Rick Warner
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
As part of his acceptance speech for winning the Best Action Sequence
category at 2002’s MTV Movie Awards, Pearl Harbor director Michael
Bay dedicated his trophy, a gilded popcorn tub, to the victims of the
actual attack; then just before bragging about making an action star out
of Nicolas Cage (who’d presented the award and stood nearby in a snakeskin
blazer), Bay claimed to make real movies for real people, or something to
that effect. Along similar lines, M. Knight Shyamalan graced the cover of
a recent Newsweek promoting Signs: he stood alone among
cornstalks, hands on hips, stylishly dressed, confident, a strand of
earthy beads dangling at his throat. The cover boasts, "The Next
Spielberg," presuming that’s the compliment to end all compliments.
Moviegoers deserve better advocates. Bay more or less gratifies crowds
with fireworks, and Shyamalan offers less than his reputation might
suggest. Though The Sixth Sense was clever and promising, it
apparently infected Shyamalan with a "surprise ending" neurosis, as both
Unbreakable and Signs suffer from eleventh-hour
contrivances; Hitchcock, an influence of Shyamalan’s, could get away with
such contrivances by visually and emotionally distracting audiences from
them, but at least for now, Shyamalan lacks that skill. And there are
countless other mainstream filmmakers who linger in the spotlight with
respected reputations but debatable talent: Oliver Stone (excessively
self-aware), Cameron Crowe (better suited for light comedy as evidenced by
Vanilla Sky), Michael Mann (proficient visually but an average
storyteller), Ron Howard (a timid embracer of PG-13). Spielberg has been
at the forefront of mainstream cinema for the span of his career, rarely
less than competent, a master of the action-adventure genre. But when he
turns to more ambitious projects—Schindler’s List, Amistad,
Saving Private Ryan, A.I., or more recently Minority Report—his
status as an artist seems open to question. He typically avoids taking
narrative risks, his stories for the most part remain pretexts for
spectacle, and he tends to redundantly underscore sentimental morals;
consider the "earn this" or the "you still have a choice" mantras that
imbue Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report respectively.
I don’t deny his importance. The Sugarland Express is too often
overlooked, and Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark are, in
their own ways, both masterpieces. He espouses a certain belief in people
that departs nicely from cinema’s trend of cynicism, and if his films can
offer escape to say, a single mother of three who just lost her job, then
they provide a valuable service. But to some extent he actually hampers
film appreciation. Through appeasing viewers with emotionally-charged
glitz, he impairs their willingness to actively watch and interpret. This
isn’t to say that entertaining movies can never be artful or vice
versa—those two qualities are hardly opposites. I’m simply suggesting that
when mediocre films masquerade as art films, they sometimes finagle both
critics and moviegoers, leaving them to believe that films like A
Beautiful Mind or Titanic represent the best of what cinema has
to offer. And as for those who see through this ruse, they might dismiss
mainstream films as altogether fraudulent and substandard.
It seems the best mainstream cinema often comes from filmmakers who
have experience working independently. The Coen brothers, for instance,
first gained attention in the early 1980s with their low-budget neo-noir,
Blood Simple. Since then, they’ve managed to both entertain
mainstream audiences and grow artistically; Fargo, arguably not
their best film, earned Oscars in1996 for best actress and original
screenplay, and received a best picture nomination. Likewise, since
Reservoir Dogs (1992), Tarantino has balanced his massive commercial
and critical appeal. But the movies of the Coens and Tarantino have seldom
if ever been deprived of adequate attention. Perhaps Steven Soderbergh,
who collected accolades in 2000 for Traffic and Erin Brokovich,
provides one of the best examples of an extraordinary mainstream film that
audiences for the most part ignored—1998’s Out of Sight.
The National Society of Film Critics, noted for its bias toward the
highbrow, named Out of Sight as the 1998’s best picture and
Soderbergh as the year’s best director, cold-shouldering Oscar contenders
like Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love. The film
also appeared on various critics’ top 10 lists and re-established
Soderbergh’s prominence, which had been in limbo since sex, lies, and
videotape. But for all of its critical success, Out of Sight
disappointed at the box office, grossing only $37 million domestically
(the same year Saving Private Ryan and Armageddon both
exceeded $200 million). As to why audiences kept their distance, it could
have been an issue of timing, since dramas released before the Oscar
season begins tend to be forgotten; Out of Sight opened in
mid-June, and the flood of summertime blockbusters possibly obscured it.
