And so it is I return to this long-neglected blog as my personal project #1 following a major life change that saw me step away from the bulk of my writing six months ago and move from Portland, OR, to North Hollywood, CA, to join Vertigo Comics as a Senior Editor. And so it is that my return is as much about me as it is about the films. But so it also is that Steven Soderbergh’s transitional double feature makes for an apropos subject with which to reignite my journey here. Not that the TV has be turned off or that I haven’t been watching my Criterions, but you’ll have to wait for second viewings before you get to know the full extent of what I thought of Ride the Pink Horse (great) or The BlackStallion (good) or It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (not so good)--though I could get personal about a couple of those two.
But no, this is a reunion with Steven Soderbergh, a model of
creative daring, a chameleon of cinema, who here we find looking for his way
while doing two films that, visually, seem the least him. Be it the idyllic
nostalgia of 1993’s King of the Hill or the
cool-like-a-glacier artifice of his 1995 soft-boiled The
Underneath, his adaptation of a Depression-era memoir or a remake of
the superb Robert Siodmak noir Criss Cross, these are films
that found Soderbergh searching. A state of malaise and confusion not unlike
what I was feeling myself leading up to my own life change. Who am I and what
am I doing here making these things? Hell, just contrast the mood of the
titles: from top to bottom, the highest to lowest, monarch to corpse.
Not that either movie here is wholly terrible, no matter the
director’s own assessment of The Underneath. Even there I
should note how much I hated it on first viewing back during
its original release. It suffered from a contrived indie ennui that was
oh-so-popular at the time, the same distancing self-regard that has kept me
from being a fan of Hartley or Egoyan. The Underneath ages
better than expected though. On my third viewing, I am fine with it, though
only just.
On the other hand, this is my first time with King
of the Hill, a wholly enjoyable but strangely anonymous take on A.E.
Hotchner’s account of one childhood furnished in aspirational poverty. A very
young Jesse Bradford (Bring it On, William
Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet [review]) stars as Aaron, an imaginative
child whose proclivity for lying is home grown. He and his parents and his
little brother live in a hotel on the wrong side of the line for the school
Aaron attends, but his parents encourage his bending of the truth to keep
getting a better education because one day the fib will bend all the way around
to being real--or so his father believes. You can’t blame him for wanting to go
the whole way with the cover-up.
Naturally, this will take much longer than expected, and
things will get worse before they get better--particularly after the younger
brother (Cameron Boyd) is shipped off to relatives, mom (Lisa Eichorn) is
shipped off to a sanitarium, and dad (Jeroen Krabbé) ships himself off to parts
unknown to sell watches, leaving Aaron to fend for himself and watch his
carefully constructed ruse of a life fall apart.
There are some stellar sequences in King of the
Hill. Anytime Bradford and Boyd share the screen, there’s a beautiful
rapport between the two that would have you believe they really did grow up
together. Bradford manages to find similar connections with other actors,
including some key scenes with Adrien Brody, who plays an older hotel resident
who teaches Aaron a few tricks. This ability to be present with his co-stars is
Bradford’s greatest strength, even when at times he is the weakest link. His
confidence and good looks never fail him, so even as he’s supposed to be sickly
and starving, he generally just appears to be having a bad day.
It’s one of many things that break the reality of the
picture. Soderbergh transports too many caricatures from old movies into what
is otherwise a modern interpretation of the timeframe. The angry cop (John
McConnell) and bullying bellboy (Joseph Chrest) are cartoons rather than
people. One expects them each to take a brick to the back of the head,
Krazy Kat-style. Compare this with the sensitive portrayal
by Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as a young girl
isolated by her epilepsy, and you see how much better King of the
Hill would have been had Soderbergh chased the humanity instead of
the visual homily. (Or perhaps embraced the antiquity completely, much as he
did in The Good German [review 1, 2]).
Which, if stepping too far into caricature is the main
problem of King of the Hill, it seems to also be the only
aspect of the film Soderbergh carries over into the next. The
Underneath is all surface chill, the pretense and plot twists of
classic noir, but with none of the fire or the passion. In a way, were we to
make this a legit double-bill where The Underneath is the
first film’s sequel, we could see this as silver-tongued Aaron having returned
to his hometown after his lies got him run out on a rail, now all grown up,
looking to make amends, and failing to find new paths.
Peter Gallagher stars as Michael Chambers, a compulsive
gambler whom we will learn skipped out on his debts, leaving his girlfriend
Rachel (Alison Elliott) to clean up after him. He’s come back to see his
widowed mother marry a new fella (Paul Dooley), only to find Rachel has now
hooked up with local gangster Tommy Dundee (William Fichtner). Michael’s
stepdad gets him a job driving an armored car, but Michael is ready to toss
that new opportunity and everyone’s happy lives aside by luring Tommy into a
robbery that, he hopes, will lead to a double-cross and a journey into the
sunset with Alison.
Despite having solid source material to build from, Soderbergh hits a wiffle ball here. He mines the plot for its basic story, but then mars the whole thing with a baffling multi-timeframe structure that does little to enhance what is occurring. Rather, it seems like smoke-and-mirrors to mask how little is going on underneath (if you’ll pardon the expression). Likewise the overbearing lighting schemes. The blues and the greens and the reds are meant to signify the different plot threads and shifting emotions, but as symbolism, Soderbergh comes up empty. Taken at face value, The Underneath is a kaleidoscopic disco of nausea.
So, too, do the backstories the writer/director invents for
the characters ring hollow. Michael has a brother, David (Adam Trese), who is a
cop. David has stuck around and been there for his mother (Anjanette Comer),
and he resents how Michael manages to consistently screw up and yet be forgiven.
It’s not hard to side with David, because Michael sure does seem like an empty
shirt. It’s impossible to see how his lack of charisma entices the women in his
life to make so many wrong choices. (Elisabeth Shue also appears as a bank
teller who should know better.)
Once again, Soderbergh pits his too-pretty lead against a
salacious villain. Though Fichtner can be quite good playing the heavy
(First Snow [review 1, 2], The Lone Ranger),
here he is like a fetal bad guy waiting to come to full term. (When he grows
up, he’ll be Gary Oldman in The Professional.) Tommy’s
outbursts may rattle the audience out of the stupor the film otherwise
encourages, but in a way that is more boorish than intriguing.
Even so, for the plethora of negatives, The
Underneath ends up being an all right movie. It slithers rather than
plods, and its final act finds some energy and manages to be interesting right down to the final twist.
Soderbergh wouldn’t disagree with any of the above. In fact,
his interviews on this set back up most of it. He says during the filming of
The Underneath he escaped from the disaster at hand by fantasizing
about making Schizopolis [review], the film that would
change everything for him. In effect, these--his third and fourth films--were
building blocks as much as they were stumbling blocks to become the filmmaker
he was meant to be. These would give way to Schizopolis, and
that would lead to Out of Sight, and not long after that
Traffic [review], and a string of unbroken successes (yes,
unbroken) right up to his shift from movies to TV and TheKnick.
And so hopefully it will be for me. The prior couple of
years of floundering--mostly on projects you will never see, mind you, not on
anything that got published--have set me up for an unexpected turn into
tomorrow. Let’s hope my track record from here on out will be just as good as
Soderbergh’s.
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