Stylish Substance: PRESENCE and BLACK BAG

The usual haunted house movie is all about how scary it would be to live with a ghost. Here’s one that goes a step further: it’d also be scary to be a ghost. The formal conceit of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence puts us in the ghost’s skittish perspective. The camera is the specter’s point of view. It lurks. It glides. It peers around corners. It eavesdrops on the family drama of the home’s new inhabitants. The mother (Lucy Liu) has looming legal trouble related to her job, the son (Eddy Maday) is a grumpy high school swimmer who is clearly a bit of a bully, the daughter (Callina Liang) is mourning the recent death of a friend, and the father (Chris Sullivan) is just tired of all this stress. Even without a ghost in the house, they’d be a troubled bunch. David Koepp’s screenplay tensely suggests these dilemmas as glimpsed from the haunted perspective. Joining the melodrama to an elliptical telling gives the story an extra eerie frisson. These are convincing, concisely drawn characterizations with a casualness that’s powerfully expressive in the performances. And the style lends all of that extra power as the camera floats and darts and stares and hides. It compounds the tension in interesting ways. It makes the audience lean in to fill in the gaps. And then there’s the additional electricity in seeing a typical ghost story scene in which a sleeping character awakens with a start and stares into a room’s dark corner, clearly sensing the supernatural presence, and seeing the character’s fearful eyes looking directly at us. Have we been spotted? The short movie (not quite 90 minutes) never outstays its welcome as it draws to a fine genre close—a kind of percolating teen drama slowly descending into horror—and takes a few gut-twisting swerves. The final shots pay off both the style and the story simultaneously with a shivering gasp. This is a fine example of playful style matching sturdy function.

Soderbergh is a rare modern Hollywood craftsman whose prolific and consistent sense of play with style only adds to the fine-tuned pleasures of his films. He clearly loves moviemaking, and it enlivens the genres to which he brings his touch. Whether a cheap experiment like Presence or his bigger studio productions, his movies reliably have slick surfaces and crisp editing, an intelligent precision to where he looks and what he sees, expertly calibrated with forward momentum and clever thoughtfulness. They are sensational entertainments serious about class and process and the ways our relationships get tangled up in ambitions and betrayals and systems. So of course Black Bag proves the spy movie works well for his style. He does it with an approach reminiscent of his Ocean’s trilogy. This is similarly a story that’s a nesting doll of intricate, intersecting secret plots done with warm colorful cinematography, a jazzy David Holmes score, clever multi-layered dialogue, and sexy stars outwitting one another. The movie, another scripted by Koepp, has a familiar cat-and-mouse game—a digital-age Le Carré mole hunt—enlivened by a cool, clinical, procedural logic. Husband and wife spies (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) host a dinner party for colleagues (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page) that’s a cover for rooting out a suspicious character. Turns out each of them could be a suspect, too. Much sneaking and spying and setting traps ensues. Their boss (Pierce Brosnan) swoops in for a handful of scenes that keep the plates spinning, too. It has that pleasing confusion of the best spy stories, and the psychological gamesmanship you’d expect from wrapping it around a marriage. Soderbergh keeps this one short and sweet, too, playing out the setup to a crisp conclusion with a propulsive editing and clinical eye that suitably straightens out the complications with a satisfying snap.

Bust a Move: MAGIC MIKE'S LAST DANCE

Somehow Steven Soderbergh knew a perfect idea for a third Magic Mike movie would be to make it a sexier Step Up movie. After all, star Channing Tatum began his film stardom with the first in that dance-battle series, and his smooth moves have been a feature of the Mikes since their inception. Here’s a series about a frustrated artist. The first film found his dream of making custom furniture an increasingly appealing exit strategy from the world of Miami’s male strip clubs. That was a downbeat but buoyantly portrayed character study. The sequel freed Mike and his friends from the club, and allowed them to stretch out as dancers—albeit still with an edge—in a rambling road trip of self-actualization through male bonding and feminine pleasure. That was a freewheeling and effervescent character comedy, a fine extension of the first while finding a new mode in which to operate. It’s only fitting a third in this shape-shifting series would be different all over again.

Which brings us to Magic Mike’s Last Dance. This threequel is totally different in tone and mood from its predecessors. It’s more romantic, and sparklier with Hollywood artifice, a sweet- and soft-hearted tip of the hat to the same old fashioned put-on-a-show energy that drove a sturdy Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland picture back in the day (or the Step Ups, more recently). Mike is out of the game, gigging as a bartender, when a fabulously wealthy Londoner (Salma Hayek Pinault) hears rumors of his previous life. Impressed by his moves—she gets a slow, sensual private show—she hires him on the spot to choreograph a dance revue for a fabulous theater she’s getting in a divorce from her gazillionaire media mogul husband. Curtain’s up in a month. He’ll have a lot of work to do as he…steps up to the new challenge.

Soderbergh is expert at showing us people at work. It’s why he’s so well-suited to stories of heists and negotiations, attentive as he is to the surfaces of jargon and routine and planning, and the ways they reveal character. Here he gives us some of the casting and rehearsal and stage-directing process. But he’s mostly interested in the ways building this show brings out the best in Mike, in a movie that’s celebrating dance’s ability to make people feel good. There’s less of the male stripper milieu—almost not at all—and more of the razzle-dazzle of the sheer pleasure of bodies in motion. It’s a dance movie! There’s a troupe of talented dancers, characterized only by their signature moves, and assembled to writhe and roll to the rhythms of pounding pop. And it gets plenty sexy by the end, in a dance in the rain with a barely-dressed ballerina and Mike down to his tight briefs, a climax amid climax in a fun final act that’s devoted entirely to the show. It’s the way there that builds the anticipation with fizz and delight, as Soderbergh, with a good eye for the way light dances off faces and bodies can pose across the frame, builds a relaxed and mature movie that’s nonetheless as serious about its lightness as a middle-aged romance can be. That’s work, too.

