Out of Sight

 

Director Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh with Jennifer Lopez

George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez

OUT OF SIGHT         A-                                                                                                             USA  (123 mi)  1998  d: Steven Soderbergh     

I'm just gonna sit here, take it easy and wait for you to screw up.                                                   —Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez)

This foursome of films from 1998 to 2000, OUT OF SIGHT (1998), The Limey (1999), ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000), and Traffic (2000) represent Soderbergh working at the peak of his creative powers.  This is one of his finest efforts, named Entertainment Weekly’s Sexiest Movie Ever (50 Sexiest Movies Ever - Nick Kaufmann - LiveJournal) in a 2008 poll, a smooth, sophisticated and very sexy Hollywood thriller that features early performances in the budding careers of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, not yet stars, yet both sizzling onscreen and romantically involved in the most unorthodox fashion, as he is the handsome and charming Jack Foley, a career bank robber incarcerated at Glades Penitentiary in Florida, while she is Karen Sisco, a smooth-as-ice, intoxicatingly beautiful FBI Federal Marshal.  They meet while locked in the trunk of a getaway car as she’s kidnapped during a prison breakout when he is covered with mud, where the two have time on their hands to chat with one another and break the ice, actually discovering they have a mutual interest in classic Hollywood movies, talking about Faye Dunaway movies of all things, including the bad end of the otherwise likeable Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Clooney misstating the famous line from Network (1976), also wondering whether Robert Redford hooked up romantically with Dunaway a little too easily in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), while he continues to stroke her thighs, “But in a nice way,” he insists.  Capturing the best of his directorial ideas, with an emphasis on stylish editing, sound, camerawork, frame compositions, and color, while still managing to maintain an independent director’s control over his films, Soderbergh has imported into Hollywood some of the formal preoccupations of experimental filmmaking, such as challenges to character identification and narrative structure, where his visionary style and his habit of playing with the timeline of events gave a new impetus to American cinema, though this inexplicably didn’t do well at the box office.  Adapted by screenwriter Scott Frank from a 1996 Elmore Leonard crime novel, best known for character-driven stories, the ongoing dialogue is exquisite, exuding razor-sharp wit, making excellent use of secondary roles, so much so that the directors could just as easily have been the smart-mouthed and wise-assed Coen Brothers, who perfectly recaptured Clooney’s acerbic criminal persona a few years later in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), while also generating a short-lived TV series appropriately named Karen Sisco, starring Carla Gugino as Sisco.  Casting is one of the more imaginative aspects of the film, as character development through the introduction of new faces continues to surprise the viewer from the first to the last shot, including Catherine Keener as Adele Delisi, Foley’s eccentric ex-wife, also brief appearances by Michael Keaton as FBI agent Ray Nicolette (Sisco’s husband) reprising his role in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), while lifelong criminal Samuel L. Jackson from that film also plays a similar role, beautifully photographed by Elliot Davis, typically using a handheld camera, featuring interior hotel scenes with a warm and memorable glow, and a jazzy score by Irish composer David Holmes.  Despite the passage of time, this film has lost none of its sophisticated elegance and charm.    