Or perhaps George Clooney’s legitimacy as a film actor was an issue for
viewers, since at that time he was still trying to shake his image as
ER’s heartthrob; Jennifer Lopez, conversely, had yet to emerge as a
pop music icon, so her presence was unlikely to sway viewers. Or maybe
Out of Sight’s slick surface made it appear slight, a crime caper full
of gunplay and wisecracks, a cheap follow up to Get Shorty or
another impotent Pulp Fiction knock off. Anyone who bought into
these or other misconceptions simply missed the boat. In spite of the
film’s apparent polish and flair, Out of Sight entertains on
multiple levels and is as artfully executed as any number of well-regarded
"heist" films, including such classics as Rififi (1954), Bob Le
Flambeur (1955), The Killing (1956), Big Deal on Madonna
Street (1958), and Topkapi (1964), not to mention more recent
examples of the genre like The Usual Suspects (1995) and Sexy
Beast (2001).
It is a truism that any film’s success involves collaboration among
artists, but this is particularly the case with Out of Sight. Scott
Frank adapted the screenplay from Elmore Leonard’s novel of the same name,
effectively channeling Leonard’s razor sharp dialogue and ironic tone. But
some of the film’s most interesting and pivotal scenes are completely
Frank’s creations. Take, for instance, the steamy bathtub sequence with
Jack Foley (Clooney) and Karen Sisco (Lopez) that turns out to be Karen’s
fantasy—Frank invented this scene in attempt to convey the sense of
longing between Foley and Karen that permeates Leonard’s book. Frank also
came up with the movie’s bittersweet conclusion which allows for different
interpretations (more on this later).
Out of Sight’s performances are equally accomplished. Leonard’s
vibrant supporting characters always seem to exist beyond their service to
the plot, and the screen version of Out of Sight similarly allots
scene-stealing potential to almost every role: Buddy Bragg (Ving Rhames),
a beefy but nervous sidekick who often functions as Jack’s counselor, robs
a woman’s vehicle right after he loads her groceries into its trunk; Glenn
Michaels (Steve Zahn), a hapless burn-out perpetually in sunglasses,
inspires laughter each time he opens his mouth; Maurice "Snoopy" Miller
(Don Cheadle), a fight-throwing boxer, is both amusing and disturbing when
spouting thuggish dialogue like "You don’t like what I’m sayin’, you just
bounce the fuck up out this whip anywhere along up in here"; Richard
Ripley (Albert Brooks) is a corrupt and ungrateful millionaire who stores
his spare toupees in his bulletproof bedroom safe; Kenneth (Isaiah
Washington), Snoopy’s ferocious accomplice and brother-in-law, boxed
professionally until he had his "retina detached two time"; the massive
White Boy Bob (Keith Loneker), another henchman of Snoopy’s, concerns
himself with pilfering steaks instead of a fortune in diamonds; Chino
(Luis Guzman), a mumbling Hispanic fugitive, inquires about a magic trick
while being handcuffed; Jack’s ex-wife Adele (Catherine Keener), an
out-of-work magician’s assistant, smacks of Miami Vice garishness
while smoking and holding her pet rabbit; Karen’s father (Denis
Farina) baffles her boyfriend, Ray Nicolet, (Michael Keaton reprising his
role from Jackie Brown) when he points to Ray’s conspicuous FBI
T-shirt and asks, "Tell me, Ray, you ever wear one that says UNDERCOVER?"
This peculiar mélange of cops and criminals supplies the backdrop for
the film’s narrative focus, the unlikely romance between Jack Foley
(prolific bank robber) and Karen Sisco (deputy federal marshal). Lopez,
playing Karen as an intricate blend of femme fatale allure and icy
resolve, has never performed better onscreen. In a demonstration of her
character’s ability to handle herself physically, she fends off Kenneth,
who’s about to force himself on her, with one swat of a steel baton,
calmly explaining as she leaves him cringing in pain, "You wanted to
tussle. We tussled." And she ultimately carries out the difficult task of
convincing the viewer that even though she feels affection for Jack and
wants to be with him in the long-term, she is willing to shoot him in the
leg and send him back to prison where an extended sentence awaits him.