Tatum and Hayek spark well together, each able to turn on smolder in close-ups and stretch out in long shots, as their characters’ incompatible compatibility pushes and pulls on the possibility of staging this one-night-only event. They’re surrounded by potentially stock characters quickly sketched and well-played with charm and believability—the cranky old butler, the precious teenager daughter, the stuffed-shirt ex-husband, the frumpy city worker, the crinkly old casting director, the feisty young actress. Because the movie cares about these people, and wants to see the power of dance bring them all together for a moment of release, the finale pays off big. I believed they’d all leave smiling because so did I.

Tech Help: KIMI

Of course now is the perfect time for a paranoid thriller. Leave it to director Steven Soderbergh to find a sharp way to shoot one in an anxious modern telling, and consummate blockbuster writer David Koepp to construct one so involvingly tightly-wound and lockbox sealed that it proceeds so quickly and craftily by its own clever logic and is practically over before it even begins. Kimi is the model of gripping efficiency, setting up a contained space and a clear set of variables that then twist the knife and speed the inevitable. And it's so of-the-moment it feels like it was shot next week. Set in a very now Seattle, with COVID on the wane and some small sense of normality slipping back into life, it finds its lead not quite ready to leave the comfort of her apartment. She (Zoe Kravitz) was dealing with trauma-induced agoraphobia before the pandemic, and the anxieties of disease and social distancing understandably didn’t help matters. Besides, she has a work-from-home job resolving mismatched commands recorded by an upstart smart speaker company. What could go wrong?

With these 30-second eavesdrops on people’s lives, she hears the usual mumbled commands and silly A.I. misunderstandings. (The machine seems a lot better than an Alexa or a Google bot, but here’s a movie that’ll do nothing to dissuade those of us who’d rather not invite a surveillance machine into our homes.) The plot takes a modern Rear Window turn (in a way much more smartly updated than the otherwise fine Disturbia from, oh, 15 years ago now?) when she thinks she overhears a crime. Shades of Blow-Up and Blow Out and The Conversation follow as she pushes and prods at the file to make it make sense, and figure out her next move. More than a touring riff on the great classics of paranoia-driven suspense pictures of this ilk, Kimi is an of-the-moment character piece told in fine detail and expert shorthand, wedded to the unrelenting momentum of its story.

Here’s a woman shaken up by the experiences of the past couple years, which have only exacerbated issues stemming from an assault prior to that. Kravitz plays the comfortable discomfort of her routine well, and then sells the physically taxing idea of stepping out with a skin-crawling sense of being trapped in her own skin. Why, even a FaceTime from a therapist sends her itching. An early scene sees her carrying on a flirtatious text chain with a neighbor from across the street, but she can’t make herself even open her door to meet him outdoors at a food truck. So of course she gets lost in something she thinks she can better control: the mystery in that audio file. We see her apartment decorated with the tools of the trade, but also masks and hand sanitizer and wipes. She’s a product of our times. I could relate to her reluctance to step out. So she digs deeper into her new technologically aided project? It does sound like a crime, after all. The better audio window she gets into the anonymous user, the more rattled she becomes. Soderbergh expertly situates steady, locked-down shots of her daily routine, the better to feel the sense of danger creeping into them, and to upend them with hurtling handheld anxiety on the outside.

When she inevitably, reluctantly has to leave her apartment to further her investigation, the camera zooms towards her like something out of Evil Dead, whips around her at canted angles, and races past only to spin around and catch her again. Other people in public can be discomfiting enough nowadays, even without the layer of unease she’s added on top of the usual. She’s trapped further by the thriller mechanics, and a cast of looming potential threats—a Romanian tech guy, a spying neighbor, an upstairs construction site, a sniveling tech company stooge, its smarmy CEO and his shady fixers. It’s all laid out skillful and credibly; it’s the kind of edge-of-your-seat suspense that is both totally enveloping in the moment, and completely sensible in retrospect. Because the filmmakers have hooked so powerfully into the mindset of their lead, and dove-tailed it so seemingly effortlessly with Soderbergh’s pet themes—here’s another of his dramatic expressions of contemporary ills in vivid genre tropes and character detail, like Unsane or Magic Mike—there’s a terrific sense of hurtling escalation. When we get to the climax, these elements are drawn together wonderfully in a cathartic final sequence that more than pays off everything that’s been set up.

This is an especially satisfying thriller all the way, with the nerve to say that our problems aren’t just the pandemic, per se, but the whole jangling anxiety of our overstimulated tech-captured and corporate-enraptured now. More than once, people or things are not what they seem, and not just because of the movie’s needs. We casually are shown staged Zoom backdrops and faked Instagram feeds in the course of this story’s telling, and not even as plot points. That’s just how it is these days, where the ground of our shared reality can feel like it’s shifting beneath our feet as we get lost in the layers of real unreality on our screens. (At one point, Kravitz dryly quips she can handle herself—“I used to be a content moderator for Facebook.”) No wonder we’re paranoid. Kravitz, who holds the screen as compellingly as ever, carries off this sense of constant tension, even in the quotidian, so intently and intensely that we don’t just want her to solve the case and dodge the complicating dangers. We want her to feel like she’s back, and safe, on solid ground. And don't we all?