Seemingly brought together by fate, Foley, with a dubious reputation of more than 200 bank robberies while never using a weapon, fortuitously acknowledges the moment, “It’s like seeing someone for the first time, like you can be passing on the street, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there’s this kind of a recognition like you both know something.  Next moment the person’s gone, and it’s too late to do anything about it.  And you always remember it because it was there, and you let it go, and you think to yourself, ‘What if I had stopped?  What if I had said something?’  What if, what if... it may only happen a few times in your life.”  Or maybe just once, she adds.  While the relationship is the pulsating heart of the film, like a throwback to the golden age of Bogart and Bacall, both displaying the self-assurance and sexiness that makes them naturally irresistible both to each other and to audiences, there is a novelistic structure onscreen, with more than enough subplots involving a host of vividly drawn characters.  Foley and Sisco don’t really acknowledge their interest in one another, yet in their minds they do, and in an oddly embarrassing moment where neither one is supposed to be where they are, he gives her a short little wave from an elevator as she’s sitting in a hotel lobby, eyes fixed on his before he disappears from view with his fellow partner in crime, Buddy Bragg (Ving Rhames), who helped break him out of prison.  While Foley exercises the buddy system, working professionally in public, or being surrounded by hordes of prison inmates, or ex-cons once he escapes, it’s as if he’s never alone and one wonders if he’s capable of private, reflective thought.  Lopez, on the other hand, sexy and determined, has a smart-mouthed, over-protective, yet adoring father, a now retired marshal (Dennis Farina) who worries about his daughter’s dating habits and thoughtfully gives her a gun for her birthday, but for the most part she exhibits a loner policy, as she doesn’t trust the current misogyny and system of male favoritism in place that represents the state of mind in the ranks of the FBI.  So she’s used to going her own way and taking care of herself, irrespective of what they may think of her.  When she goes looking for a career criminal named Maurice (Don Cheadle), aka Snoopy, a murderous ex-prizefighter, but instead finds Mosella (Viola Davis) as his embittered, long forgotten wife, Sisco does a number on Maurice’s brother, Kenneth (Isaiah Washington), an over-controlling serial rapist and male thug, who instantly senses a hot-blooded woman with a taste for violence, exhibiting a sensual lust for getting down and dirty on the floor with her, so she zaps him with a collapsible baton that leaves him otherwise immobile, saying “You wanted to tussle.  We tussled,” as she calmly walks out the door unscathed.

Following another Elmore Leonard novel brought to the screen, Barry Sonnenfeld’s GET SHORTY (1995), both adapted by Scott Frank and produced by Danny DeVito, this is a collective mosaic of genre pieces from past decades, including shootouts, a jewelry robbery, and prison breaks, full of zooms, jump cuts, flashbacks, flash-forwards, close-ups, freeze frames, and grainy images, as if to remind viewers we are watching a movie, with a heated romance at the center, bathed in the warmth of a retro design, with a deep respect for the classical forms, where much of the beauty of this film is the dazzling interplay between characters, which in the world of criminals is all about exuding an air of confidence, refusing to be defeated or brought down by anybody.  Oddly enough, this is also the same method for initiating romance, which is beautifully done here, one of the highlights of the film, a clever mix of image and dialogue and music, preceded by Sisco sitting alone in a near empty hotel bar being hit on by a bunch of out of town male imbeciles before Foley walks in and they have a serious conversation, where their thoughts jump ahead out of sequence and we see what they are about to do before they actually do it, a co-mingling of the sexual imagination and the real, gorgeously understated, memorably jazzy and intoxicating.  Fascinated by his carefree behavior, in the mold of Clark Gable, even their post-coital conversation has an air of authenticity not shared anywhere else in the film, where Sisco is allowed to have doubts creep in, and Foley, of course, ever vigilant, puts her mind at ease.  They call this little interlude a “timeout” before they resume back to their normal lives, where Foley and Maurice are in competition for finding the big score, the teaser in all film noirs, which in this case is the robbery of $5 million dollars worth of uncut diamonds hidden somewhere in the giant estate of fellow white collar criminal Ripley (Albert Brooks), a Wall Street billionaire who did time in Lompoc for insider trading, where he met Maurice, amusingly paying his accounts in prison by checkbook.  While the first half of the film is set in sunny Miami with those south Florida vibrant colors, where there is a perceived lack of real menace, the second half moves to Detroit in winter, viewed as a dangerous, oppressive place, rendered in darker tones, dominated by nighttime scenes in tightly enclosed spaces.  It’s a snowy night in Detroit filled with sinister possibilities where anything can happen, with an elevated level of suspense galvanized by the unfocused impulses of sadistic black criminal gangsters, yet the film is really about the sexual swagger of Karen Cisco, one badass woman who’s sitting on the outside waiting to bust them.  Generally regarded as one of the most overlooked gems of the 90’s, the film is smart, tense, stylish, well-directed, character driven, atmospheric, and moves at a fast clip, like a screwball comedy, beautifully edited by legendary British editor Anne V. Coates, but the believable chemistry between the unconventional connection between Clooney and Lopez makes all the difference.   