For Clooney’s part, he charms and convinces from the movie’s opening
scene— he rips off his tie, smooths his hair, then strolls into a bank
unarmed and holds up the jittery cashier, speaking to her casually, "First
time being robbed? You’re doing great." He seems utterly relaxed in front
of the camera, portraying Jack with considerable restraint and
world-weariness, as befits a character who’s been in prison most of his
life and now realizes that his future looks more and more dim. At various
points, Soderbergh emphasizes Jack’s sense of severed possibility by
placing him in claustrophobic surroundings—cramped hotel rooms, car
trunks, elevators—which, through metaphor, perpetuate his psychological
confinement despite his physical freedom. Yet Clooney can immediately
shift from this weary indifference to a don’t-screw-with-me kind of
aloofness, somewhat reminiscent of Steve McQueen, showing only a trace of
vulnerability. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment in this film is his
ability to convey Jack’s fatalistic tendencies: Jack fully understands the
ridiculousness of pursuing one last score. The guns-and-ski masks
operation departs severely from Jack’s previous exploits as a
smooth-talking unarmed bank robber, but he goes along with it anyway,
risking death at the hands of Snoopy and his cronies as well as potential
arrest. Jack’s combination of self-destructiveness and self-delusion ("I
wonder," he tells Karen shortly after abducting her, "say we met under
different circumstances and got to talking, say you were in a bar and I
came up to you—I wonder what would happen then") incites laughter and
heartbreak and qualifies him as an exemplary tragicomic protagonist.
Irish DJ/producer David Holmes provides Out of Sight’s musical
score—a marriage of brooding electronica and funk-laden soul that enhances
the movie’s look and feel. Soderbergh, who would call on Holmes again for
Ocean’s Eleven, told The Village Voice, "I wanted a
combination of Lalo Schifrin’s Dirty Harry and the first year of
The Rockford Files, and David just totally got it." But Holmes’ score
does more than just complement the action onscreen; at certain points it’s
completely essential to the viewer’s interpretation. During the bathtub
sequence, for instance, Holmes’s rhythmic, eroticized accompaniment
reinforces the idea that what we’re seeing is Karen’s sexual fantasy. And
toward the movie’s end, when Karen shoots and apprehends Jack, we hear the
same somber music that played during their love scene. Hardly a
coincidence, this aurally underpins the consequences of their
doomed-from-the-start liaison. Such narrative intelligence sets Holmes in
sharp relief from the Moby-esque soundtrack producers who simply create
mood music.
Given the overwhelming number of creative influences at work here, we
might be inclined to think that Soderbergh just relaxed and let things
fall into place, but on the contrary, he managed to put his own
auteuristic stamp on the film. Soderbergh’s films have always been known
for their distinct style, and Out of Sight, his seventh effort as
director, is not an exception. The film brings together an assortment of
visual and narrative techniques rarely seen in contemporary popular
cinema, and lays the groundwork for their use in his later, more
commercially successful endeavors, particularly Traffic and
Ocean’s Eleven (incidentally, another heist film).
From Out of Sight’s earliest stages, Soderbergh had in mind an
aesthetic agenda that borrowed from his influences. "When I went in to
meet with Jersey [Films] and Clooney," Soderbergh explained to Film
Journal International, "I said that I saw it as a combination of an
early William Friedkin movie and a Hal Ashby movie. It should have the
energy of a Friedkin movie from the early ‘70s, but its approach to
character and its balance to drama and humor should be like Ashby." And
with the help of Scott Frank, Soderbergh quickly took measures to
reshuffle the film’s story, which prior to his involvement was set to be
told chronologically. Soderbergh later supplemented these preliminary
adjustments with freeze-frames, jump-cuts, flashbacks, color shifts, and
handheld camerawork, with each device fulfilling a relevant narrative
function.
The freeze-frame first appears in the opening sequence, capturing Jack
in mid-motion slinging his tie to the sidewalk, just as the OUT OF SIGHT
title card flashes onto the screen. Here the freeze-frame works partly as
a stylistic device, calling attention to itself in accordance with feel of
the "It’s Your Thing"-accompanied opening credits. But it also calls
attention to Jack’s angst and desperation, and it prepares us for the time
loop that later takes place; when we find ourselves seeing Jack sling his
tie a second time, we know we’re back at square one sequentially.
Soderbergh employs the freeze-frame throughout the movie either for
emphasis or to signal a time-shift, but the final and best example of its
use occurs during Jack and Karen’s romantic interlude.
The scene begins in a trendy cocktail lounge atop Karen’s hotel.