Out of Sight: NO SUDDEN MOVE

Steven Soderbergh’s small and satisfying No Sudden Move gets by on style and the sheer propulsive pleasure of plot. His filmmaking is so slick and precise that he can serve both at once. He’s a master of aesthetic detail — here a 50’s period piece shot with vintage anamorphic lensing and modern digital sheen — and of storytelling. Together the images pop with meaningful blocking and striking compositions, while the tight compelling story unfolds and unfolds and unfolds. The screenplay sets up an Elmore Leonard-style schemes-within-schemes Detroit crime caper that locates that town’s mid-century power structures: cops, cars companies, and mobsters. Then it watches as one little scam grows out of control simply because it pops off and cuts across all three lines of influence. We start with low-level criminals (Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Kieran Culkin) hired to help watch the family of an accountant (David Harbour) as he’s forced at gunpoint to go to the office and take some car component designs out of a safe. It’s not so simple. The intelligence of Ed Solomon’s screenplay, beyond the clever wit to the dialogue and clockwork connections between people, is to catch all the characters in the middle of their own complicated lives, with unexpected interpersonal variables and cross-conflicts. This is just one more thing to throw a wrench into so many plans. Soon we have murder and infidelities and home invasion and bags of money and calls up the chain of command. Everyone needs to get their hands on this problem, ostensibly to solve it to their liking, but really to try to come out a little richer. 

Along the way, we get a little wiser to the corruption floating through Detroit at the time, and Soderbergh sharply draws our attention to the futility behind the characters’ competing goals. They scurry around, and there’s always someone higher up to swoop in to wave a gun, to make new deals, or to propose a better scam on top of the other scams. It’s the kind of crime picture that can introduce new big name actors to step in with a complication an hour or an hour and a half into the proceedings and it feels like yet another pleasurable twist. The large, well-cast ensemble — also including Brendan Fraser, Julia Fox, Jon Hamm, Amy Seimetz, Noah Jupe, Frankie Shaw, Bill Duke, and more surprises throughout — expertly navigates the twists and turns by being locked in on their own particular duties and struggles. Some show marvelous in-over-their-heads exasperation, while others are rattled and sidelined, and still more think they’re in total control. Maybe. Maybe not. Some are too smart for their own good; others can’t even grasp how behind they are. There’s no sudden move out of this when the motor city’s most corrupt are out to stop forward progress. This trust-no-one caper is briskly, crisply entertaining on a scene by scene level as it adds up to yet another of Soderbergh’s pleasurable genre experiments, and a recapitulation of his oft returned-to maxim: “When the person in charge won't get to the bottom of something, it's usually because they are at the bottom of that something.”

UNSANE in the Brain

Unsane, Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, is a breathlessly suspenseful psychological thriller built upon a great lead performance, and an experiment in technical limitations. It finds tightly wound tension as a woman (Claire Foy) is involuntarily committed to a mental institution and therefore quickly pushed to her wits end. The more she loudly and wildly proclaims her sanity, the less the staff is likely to believe her, especially when the cops see the paperwork she signed, and the insurance company signs off on underwriting her stay. Shot almost entirely on iPhones, the perspective is unfamiliar, set on tables and desks, at unusually close or low angles a full-sized camera on a conventional set couldn’t possibly find. There’s a sense of tactile energy to the framing, and a crackling sense of unease in how unfamiliar the look becomes. This isn’t manipulated like Sean Baker’s Tangerine (the other major iPhone-shot feature) to have a rough-hewn beauty approaching the digital expressiveness of Michael Mann or latter day Godard. Soderbergh allows for the phone’s camera to manifest natural jaggedness in pans, slight wobbling of focus at the edges, tight aspect ratio that leaves black the edges of a properly sized and matted theater screen. Every interaction seems ripe with danger. The whole frame is closing in on its main character, trapping her as reality seems to warp and distort in the bugs of the visual information’s capture. 

The trick of the movie is the deceptively simple filmmaking and crystal clear screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer letting suspicion cloud judgement. Maybe, the thought occurred to me early on, our protagonist really is in need of this treatment. She went to see a therapist about lingering uneasiness related to being the victim of a stalker (Joshua Leonard). She admits to occasional thoughts of self-harm. Then she’s asked back into the inner wards and locked in a seven day stay for her own good, cooped up with others (Jay Pharaoh, Juno Temple) who view her as one of them. Soon, she starts lashing out – striking an employee, berating her fellow patients – eventually appearing to hallucinate her stalker is one of the nurses at the facility. How easy it is to slip out of sanity, when stress is pushed to the limits. She feels trapped, held against her will, loudly protesting when no one believes her pleas. She is unsafe, she cries. No, say the doctors, she is simply unsane. Soderbergh takes her point of view at clinical face value, the great twist brewing in plain sight. He’s simply not trying to trick you, playing everything exactly straight, playing the audience’s doubts against his character. Foy does a Grade-A breakdown, expertly modulating her mood swings from exasperated frustration and wailing despair to violent disbelief or depressed resignation and back again as the week stretches on. As the film picks up in a pulpy fever pitch, it becomes a double-edged harm – from a health care system easily manipulated by corrupt individuals, and from the long-lasting effects of trauma. It’s as gripping an experiment as any Soderbergh has yet pulled off.

Party On: MAGIC MIKE XXL

The main question left unresolved at the end of Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, a breezy downbeat male stripper drama with the economy on its mind, was a simple one. Will these entertainers find happiness? We watched them enjoy dancing on stage, commodifying their bodies to barely scrape by. But it wasn’t always fun. They had personal problems, and bigger dreams. In the end Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) gave it all up to start his custom furniture business. Now, three years later, we have a sequel, Magic Mike XXL, to answer the question of the characters’ happiness by ditching the heavier dramatic stakes. A romantic subplot, business angst, and drug-related problems go almost entirely by the wayside. Instead, we get a let’s-put-on-a-show road movie, inessential but hugely enjoyable, unfolding as a series of casual comic hangouts and winning theatrical dance sequences. It’s one long party.