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Concussion

Dr. Bennet Omalu (left) and actor Will Smith who portrays him in the movie Concussion

 

CONCUSSION                      B-                   

USA  Great Britian  Australia  (123 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Peter Landesman                                   Official site

A tragic and ultimately heartbreaking story about the profound effects of football-related brain trauma, where professional athletes are reduced to inexplicable shells of themselves, literally becoming different people inhabiting their same bodies with no control over their actions, succumbed by constant headaches, psychological torment and such mind-numbing pain that they can no longer sleep or think straight, many resorting to suicide as the only way out.  While this is in every sense a Hollywood movie, complete with an accompanying inner story romance, it’s tone throughout is downbeat and somber, reflective of the post 9/11 era in which it is set, basically following the life of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born pathologist and forensic neuropathologist whose specialty is the study of the human brain, who at the time was assigned to the Allegheny County coroner’s office in Pittsburgh where his job was examining the dead bodies in the morgue.  However, before we meet him, there’s a fascinating introduction where David Morse plays Hall of Famer “Iron” Mike Webster in his final days, arguably the greatest center in the history of professional football, the man who anchored the offensive line in a spectacular run of winning 4 Super Bowls for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1970’s, but he’s seen homeless, psychologically damaged, unintelligible, destitute, and literally out of his mind, living in an old beat-up truck on the outskirts of a vacant lot next to a steel plant.  The extent of his fall from grace is astonishing to anyone that knew him, as his anguishing pain was constant and insufferable, subjecting himself to relentless electric shock from a Taser gun, rendering himself unconscious just to fall asleep, and eventually dying of a reported heart attack at the age of 50.  This brief interlude sets the tone for the film, horrifying to say the least from a Hall of Fame legend, unimaginable, and equally unforgettable. 

Something of a cross between the hidden secrets of the tobacco industry in Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER (1999) and similar secrets hidden by the nuclear power industry in Mike Nichols’ SILKWOOD (1983), complete with unexplained conspiracy theories that are left dangling in the wind, Will Smith (with an African accent) stars as a forensic neuropathologist who discovers the first case of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), a football-related brain trauma, and challenges the NFL in his battle to reveal the truth, where he is fought at every step by a multi-billion dollar industry that prefers to cover up any scientific knowledge that would have a significant impact on the game.   While it’s a case of dollars and cents, where the league is protecting their investment into the product of football, the filmmaker himself is an investigative journalist for the New York Times magazine, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and others, covering the conflicts in Rwanda, Kosovo, and Afghanistan/Pakistan after 9/11.  The film is based on an extensive magazine piece, Game Brain - GQ.com, written by Jeanne Marie Laskas from GQ magazine, September 14, 2009, now enlarged into a book entitled Concussion, where she documents what happened to Mike Webster and several other former NFL football players, including Steelers offensive lineman Justin Strzelcyzk, who died in a head-on collision after leading police on a high speed car chase, and yet another Steelers offensive lineman Terry Long who died from drinking antifreeze, each a spiraling tragedy of epic proportions.  It was Dr. Omalu who examined each of their brains after death, as the diagnosis can only be determined by an autopsy of the brain, so it’s only after the fact that the extent of this deteriorating brain condition is realized, that repeated blows to the head can have drastic effects to the brain, associated with depression, early-onset dementia, aggressive behavior and suicide.  Over time, as more NFL players die, the results will be even more pervasive as other names are added to the list, such as Andre Waters, who had a reputation as one of the NFL’s hardest hitting defenders as a safety from the Philadelphia Eagles defensive backfield, but eventually took his own life with a gunshot to the head, or Dave Duerson, another heavy hitting safety from the Chicago Bears who died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the chest.   