Through a wall-length window we see a nighttime view of the Detroit
skyline, accented by snowfall. Looking sullen, Karen drinks her bourbon
alone and wards off a duo of obnoxious advertising executives, until Jack
shows up unexpectedly, sporting a navy blue suit and flicking his
trademark Zippo. In rigid contrast to her treatment of the "ad guys," as
they call themselves, Karen immediately becomes transfixed and gracious.
After Jack sits down, he and Karen, silhouetted in the lamplight, begin a
half-playful, half-serious conversation that escalates into Karen inviting
Jack to her hotel room. But Soderbergh chooses to intersperse footage and
dialogue of the cocktail lounge scene with footage of their actual love
scene. Explaining this unusual juxtaposition, Soderbergh remarked to
Michael Sragow of Salon.com, "I thought back to that sequence in
Don’t Look Now, and how those two scenes of Donald Sutherland and
Julie Christie making love and getting dressed suggested an intimacy that
was stronger than either of those scenes alone." His instincts were on
target. By contemporary standards the scene is exceedingly tame, exposing
minimal skin, certainly not enough to constitute nudity, yet the scene
remains intensely erotic—because of that peculiar juxtaposition, because
of David Holmes’ narrative-appropriate score, because of what it chooses
not to reveal, and because of the freeze-framing, the unsteady
camerawork, and the overlapping dissolves that intensify the action
onscreen. Jack and Karen’s frozen embrace marks the film’s last
application of the freeze-frame, ushering in the plot’s return to the here
and now, to the present in the absence of flashbacks.
Soderbergh’s use of color in Out of Sight is of equal
significance. To further underscore the film’s tone and to help the
audience keep track of the time-shifts, Soderbergh identifies each major
location with separate color palettes—vibrant oranges and turquoises for
Miami, a monochromatic scheme of blues and grays for Detroit. As a comment
on Jack and Karen’s ill-fated relationship, once the film shifts to wintry
Detroit the warmth and sense of possibility in Miami are left behind.
Similarly, each prison can be identified by a difference in the prisoner’s
uniforms—steel blue for Glades Correctional, canary yellow for Lompoc, and
finally, denim and orange for Detroit. From this visual pattern alone we
can loosely construct a narrative timeline.
Soderbergh often reconciles his style and technical expertise to
whatever genre (if any) he brings into play. His track record shows a
proclivity for film noir—it surfaces in his earlier films like
Kafka (1991) and The Underneath (1995), the latter a
conceptualized remake of Robert Siodmak’s 1948 classic, Criss Cross.
Soderbergh has discussed at length his attraction to film noir and
his desire to expand on it rather than duplicate it:
There is a central idea in this genre that I like a lot: a
character lives as a function of values in which he/she believes, and
in relation to a moral code. When they start to want something very
strongly, just for a moment they think they can cross that line that
they themselves established…then go back to the way things were.
Naturally, they find out that’s not possible… On the other hand, the
exterior aspects of the genre don’t really interest me. From the
beginning I told my collaborators [on The Underneath]: no wet
pavement, no huge shadows, no hats, no smoke…that seems pointless to
me… You have to acknowledge the conventions associated with this kind
of film if you decide to make one, but most importantly, you have to
bring your own point of view (Postif, April 1996).
Out of Sight, of course, owes less to film noir than some of
Soderbergh’s other films, but the noirish elements that do
materialize, such as the wisecracking banter between Jack and Karen, come
off as fresh. Likewise, Jack’s fatalism and skewed sense of ethics are in
keeping with the noir hero’s tendency that Soderbergh mentioned:
it’s the same rationale which allows Jack to delude himself into thinking
that he and Karen can iron things out, that after one last score the two
of them can "make it an island."
This final score, or at least the attempt at the score, transpires at
Richard Ripley’s exquisitely lit Detroit mansion—compared to the frigid
conditions outside its walls, the house seems like an oasis of warmth and
opportunity. In another display of his ability to mix and match tones,
Soderbergh offsets the film’s mounting sense of dread with ironic comedy.
Snoopy and his gang of thugs, though they consider themselves
professionals, quickly fold when the diamonds fail to turn up in the first
places they look. White Boy Bob amuses himself by discovering multicolored
condoms underneath Ripley’s mattress, then sneaks off to raid the freezer;
taking a break from trying to rape Ripley’s maid, Kenneth rummages through
Ripley’s CD collection for theme music; Snoopy, supposedly the brains
behind the operation, concerns himself with putting together an ensemble
from Ripley’s wardrobe.