Movies can take us places we’ve never been. For most of us, that’ll be a road trip from Miami to Myrtle Beach for a Fourth of July male stripper convention, ending in a performance space filled with screaming and swooning women ready to see perfect physical specimens perform cheeky choreography. Is there such a convention? I don’t know, but it makes for a great low-stakes movie idea. We meet Mike in Tampa, working hard to keep his business afloat when a group of his old stripper buddies (Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Adam Rodriguez, and Kevin Nash) show up. The DJ (Gabriel Iglesias) at the wheel, they’re on their way to the convention, and convince Mike to take a vacation and join them. His girlfriend dumped him. Their manager dumped them, taking the hot young star with him. (What a convenient way to write out the absent Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey, and Alex Pettyfer, huh?) Why not take a fun holiday weekend trip together?

A loose, shaggy structure moves the guys up the coast, taking pit stops for relaxed sidebars. They find themselves watching a drag show, and then attending a beach party with some likable young women (including Amber Heard). They visit a luxurious private club where a group of performers (Twitch, Donald Glover, Michael Strahan) are presided over by an intensely charismatic host (Jada Pinkett Smith). They stop at a house owned by a wine-guzzling rich lady (Andie McDowell) for some flirtatious conversation. And of course they dance a little at each stop, and elsewhere too, including a hilarious convenience store challenge set to a booming Backstreet Boys song. (Boy bands are an important part of Florida history, we’re told in one of many amusing off-the-cuff conversations.) The movie treats the characters’ lives seriously, but their weekend lightly. It knows they, and we, just want to have a fun time. The result is a charming movie full of good cheer, easy rapport, a comfortable vibe watching a reunion of old friends happy to hang out and dance together again.

Soderbergh hands the director’s chair to his longtime assistant director/producer Gregory Jacobs, but stays on as producer, editor, and director of photography. There’s the same lush naturalism to the dim lighting, the loving consideration of physical presence as conduit of appeal. Reid Carolin returns as screenwriter, finding warm energy in stumbling banter, a funny, supportive, open-minded atmosphere. Without the dramatic tensions or interest in seedier elements of the first film, this one has the characters just enjoying the journey. Along the way, Mike convinces the group to toss out their old routines and just dance from the heart. We hear each man talk about their plans for the future, wishes for secure relationships, steady income. They’re driving towards one last big show. They might never see each other again. Why not do some new choreography, express themselves, go out on a high note?

So it’s three hoary old plots in one: road movie, dance movie, and one last job movie. The structure is similar to an early talkie musical like 1934’s Joan Blondell/Dick Powell picture Dames, which has lots of light comedy before climaxing in a series of elaborate dance sequences. Or look at it as a ribald Step Up movie, not just because it has two of that series’ alumni, but because it’s sprinkled with dance breaks before finishing off at a big contest with an elaborate show-stopping group number giving every character a shining showcase. Their raunchy routines are expertly choreographed collections of uninhibited, abs-baring, hip-thrusting, gyrations and gesticulations, spiced up with prop comedy and a little amateur Astaire and Kelly. Even a bit of the Marx brother’s Duck Soup mirror works its way into the lengthy climax. It’s thick with the electric ogling energy of performance.

That’s why the movie’s such a carousing delight. It finds exuberance of performance with a comfortable ensemble allowed unhurried scenes. Chemistry is what carries it, as well as a refreshing diversity, and low-key non-judgmental kindness, emphasizing the respect and enjoyment all involved on stage and off get out of their sexualized dancing. Other sequels would be tempted to open up new conflicts between the guys, find a villain of some kind, make the stakes higher. Though we learn a lot more about each character’s hopes, dreams, fears, and proclivities, there’s no heavy drama. It’s just a bunch of friends having fun, going with the flow, meeting interesting new people, and pulling together for a final job. It provides just enough plot for forward momentum and settles back into appealing sequences of likable actors thrown into eccentric situations. Light on its feet, there’s a meandering party atmosphere pervading every moment.

Bitter Pill: SIDE EFFECTS

Emily (Rooney Mara) is depressed. Her husband (Channing Tatum) is getting out of prison after serving a four year sentence for insider trading, but she’s wearing a frown, her eyes turned downwards, her pale skin still and pensive. It’s shortly after he returns home that she deliberately drives her car into the wall of a parking garage. At the hospital, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), a psychiatrist, comes to check on her. She knows the drill. She’s been in therapy before. She asks that he let her go home on the condition that she meets with him regularly for consultations. She says she feels hopeful that the right medication will help her feel better. This is just the start of Side Effects, a twisty thriller that starts out as one kind of darkly psychological movie and is thrown by a single moment of unexpected violence into a second kind of thriller, one with a shift in protagonist, with knotty mysteries that slowly simmer and bring into focus clues that lead towards a series of climactic revelations that reveal it all to be, perhaps, in the end, a bit too predictable.

