligence of Pacific Gas & Electric. When she realizes the severity of the company’s actions, she persuades her boss (Finney) to pursue a class action lawsuit. Risking the well-being of her kids, her relationship with her neighbor and boyfriend (Eckhart), and even her own health, she relentlessly pursues justice for the people who were wronged and have no hope for restitution for their suffering. It’s still amazing to me that Soderbergh released two excellent films in the same year – Traffic, a serious drama that typically resonates with Oscar voters, and Erin Brockovich, a winning Hollywood story of the underdog persevering against injustices. Quite the year.
#2 – Out of Sight (1998)
If you aren’t an avid follower of the movie industry, it may be hard to believe that at one point in the mid-1990s there was a question of whether George Clooney could successfully make the transition from television (where he was a huge star on ER) to movies. His first few films were pretty mediocre, as I covered in my piece on Clooney and Tom Hanks here, including almost torpedoing the Batman franchise. Thankfully, things started to turn around beginning with Out of Sight, his first of six collaborations with Soderbergh, in 1998. Based on the novel by legendary author Elmore Leonard, Out of Sight is a cat and mouse crime comedy featuring Clooney as a career criminal planning to steal some diamonds with a U.S Marshall in pursuit. The actress playing that law enforcement official is Jennifer Lopez, in one of her early acting performances, again demonstrating Soderbergh’s creativity in casting his movies. The chemistry between Clooney and Lopez is excellent as they bounce between the dynamic of a cop chasing a criminal, with two people developing feelings for each other. There is a nice balance of comedy and crime suspense throughout Out of Sight, and features a strong supporting cast behind Clooney and Lopez. After more than thirty projects, it is still regarded as one of Soderbergh’s best films.
#1 – Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
The ultimate popcorn movie. No characters suffering a crisis in their life. No depressing storylines. No veiled messages to educate the audience. Just movie stars doing movie star things. Don’t overthink it. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. It’s been twenty years since Soderbergh pulled together an all-star cast to play a gang of misfit criminals to pull off the ultimate Vegas heist – rob three casinos during a heavyweight fight. This is, of course, a remake of the 1960 Rat Pack film led by Frank Sinatra as Danny Ocean, the role that Soderbergh would slot George Clooney into. He is joined by Brad Pitt as his trusty sidekick, Rusty, to plan the heist. This film has so many wonderful moments throughout – the early scenes where they assemble the gang, the “here’s how we’re going to do it” scene, the interactions between Clooney and Julia Roberts (as his ex-wife Tess), and the heist itself.
Soderbergh pulls the classic bait and switch where we see everything unfold on the night of the heist. Or do we? As the target of the robbery (casino owner Terry Benedict, played by Andy Garcia) realizes what is happening, Soderbergh brings us in on what really transpired over the course of the evening in question. It’s a wonderful few moments that have us saying, “Oh, so that’s how they did that!” and makes Ocean’s Eleven even more fun on a rewatch, as you start to notice little hints throughout the film that telegraph what will happen. The air freshener in the truck. The conversation about building the replica vault. “We’re building that for practice?” “Yeah, something like that.” There are some all-time great movies that have been called “perfect” – The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and many others. And while Ocean’s Eleven may not be an all-time “greatest ever” movie, for what it is – a fun Hollywood popcorn movie – to me, it’s perfect. So, naturally it’s my favorite movie from the extensive Soderbergh filmography.
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this look at one of my favorite directors. I’ll be back next week for an update on the year in 2021 in movies so far. I’ll take a look at the state of the industry (spoiler: movies are back in a big way, but confusion in finding where to watch them is running rampant), and my thoughts about some films that I really liked, and a few that just didn’t work for me. Thanks for reading and if you’d like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe here.