The Essentials: The Films Of Steven Soderbergh

“Che” (2008)
Deemed by some to be the director’s masterpiece, Soderbergh’s take on revolutionary icon Che Guevara (a one-time Terrence Malick project) is made up of two films — “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla” — which are each distinct, but at the same time are so closely interlinked that they can only really be looked at together. Each stars Benicio Del Toro, in a career-crowning performance as Guevara, but “The Argentine” focuses on Che’s success alongside Fidel Castro, overthrowing Batista’s regime in Cuba, while “Guerilla” follows his final failure, a botched revolution in Bolivia. But despite the rise-and-fall approach, and two very distinct visual approaches — a warm, yellowish vibe mixed with black-and-white Super16 footage for the framing scenes at the U.N; blue-tinged cold for “The Guerilla,” with both marking Soderbergh’s first time shooting with the RED camera — the two films are very much companion pieces in being ground-view procedural war films, interested more in the day-to-day tasks of keeping a revolution alive than in heroics and battles. Again, it’s that Sodeberghian fascination with process — how something happens, not so much the why — that takes precedence, and while some find it to be emotionally alienating as a result (what’s new?), the slow-burn makes it one of Soderbergh’s most absorbing films, particularly if you were lucky enough to catch the back-to-back roadshow of the two films together. And that’s because they really are inseparable — the triumph and (relative) thrills of Part One are less effective without the fall to earth in Part Two, just as the steadily tightening claustrophobia of part two doesn’t work as well without the success of Part One as a contrast. And while the supporting cast are uniformly excellent (Demian Bichir‘s Castro a particularly highlight), it’s really Del Toro’s show through and through. The actor resists the temptation to be showy, often happy to fade into the background, but even when Sodebergh’s lens focuses on the men, it’s the quiet charisma of his “Traffic” star that burns through. It’s probably too inaccessible to be known to cinephiles at large as the director’s finest hour, but it’s hard to think of a film on his resume that’s both as ambitious, and as fully realized, as this one, so it certainly makes a good case. [A]

“The Girlfriend Experience” (2009)
The second of Soderbergh’s low-budget excursions into the world of non-professional actors (mostly brought to an end after this, though you could argue that “Haywire” completes the trilogy), “The Girlfriend Experience” also serves as something of a precursor to “Magic Mike” — hooking an audience in with the promise of sex, not least thanks to the presence of famous porn star Sasha Grey in the lead role, and then delivering a film that’s more about economics than anything else. The film sees Grey play Chelsea, a high-priced escort who, while she sleeps with clients, is prized for giving the titular ‘girlfriend experience.’ With the economy collapsing (Soderbergh was shooting as the markets caved), she’s not bringing in what she’s used to, and despite a long-term boyfriend, the offer from a client of a new life starts to feel a little more tempting. It’s relatively slight stuff, especially with a performance from Grey that, while reasonably effective for Soderbergh’s purposes, certainly proves that the porn legend isn’t going to be doing Shakespeare any time soon (most of the rest of the cast fare about the same, with the exception of film critic Glenn Kenny, who lends an excellently sleazy cameo as a self-styled escort connoisseur). But it’s one of the cases when Soderbergh’s emotional detachment serves his take on the business of relationships and sex especially well. A minor entry, for certain, but an interesting little experiment. [B]

“The Informant!” (2009)
Having already succeeded with a fairly straightforward character-based whistleblower picture in “Erin Brockovich” and wisely realizing “The Insider” is still an untouchable milestone in said genre, Steven Soderbergh realized the only logical entry point for the story of agricultural price-fixing tattle-tale Mark Whitacre was through comedy. Indebted to the ’70s in more ways than one — the hilariously goofy Marvin Hamlisch score, the groovy font title cards throughout and the non-traditional narrative filled with minor character crises –“The Informant!” is an amusing homage to that era. Featuring a portly Matt Damon in the lead as a cheerful, bi-polar, Midwestern bio-chemist, the picture doesn’t follow a three-act structure as much as it just layers whopping fib on top of gigantic lie wrapped up in ridiculous fabrication; soon enough it’s impossible to tell what’s fact or fiction. Aside from the score and wickedly sly off-topic voice-over, Soderbergh plays it all deliciously straight and matter-of-fact, and Damon seems to relish playing the apogee of unreliable narrators who actually thinks he’s some sort of spy. The whole thing is rounded out by a strong supporting cast that conveys various levels of disbelief and ridicule — Melanie Lynskey in particular does a subtly strong job as Mark’s supportive wife. Unorthodox enough to be generally out of step with modern-day audiences (it didn’t exactly clean up at the box-office), nevertheless, “The Informant!” is a devilishly funny little riff and another picture in a long line of Soderbergh-ian experiments in a sub-genre. [B]

“Contagion” (2011)
With his retirement already announced by the time it premiered at Venice in September 2011, an air of finality permeates “Contagion,” Soderbergh’s modern take on 1970s disaster movies by way of George Romero‘s socially conscious horror films. The fact that “Contagion” turned out to be such a thrilling, emotionally sound exercise makes his impending retirement even more bittersweet and hard to swallow. The tale of a globetrotting virus, and the hard-working scientists that rally to stop its spread, it’s an economically told epic, clocking in at a little over 100 minutes but featuring over a dozen central characters (played by Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Lawrence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and, the pick of the bunch, Jennifer Ehle) and set on several continents. While not openly emotional, the film does find time, particularly in its last act, to punctuate the proceedings with moments of heart-tugging warmth, particularly involving Fishburne’s selfless CDC official and Damon’s newly widowed (and completely immune) suburban father. The film is scary and its politics slyly leftist – this is, after all, a movie where an organized government body actually succeeds in stopping an out-of-control disease. (The Tea Partiers would be the first to kick the bucket.) Supposedly an hour of fully edited footage was trimmed at the final stages, and we’d kill to see that stuff; it would have given “Contagion” an even grander scale but probably rendered it less human. Still, what remains is probably one of Soderbergh’s most satisfying mainstream pictures, which also let him tick “disaster movie” and “horror flick” off his genre bucket list. [A-]

“Haywire” (2012)
Unless you count the “Ocean’s” movies, “Haywire” marks Soderbergh’s first bona-fide action movie, one envisioned as a contrast to the rapid-fire cutting of the “Bourne” series and similar, while also seeing him follow in the spirit of “The Girlfriend Experience” by hiring a first-time actress better known for her work in other fields — in this case MMA fighter Gina Carano — to lead the film. It was a fairly enticing prospect, especially given that it marked a reunion with “The Limey” writer Lem Dobbs, and had a cast also including Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender, but it somehow adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The film’s hardly lacking in style, thanks to some sharp cutting, and a funk-fuelled David Holmes score, but ‘Peter Andrews”s RED camerawork is starting to run a little thin at this point; the color-palette is similar to what we’ve seen in earlier films, and it’s all a touch dispiriting. While the way the director lenses the action with such clarity and clear-headedness is refreshing, the film is rarely particularly thrilling, and Dobbs’ script, intriguing gender issues aside, never adds up to more than an unusually verbose, unnecessarily complex direct-to-video actioner elevated by a starry cast. And of that cast, most — presumably inspired by their not-so-great-with-the-line-readings leading lady — are somewhat flat, leaving Tatum to be the surprising stand-out. [C+]