But through it all, masterful director Steven Soderbergh, in what he claims is his penultimate film before retirement, views with startling specificity and smooth digital surfaces the tensions and foibles that the characters find themselves trapped within, slowly, selfishly jockeying for their best possible outcome in an increasingly disreputable series of events. It’s the kind of story about sharply dressed young professionals crossing paths, interrogating their feelings, and turning their problems into the stuff of pulp fictions that would’ve been perfectly at home as one of those mid-budget 90’s thrillers. You know the kind, the ones that would probably star Ashley Judd or Michael Douglas. Here, though, Scott Z. Burns (who also wrote Soderbergh’s even better films The Informant! and Contagion) has written a script that goes down smoothly with psychological twists that are given pleasingly sleek textures with Soderbergh’s keen sense of framing visual spaces in evocative ways and using jazzy, syncopated editing to methodically keep things moving. It’s a typical thriller elevated by the committed talents of all involved.

There’s a scene early on when Emily, suddenly appearing distraught at a cocktail party, the first social event she and her newly freed husband have gone to since their reunion, steps away from the group and slides up to the corner of the bar to silently weep. The frame is entirely blurry until she learns closer, the camera pulling the picture into focus. This trick is repeated to various degrees through the film. Through scene after scene shot with shallow depth of focus, perhaps the foreground is blurred, or maybe a character leans into the range of focus. These images serve to underline that these characters are people who feel fuzzy emotionally, legally, and professionally. They aren’t seeing clearly or are operating without all the information, doing the best they can under the circumstances to advance selfish goals and come out on top.

The doctor, having commiserated with his patient’s former psychiatrist (Catherine Zeta-Jones) at a conference, prescribes anti-depressants to Emily. The side effects end up snowballing into a high-stakes legal dispute that calls into question the motives of everyone involved. Questions of power, who has it, who needs it, and who really has the upper hand, become important, the difference between imprisonment and freedom, riches and poverty. I’m being deliberately vague here. The pleasures of the film come from the brisk, involving way Soderbergh, relaxed, twists the knife of the screenplay, effortlessly making the plot turns sharply and without losing sight of the big picture.

In observant close ups, the actors are given a chance to reveal their characters’ true intentions – or are they? – with the glance of an eye or the twitch of a cheek. Key flashbacks and montages fill in perceptive details that reveal shadings to incidents and environments that change the meanings of previously held beliefs about what happened, what the characters want, who is helping and who is hurting the goals of the others. Thomas Newman’s needling score joins forces with the crisp cuts to keep it all off-kilter, teetering on the brink of greater dangers. Only disappointing in the way it concludes with less of a flourish than it begins, Side Effects is a fine work of thriller craftsmanship from all involved, and a typically expert genre bauble that’s as sensible an auteurist signifier as anything Soderbergh has done. In its twists, it finds reason to nod towards nearly every theme and preoccupation he’s dealt with throughout his career. If we’re really nearing a goodbye, he’ll be missed, but he’ll also be leaving behind a wonderful collection of films worth revisiting.

Flash, Dance: MAGIC MIKE

With Magic Mike, director Steven Soderbergh continues to explore the ways in which society’s institutions can both enable and thwart ambition by turning people into products. Here he (from a screenplay by Reid Carolin) tells a story of an ambitious thirty-year-old man, Mike (Channing Tatum), working three jobs, none of them the one he most desires. He wants to make custom furniture, a way to take his passions and creativity and spend his time getting paid for something he loves to do. Instead, he’s working mostly low-paying jobs, getting paid all in cash. He can save up enough for a down payment on a loan for his dream business, but can’t get one with his bad credit. The economy has had him stuck in place for six years now in a vicious cycle of saving to no avail. Still he works. He has a mobile detailing business when he’s not haggling for better pay at his construction job. It’s there that he meets an aimless, mostly unemployed twenty-year-old guy, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who is on his first and last day on the job. Mike feels sorry for Adam and invites him to come help out at his third job, where he works only weekend nights, where he makes most of his money: a strip club.

There, under the watch of drawling manger Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), Mike and his co-workers, guys with names like Richie (Joe Manganiello), Ken (Matt Bomer), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), and Tarzan (Kevin Nash), perform goofy choreographed routines with silly props. Their performances look like nothing more than racy dance numbers until they slip off just enough clothes to scandalize and titillate the screaming audience of sorority girls and bachelorette parties. For their audience this is not about nudity or dirtiness so much as it’s about the naughtiness of escaping the norms of everyday life. Either way, it looks like easy money to Adam who is currently crashing with his older sister (Cody Horn), and so the movie turns into one of those melodramas wherein the older veteran, frustrated with his life but making it look so easy, takes the naive new guy into the fold of a business rife with temptations. Soderbergh takes it all in with his usual patient, clinically observant cinematography, which steers the film away from easy predictability.

Like Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience, this is a film about people living under a cloud of economic uncertainty, trying to get by with the money they can get selling themselves. It’s essentially an R-rated backstage drama that starts as goofy fun of a sort and then grows progressively darker as the full implications of the business sets in. It doesn’t go exactly where you’d expect, tracking not simply the younger man’s descent from naivety into jadedness, but the veteran’s growing disillusionment as well. Here’s a guy who feels like he’s been doing everything right, getting a job or three, working hard, saving up, and still he can’t get ahead, can’t find a good foothold. There’s talk of moving the club to Miami, where, we’re told, the real money is. But would that really change the situations of these men in a significant way? More money for the same objectification may not be the healthiest thing, especially as several are already suffering from mostly well-hidden substance abuse issues. The first performance of the movie, one dancer ends up passed out backstage. Later, a groupie with a pet pig is eager to pass out ecstasy. “I’m not my lifestyle,” Mike protests to Adam’s sister, who is both charmed and repulsed by his flirtatiousness.