Meanwhile Jack and Buddy locate the uncut diamonds, but Jack sends
Buddy away with them alone, remaining behind to protect the maid. He does
manage to save her, killing Kenneth in the process (which appears to be
the first time he has fired a gun, vis-à-vis Butch Cassidy) but before he
can escape, Karen appears and holds him at gunpoint. Jack, clenching an
empty pistol, threatens to commit suicide-by-cop (Karen had requested
backup and at this point we hear the approaching sirens), but Karen denies
him that option by shooting him in the leg with the same gun that Jack
returned to her the morning after their interlude. Handcuffing him to the
balustrade, she tells him, "I’m sorry. I wish things were different."
David Holmes’ score—again, the identical score played during the love
scene—drowns out all other sound while Jack grimaces in pain and comes to
terms with the way things shook out (a mental process amplified by a
series of jump-cuts). Though he doesn’t respond to Karen’s numb apology,
we can see that Jack wishes things were different too.
The film’s mildly ambiguous conclusion, absent from Leonard’s novel,
comes entirely from the imagination of Scott Frank. While being
transported from Detroit back to Glades Correctional, Jack finds himself
paired with fellow prisoner Hejira Henry (Samuel L. Jackson). In the
course of their conversation, Jack learns that Hejira has escaped from
prison on ten previous occasions. Putting two and two together, Jack
begins to understand why Karen made arrangements for the two of them to
meet:
JACK
And now we’re off to Glades.
HEJIRA
Yeah, looks that way. I was supposed to leave last night with the lady
marshal,
but for some reason she wanted to wait.
JACK
She did, huh?
HEJIRA
Guess it’s cheaper taking two of us down in one van.
JACK
Could be. Could be maybe she thought we’d have a lot to talk about.
HEJIRA
Really. Like what?
JACK
I don’t know… Long ride to Florida.
This scene stands out for several reasons. For one, it embodies a
flawless use of the cameo—Jackson’s presence ensures that the scene will
resonate in the minds of the audience. Secondly, it veers drastically from
mainstream cinema’s tendency to unite its lovers at all cost. In the hands
of less adept storytellers, Jack might have reached a sudden epiphany and
changed his bank-robbing ways. But Soderbergh, Frank, and Leonard all
three demonstrate that Jack lacks the capacity to reform himself; look no
further than his eruption inside Ripley’s office building. Thus, given the
plot’s circumstances, Out of Sight reaches an entirely
logical—albeit depressing—conclusion. Lastly, by intentionally leaving the
film open-ended, Soderbergh sustains its mystery and encourages the viewer
to actively fill in the gaps. Like his contemporaries Christopher Nolan
and David Lynch, Soderbergh in this manner plays with the audience’s
compulsion to know every last detail. And if Traffic and Ocean’s
Eleven are any indication, Soderbergh clearly thinks that endings are
often about new beginnings—instead of being constricted by a contrived
stab at closure, the movie seems to continue beyond the strips of
celluloid.
Steven Soderbergh has emerged from the avant-garde to chip away at the
barrier between popular cinema and art cinema, and Out of Sight
confirms this beautifully. Though his films are seldom "original" in the
traditional sense—he routinely derives material from the films he admires,
and Solaris will mark his third remake to date—his talent lies in
his execution and his eagerness to take risks. Most recently, Full
Frontal has been unanimously panned by the critics, dismissed as a
pretentious and self-referential experiment, a miserable follow-up to
Ocean’s Eleven. Audiences have apparently taken the film too seriously
and overlooked the satire that oscillates under the film’s surface, but
the point is that Full Frontal clearly speaks to Soderbergh’s
ability to regroup and keep himself fresh—a trait that sets him apart from
other supposed film artists who merely find a formula that works and set
up shop. Expressing his approach to mainstream filmmaking, Soderbergh
stated:
As somebody once put it to me, bluntly, "If you think Hollywood
movies are so fucking terrible, why don’t you try to make a good one
instead of bitching about it." So I’ve been trying to carve out
half-in, half-out of the mainstream ideas for genre films made with
some amount of care and intelligence and humor—to see if we can get
back to that period we all liked in American cinema 25 years ago (Salon.com,
January 2000, archived).
Rick Warner is currently working toward a M.A. in Film Studies at Emory
University |