While the results are devastating, the film itself gets carried away with a Hollywood good and evil scenario, seen almost exclusively through Dr. Omalu’s point of view, with Will Smith playing a Nigerian émigré who dreamed of coming to America as a young boy, who desperately wants to be accepted in America, a tireless worker who holds eight advanced degrees and board certifications, whose hours of work are so extensive that he has little time for anything else, though he’s a dedicated Catholic, where his church priest assigns him the role of shepherding a newly arrived medical student from Kenya, Gugu Mbatha-Raw from Beyond the Lights (2014) as Prema, where his early success parallels their growing love affair, ultimately getting engaged and married, becoming his most steadfast supporter.  Like Sidney Poitier in GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1967), their moral character has to be above reproach, where Hollywood presents them as saints, where their level of decency is stupifying, though it’s clear one of the reasons his research is initially received with such skepticism is that he’s an African without American citizenship, so it’s easy to belittle his findings.  In the coroner’s office, his supervisor is so offended by the invasive procedures performed on Pittsburgh Steeler greats after death that he refuses to authorize them, forcing the doctor to pay for more scientific results himself, which includes specialized tissue analysis outside the norm, as the brain shows no signs of damage during an autopsy.   This thread of xenophobia and American inequality interestingly runs throughout this picture, as Omalu’s naiveté is a stark contrast to the cynicism and outright racism that greets him, where even after publishing his findings in a medical journal, he is met with a formidable amount of character assassination and utter disdain, as the NFL initially smears his medical findings.  The lone ally in the room is the man that runs the coroner’s office, Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), a noted forensic consultant in legal cases, and the mentor who trained Omalu as a forensic pathologist, and through him Omalu meets Dr. Julian Bailes (Alec Baldwin), a former team doctor for the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the first NFL representatives to believe his medical findings, offering credibility from someone within the sport, becoming a major turning point in Omalu’s effort to get the NFL, and the world, to notice. 

While it is portrayed as a David versus Goliath confrontation, where a $12 billion dollar giant corporation with unlimited monetary resources tries to suppress Omalu’s findings, where the NFL won’t even allow him in the room to discuss the matter, turning instead to Dr. Baines “as one of their own,” where the initial findings are met with open suspicion, anger, and even intimidation, which leads to the most incredulous Hollywood insinuations, easily the least effective part of the film, becoming a study of growing paranoia as there is some suggestion that the NFL uses its influence to call in the FBI to raid Dr. Wecht’s office, going through his files, removing sensitive equipment, where Omalu concludes, “You are attacking him to get to me!”  The problem is the FBI did, in fact, raid Wecht’s office, but it came three months “before” Omalu published any of his research, so this is the kind of movie hysteria that diminishes Hollywood’s own influence and credibility, resorting to foolishness and utter nonsense instead of presenting what actually happened, which undermines the effectiveness of the picture.  Even worse, there are insinuations that Omalu’s pregnant wife is being followed, as we see her being tailed by an anonymous car, amping up the fear factor as she attempts to get away, losing her unborn baby in the process.  While there is an exaggerated portrayal of a lurking presence of evil, suggesting the NFL is behind it all, this is Hollywood overkill.  The blatant NFL crimes are obvious enough, as they were slow to recognize how seriously concussions and repeated blows to the head can effect one’s brain, where initially as an industry they lied and covered up.  Despite the absurd doublespeak of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell as he speaks under oath before an investigatory Congressional committee studying how concussions may impact the game, nine years passed after Omalu’s initial publishing before the NFL recognized the merit of his findings.  There are still any number of football spokespersons that continue to underestimate the impact, but it’s hard to refute the evidence that the game of football has on the human brain, even at the sub-concussion level, though at least the league is much more focused on concussion protocol (Concussion - NFL Players Association) in today’s game, as are all sports in general, which includes an independent evaluation from doctors who are not connected to the league.  While high-priced quarterbacks that earn big salaries can afford to voluntarily remove themselves from the game after taking big hits, which is the ideal goal of today’s game, many of the more borderline players can’t, as their earnings are far more suspect, so they’re not so willing to voluntarily pull themselves out of a game.  As a result, there are official spotters (ATC Spotters | NFL Football Operations) on the sidelines of today’s NFL games whose job is to observe player behavior and pull out players suspected of taking voracious hits to the head and subjecting them to a concussion protocol.  While the system is imperfect, where they obviously miss incidents observing from the press box, at least the league’s rules are developing with more interest in player safety.