What’s best about Magic Mike is the generous way Soderbergh has of drawing terrific performances from the entirety of an ensemble. He finds exactly the right ways to use his performers to best accentuate their skills, to draw out aspects of their personas in interesting ways. The tension between Tatum’s charm and blockheaded athleticism is used to flesh out a portrait of a man who allows himself to be objectified despite larger goals, much like his own early film roles hid his deeper talent. McConaughey’s near self-parody “alright, alright, alright” becomes a sort of incantation of sleaze, his mostly shirtless wardrobe a form of wiry narcissism. The other actors, convincing all, even stand-up comedian Gabriel Iglesias as the club’s DJ, float in and out of the story, creating a vivid portrait of this world filled with details both funny (one dancer throws out his back and shuffles off the stage after a heavyset woman leaps onto the stage and into his arms) and sad (another dancer brings his wife to a party and urges the new guy to feel her up).

The film is, in contrast to its high-energy burlesque on-stage and its funnier moments, so low-key about its off-stage melodrama that by the end it feels uncommitted and, when the film ends with its thematic cards still up in the air, the lack of resolution is at once bracing and frustrating. Still, the film is so well acted and crisply directed that the characters’ (and, by extension, the film’s) uncomfortable tension between enjoyment and depression becomes notable. As the credits roll, some characters have made tentative steps towards self-improvement. Others are left, maybe to thrive, perhaps to wallow, in their disreputable career choices. Why shouldn’t the end be so unresolved? It fits right in with the sense of economic despair that hovers around in this story of easy money and uneasy decisions.

Knockout: HAYWIRE

Retired mixed martial arts star Gina Carano is the center of Haywire, a terrifically exciting actioner. This is essentially her acting debut, playing Mallory Kane, a tough ex-Marine who works for an independent com- pany hired by the United States government to execute special missions. She’s a secret agent for hire. Carano is perfect for the role. She’s tough. You don’t want to cross her. She has intensity in her eyes and muscle to her physicality. She doesn’t just look like a fighter; she is a fight- er. When her punches land, not only are they convincing, they look like they cause real pain.

That Carano can really handle herself in a fight is no small fact. It’s the very purpose of the film. Every step of the way, she has to fight off attackers. With simply stunning fight choreography, Carano kicks, flips, and punches her way to freedom. The music drops away, leaving only the grunts and thunks to score the action. There’s tantalizing eeriness as the camera stands back and regards with a restraint that suits the judicious editing. Diegetic sound is all we need to feel the full force of these knockdown drag-out fights.

The film could easily have been a routine story of espionage and double crosses, but it’s so energetically and stylishly told that it’s anything but. Directed by Steven Soderbergh from a smoothly complicated script by Lem Dobbs (they last worked together on The Limey, another great thriller), it moves with a slick, artful excitement. We start in the middle of things, with Carano getting attacked in an upstate New York diner by a former coworker (Channing Tatum). It unfolds with quick brutal resourcefulness as she kicks him out cold and then demands a cowering patron (Michael Angarano) give her a ride and patch up her arm. On the way to wherever she’s heading, she tells him her story.

It globetrots through flash- backs revealing that a government bureaucrat (Michael Douglas) hires a security company, headed by a slick suit (Ewan McGregor) consulting with a Spanish counterpart (Antonio Banderas) to rescue a Chinese dissident held hostage on Spanish soil. It appears to be a successful op, and Carano heads off to her next mission, playing wife to an undercover British agent (Michael Fassbender). There she learns she’s framed for murder charges. She escapes, barely finds the time to call a warning to her dad (Bill Paxton), and then spends the rest of the film on the run, leading us back to where we came in and beyond as she pieces together the con- spiracy that put her in this predicament.

It’s so sleek and fast, with nary a wasted shot, it’s practically aerodynamic. The action is well-staged by Soderbergh, whose films are at least as interesting for how the story is told as for the story itself. His cool digital cinematography and editing have a clinical movement to them, laying out spaces with ease and allowing the fights – and the chases, shootouts, and even simple conversational clashes – to unfold with clarity and cold, blunt observational precision. This is gleaming pop pulp filmmaking, hurtling through familiar tropes with an uncommon energy. It’s just plain fun.

And I think Soderbergh and Dobbs had fun coming up with this film too. Carano’s compelling athleticism may be the driving engine of interest here, but the pleasantly jumbled chronology of the plot, the precision of the shots, and the deeply talented supporting cast are just as compelling. There’s a fleeting moment when, during a chase scene, an animal darts across the road. It’s a perfect whimsical moment that’s at once a lovely visual detail, a funny little gag, and an escalation of tension. Soderbergh creates frames that are composed to have information in the background. He doesn’t overwhelm you with visual noise. He invites you to look closer. A moment during a rooftop foot chase finds Carano slinking through the foreground while we can see, tucked away in the corner of the frame, her pursuers a few roofs back. Neither the pursuers nor the pursued has the whole picture, but there’s a thrill in understanding the layout that enhances the stakes. (The moment is twinned in the climax when Carano comes hurtling from the background, smashing into the unaware villain in the foreground).

Steven Soderbergh films are about the stakes inherent when people are very good at their jobs (Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13), which makes it all the more troubling when things go wrong (Contagion, Out of Sight), when people who may at times seem competent aren’t (The Informant!, Bubble, Solaris), when we question the value of what they do (Traffic, The Girlfriend Experience). All of the above applies to Haywire. Carano is good in a fight, but when she beats a path through her former coworkers, it’s destabilizing. She’s been cut loose from her company and her extralegal status does her no good. She may have skill, but the system itself is broken.

