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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Pulp Fiction

PULP FICTION                      B+               
USA  (154 mi)  1994  ‘Scope  d:  Quentin Tarantino    

PULP FICTION remains Tarantino’s best film, immensely popular, currently listed #5 on Highest Rated IMDb viewer rankings and the place to start in evaluating his work, awarded the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1994, over films like Kiarostami’s final installment of his Earthquake Trilogy, THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES, Kielsowski’s THREE COLORS: RED, Atom Egoyan’s EXOTICA, or Zhang Yimou’s TO LIVE, with Clint Eastwood as the Cannes Jury President, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, losing Best Picture to FORREST GUMP (1994) - - talk about irony.  While not sharing all the platitudes for Tarantino, finding him something of an adolescent schlockmeister who’s often more interested in provoking controversy and drawing attention to himself, since he remains attracted to super heroes thrust into lurid melodramas not far removed from a fantasy, comic book universe, creating endless dialogue about nothing in particular that some go gaga about, but really, they seem more like undeveloped sketches, especially since he tends to interrupt them midstream, jump into another lengthy dialogue sequence before resuming the story later.  That he occasionally dips into realism is no substitute, however, for the real thing, as he can’t stop himself from indulging in Hollywood kitsch pieces, losing himself in his own childlike wonder and expanding his sequences as violently or as grotesquely as he pleases, though in this film most of the violence is offscreen.  It’s unclear how serious he takes his responsibilities, as down deep, he’s just a boy that wants to have fun at the movies, constantly using movie references throughout his works as a way of communicating with his audience.  Seen as a whole, his films are not life altering, do not make you see the world any differently, and are for the most part a superficial alteration of reality.  Despite supposed subversive evidence to the contrary, Tarantino is not John Waters and instead adheres to the Harvey Weinstein method of making Hollywood films. 

Especially early in his career when he made relatively low budget movies, he both revived actors stalled careers and discovered fresh faces, while also becoming enamored with the idea of putting himself in his own movies.  While he’s hardly a groundbreaker, especially since he relishes a sense of honoring and reviving the past, he’s developed a near cult following that would beg to differ, including director Peter Bogdanovich who has called him “the single most influential director of his generation.” Between his quirky dialogue and his brilliant use of period music, he has articulated the art of cool on the set, where his energized and often youth oriented filmmaking is always distinguished by the creation of uniquely inventive sequences that many would claim are among the best they’ve seen.  Tarantino has also maintained an avid interest in hard-boiled pulp novels, like Jim Thompson and W. R. Burnett in particular, but also classic film noir, where it’s impossible not to see evidence of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) in the contents inside the briefcase Samuel L. Jackson carries around the whole movie, or traces of 40’s and 50’s hit men, but instead of faceless creatures hiding in the shadows barely uttering a word, he brings them front and center as his leading star characters.  As the title suggests, this film is filled with chapter sequences, told out of time, but all somehow pulled together by the end with the use of recurring characters. 

Tarantino pulled John Travolta out of mothballs and teamed him up with a relatively unknown at the time Samuel L. Jackson as a couple of low level hit men who are occasionally hired to do some dirty work.  Their appeal lies in their hilarious comic repartee, an explicative-laced, running dialogue between the two continually engaged in random conversation filled with pop culture references, blending comedy with violence, where they rarely shut up and instead talk their way through every situation.  Basically, these are a couple of smart asses with hair-trigger tempers carrying loaded guns and a penchant for using them.  Jackson comes off as the smarter of the two, a guy who carries around a wallet with “Bad Mother Fucker” inscribed, but the more reckless Travolta has a special charm about him that is perfectly exposed in a series of lowbrow questions asked by Uma Thurman, the boss’s wife, who is sizing him up before they go out on the town together Son of a Preacher Man from Pulp Fiction YouTube (2:01), as ordered by his drug dealing gangland boss, Ving Rhames, an enormous guy with a violent reputation who is challenging Travolta’s loyalty by dangling his attractive wife at him.  Their scenes together may be the most memorable, especially when Uma urges him to help win a twist dance contest and Travolta happily obliges Twist Contest Dance Scene (Pulp Fiction) - YouTube (3:19).  But Uma Thurman is the film noir, dark-edged, femme fatale who does not appear out of place anywhere in Tarantino films, as she perfectly fits his fantasy profile, laying the groundwork for her tough-as-nails character in the upcoming KILL BILL Pt’s I and II (2003 – 04).    

Characters are introduced, disappear, or are killed off and later return as the film's narrative structure jumps back and forth throughout, where there’s an extended sequence with Bruce Willis that doesn’t quite work because he plays the exact same one-note macho character that we see in all his other Hollywood films, playing a boxer ordered to take a dive by the same gangland boss, Ving Rhames, but instead skips town after literally killing his surprised opponent in the ring.  Out of sheer bad fortune, he meets his boss, the one guy he’s running away from, by accident on a city street, and the scene descends into a completely different moral plane, where after a mano a mano confrontation we enter a world of utter depravity, where Redneck underground sadists sodomize and torture their victims before killing them.  This entire torture porn sequence grows endlessly more gruesome and revoltingly hideous, but suggests there are layers of morality even among thieves.  At least when Travolta and Jackson return again, opening and closing the film, they retain their unpredictable gift for gab, where their time onscreen immediately uplifts the material, unexpectedly ending up in the home of Tarantino himself who uses some questionable “nigger” humor.  Samuel L. Jackson uses the word naturally and effortlessly, but out of Tarantino’s mouth it sounds repugnantly tasteless, even if he’s the guy writing all of Jackson’s dialogue. 

 
While he may have intended to extend black culture into a white world or character, Mark Twain already did that in Huckleberry Finn, circa 1884, and more than 100 years later it remains a controversial decision, but artistically it’s considered the accepted language of the historical era.  Not so here, where Tarantino is unfortunately suggesting that in the 1990’s in America it’s acceptable for whites to use this word onscreen in a humorous context without offensive racial ramifications.  This is an exasperatingly deluded choice, as it is now and will likely generations from now remain offensive, especially in a film layered in pop culture, where others will undoubtedly mimic or copy the same behavior and think it’s acceptable.  Spike Lee called him on it, especially with its continued and prolific use in JACKIE BROWN (1997), “I’m not against the word, and some people speak that way, but Quentin is infatuated with that word.  What does he want to be made—an honorary black man? …I want Quentin to know that all African Americans do not think that word is trendy or slick.”  So, like all Tarantino films, the writer/director tends to get carried away with his own self-indulgent crudeness, which as an artist he has every right to express, but this diminishes the maturity and overall impact of his work, where something meant to be sarcastically funny and ironic turns implosively on its ear, returning to that snarky, juvenile tone of the author.  In PULP FICTION, for the most part, it all sounds so inventively new, where Tarantino brings all these forces together, accentuated by a brilliant soundtrack and cast, where in the eyes of some it is generation defining, where PULP FICTION brings to the culture of the 90’s what Easy Rider (1969) was to the counterculture of the 60’s.