The classification allowing the company to do whatever it wants in the name of national security is of no help whatsoever to her. This confident and capable woman has only so much fight in her. She can only run for so long. Confidence and capabilities will mean nothing if she can’t prove her innocence and uncover the corruption. And that’s what makes the movie work so well. Carano has incredible action star charisma. I believed she could beat up any- one she needed to. But the resolution doesn’t rely solely on her physical capabilities. She makes a compelling center surrounded by calculating sliminess. Much like the film itself is proof of the coolness of verisimilitude in a genre of pretenders.

Going Viral: CONTAGION

The screen is dark. The theater is silent save for one ragged cough echoing in the speakers. Suddenly the screen comes alive with a cut to a clearly ill woman – puffy red eyes, pale skin – sitting at an airport bar talking on her cell phone while rummaging in a small bowl of complimentary peanuts. She coughs again. She’s tired. “Jet lag,” she says. “Day Two,” an ominous subtitle announces. It has already begun.

This is the opening of Contagion, the newest film from Steven Soderbergh. It reteams him with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns who wrote his corporate espionage comedy The Informant!, but there’s nothing funny about their new collaboration. Closer in spirit, if not depth, to Soderbergh’s drug-war epic Traffic, Contagion soberly, seriously, and single-mindedly portrays a global pandemic. It starts with a new strain of a disease, deadly variations on common ailments. Once infected, a person is contagious without knowing it, spreading it to those nearby. Then, flu-like symptoms set in. Then come the seizures. Then, all too often, comes death. By then, there are already more people to count among the growing numbers of the infected.

It all starts with the woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) in the opening scene. She’s returning home to Minneapolis from a business trip to Hong Kong.  Her husband (Matt Damon) and her son (Griffin Kane) are concerned about her, as her symptoms grow ever increasingly worse. A film of massive scope starts small, with this little family unit, but grows larger and larger as the virus makes its way across the planet. We meet scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliot Gould, Demetri Martin) tasked with analyzing the disease that has suddenly appeared in Minnesota. Could it have a connection to the mysterious ailment that is affecting certain villages in China? And now there are reports of this strain in London, in Hong Kong, in Chicago. Who came into contact with this one sick woman who happened to cross the globe, who infected her and where did they take the infection? Or is she the source?

The disease spreads. The ensemble grows. At the Center for Disease Control, urgent meetings are held. They’re in contact with the scientists, but no one seems to be able to say for sure what is happening. Laurence Fishburne sends Kate Winslet to Minnesota to investigate what they have taken to calling “Ground Zero.” Overseas, the World Health Organization sends Marion Cotillard to Hong Kong, where they’re working with their own leads. All want to understand this ailment, so that they can cure it. Contracting the disease is not quite a death sentence – some of the sick do survive – but it’s close enough. Everywhere the cameras turn, there are new characters to puzzle through the mess with us, a general (Bryan Cranston), bureaucrats (Chin Han and Enrico Colantoni), even a confident conspiracy theorist (Jude Law) who sees it all coming, posting a viral video of a Chinese man collapsing on a bus, all the while ranting about evil pharmaceutical companies and pure natural remedies. But for all his sense of righteous certainty, he’s no more capable of stopping the pandemic than the ones in power that he castigates.

For all the explanations, the crinkling scientific dialogue and the pulsing montages, the essential source of fear remains elusive. It’s essentially a zombie movie without the zombies. Death is slowly, relentlessly coming. You can hole up, you can hide, but it will inevitably arrive. There’s an invisible source of creeping dread that could infect you and kill you, but not before you spread it to your family and friends. It’s a slow motion freak-out. Soderbergh pays attention to the surfaces we come into contact with on a daily basis. Buttons, knobs, handles, and counters become simple sources of anxiety. He holds the camera an extra beat when someone presses against a door, or punches information into a computer. No one has to speak the word “germs” to start the unsettling sense of grim distress. By the time the world is in a full-blown panic over the pandemic, rioting, looting, protesting, worrying, the germs are only part of the problem.

The characters are moved about as pawns in the cold what-if scenario, this pandemic epic. It’s an extraordinary cast, movie stars expertly deglamourized and not at all safe, but the disease is the real star. The film spends its time reveling in the nuts-and-bolts of its elaborately staged outbreak while allowing the human element to stretch thin. It convincingly sends shivers into audiences with its sole meticulous purpose to put out a chilly, convincing bio disaster scenario. Soderbergh uses his considerable skills as a filmmaker to create a fast pace and a believable atmosphere, effortlessly cutting between the dozens of characters and locations, juggling many plotlines. His camera stares with cold hues, a sickly pallor, and unblinking detachment at the dead bodies, the computer screens, the press conferences, the roundtable meetings, and all those potentially deadly shared surfaces. It’s all too real. It doesn’t have a satisfying ending, but how could it? It's a movie about an overwhelming problem, and tentative, maybe even tenuous resolution. The world as we know it may be hurtling to a believable close, and all one can do is hug your family close before it gets to you. The film doesn’t resolve so much as coast to a poignant stop, and the journey there is terrifying. It’s effective and persuasive, unadorned with obvious embellishment. I found myself shifting in my seat, my popcorn untouched, keeping my hands away from my face as my throat grew scratchy and I fought the urge to cough.

Soderbergh's Capitalism, A Love Story: THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE and THE INFORMANT!

Steven Soderbergh knows how to bring the opposite of what you’d expect and make it feel natural, a quality he proves every time he makes a film. In 2009, with his slick and stylish low-budget indie The Girlfriend Experience and his offbeat star-studded studio film The Informant!, he further proves that he’s a bit of a cinematic prankster willing to subvert expectations and play around with the formal elements of film without letting his experimentation get in the way of telling great stories. He’s one of the best, or at the very least one of the most interesting, directors working today.

The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant! are films about capitalism and the quest for success turning people into cogs while they barely notice, hampered by a tunnel-vision of doomed entrepreneurship which will ultimately lead to collapses of both financial stability and familial structure. In the worst case, the characters will bring down more than their own finances in the self-destruction of their success. Soderbergh has captured our collapsing economy perfectly in two films that make the broad consequences of our economy very personal. Both films play out almost like stripped-down heist movies with protagonists who think of themselves as slick as Danny Ocean, but who find that wheeling and dealing the real world leaves a person without a safety net.

With The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh has made a fairly short but very interesting film that examines the people who make their living off of the somewhat rich and kind of powerful in corporations and asks us to think seriously about the difference between a personal trainer and an escort. After all, in both cases payment is being exchanged for interaction with another human being. This is a film that can be as cold and beautiful as its lead role, a woman (Sasha Grey) who builds her life around forming hollow, fleeting relationships with men who think they love her, or at least love what she represents.

As an escort, she feels she is better than some common prostitute since she’s being paid for the Girlfriend Experience, and not necessarily just physical contact. People are paying for companionship, a relationship, fake as it is, just as the people who pay her boyfriend (Chris Santos), a personal trainer, begin to think of him as a friend even though the circumstances are equally false. As played by Sasha Grey, this young woman is very smart and scarily composed in a movie that keeps its distance. This is a remarkably restrained film, tactful and tasteful about a sex worker. It can be as austere and respectful as its lead character. She’s intellectualized her job while allowing that intellectualization to seep a chill into her relationship with her real boyfriend. As they sit in their apartment with its modern décor and large empty spaces it’s hard not to draw comparisons to the equally stylish-but-empty apartments and hotel rooms where we otherwise find Grey and the empty impersonal gym spaces where we otherwise find Santos.

Told out of order, the film is as scattered as the lives of its leads, more about tone than plot, more about the characters’ carefully constructed shells than any emotions bubbling over. A handful of scenes find Santos flying to Las Vegas with a group of bankers after being invited by a client. As the bankers talk about the collapsing economy and a possible bailout (the movie was filmed and is set in late 2008), it’s clear that his profession and his girlfriend’s profession are parasitic ones. If the New York upper-class loses the money to spend on fake relationships, where will that leave the two of them? And when both of them make their living pretending to care about others, can even their own relationship be fully trusted?

With The Informant!, Soderbergh has made a film about people within corporations, based on a true story that reveals a corporate culture of favors, kickbacks, and mutually beneficial deceptions and then follows an ambitious whistleblower that gets himself into trouble by learning too much from these encouraged tactics. Set in the early 90s, it’s easy to see the seeds for our current economic state being sown, and yet this is not the darkly menacing whistleblower movie you may be expecting. This is hardly Michael Mann’s great The Insider or even Soderbergh’s own Erin Brockovich, each presenting the story of a courageous person dodging corporate thugs to show the world the ugly underbelly of a business. Here, Soderbergh has no qualms about detangling the expectations of the audience and inverting the whistleblower formula by delivering a serio-comic tragedy of sorts.

Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, an upper-mid-level employee of Archer Daniels Midland, an Illinois-based company involved with creating chemicals for food ingredients. Early scenes show Whitacre as he goes to work driving by endless corn fields. Soderbergh gives the movie a smeary orange-infused color palate, as if the processed corn chemicals of the milieu have infected the film. It looks uglier than you’d expect a Hollywood picture to look, which perfectly fits the unexpected tone of the film, which is lighter and goofier than you’d expect.

Whitacre has contact with an FBI agent, played stoic yet exasperated by Scott Bakula, who gets him to agree to expose price-fixing and other corporate nastiness occurring in his business. Through a mix of inept spying and inept scheming, Whitacre nearly derails the investigation in one odd, comedic sequence after another. He sees himself as a great spy (calling himself double-oh-14 since he’s twice as smart as James Bond), is obsessed with Michael Crichton and John Grisham novels, and eagerly absorbs and ponders trivia and minutia. He so desperately wants to be the hero of his life’s story that it’s by turns funny, pathetic and sad. He narrates the film, constantly losing track of what he’s saying, diverging from the context of the moment to ponder, say, polar bears, foreign vending machines, or how awesome things are for him. By putting us inside the character’s head, we begin to see his delusions and his eccentricities all the more clearly, for he’s a man who’s outwardly normal, but inwardly in need of serious help.

Soderbergh gives the movie a bouncy, jazzy score from Marvin Hamlisch which is located directly on the border between cool and kitsch, in some cases scoring the movie in which Whitacre saw himself, in some cases scoring the strange comedy we are seeing. Soderbergh then takes the strange nature of the underlying story and amplifies it by casting professional jokesters like Joel McHale, Tom Papa, Tony Hale, Andrew Daly, Paul F. Tompkins, and Patton Oswalt in supporting roles. They aren’t knowingly playing comedic roles, perpetually winking at the camera, but rather, they are playing true situations that are inherently comedic and playing them totally seriously. It creates a sense that the business world is a finite universe populated primarily with buffoons.

The Informant!, along with The Girlfriend Experience, finds Soderbergh shining light into odd corners of our economy, forming a picture of why we are where we are, revealing the types of ruinous personal and societal decisions so many people unthinkingly made. It reveals a failing status quo that went mostly undiagnosed with disastrous consequences. By making movies about very specific characters and moments, Soderbergh has created a portrait of the American economy that shows how broad policies and decisions are affected by and have effect on the most anonymous of us all, of how the world can crash around people while they only reluctantly notice their own fragility or even their own culpability.