While there are certainly filmmakers out there that I personally like more, I have difficulty thinking of a filmmaker who outright fascinates me as much as Steven Soderbergh. His prolific and endlessly flexible body of work, his revolutionary approach to the art form and the industry that dominates it, his consistent championing of low-budget independent filmmaking; I have all kinds of respect for the man as an artist. So I figured it would be fitting to close out my reviews for 2021 with a double-feature of the man’s most recent films, starting with this little curio of a feature.
In keeping with Soderbergh’s M.O. over the last few years, the interesting shit starts before the film even begins, given the production background for this. It features a relatively-smaller but still high-profile cast, including Meryl Streep, Lucas Hedges, Dianne Wiest, and Candice Bergen, as they go on a cruise ship from the U.S. to the U.K.. Soderbergh is doing all his own cinematography and editing as per usual (with him apparently rolling around in a wheelchair while he was getting his shots), and aside from a small sound crew, that’s about it as far as on-site film crew. Everything else is au naturel, particularly the lighting. It is quite jarring, and weirdly refreshing, to see a film this devoid of artificial lighting arrangements, letting the cool brightness of the sun and the jaundiced gold of the ship’s interior lights do all the work.
The dialogue follows suit as, while everyone is working from a 50-page outline written up by Deborah Eisenberg, pretty much all of the actual words being spoken were improvised by the cast themselves. The first scene shows Streep as author Alice Hughes, sitting in the back of a limo, describing “a new way to use words to take you to a place beyond words”, and while this kind of cinematic improv isn’t exactly ‘new’, it still fits as a mission statement for the film to follow.
With how much of the story involves the ethics of writing based on real-life events, and the politics of the publishing industry (which is shown to be just as sequel-hungry as Hollywood), the story becomes a deconstruction of the Author in regards to all forms of art, film included. Like it’s the role of an actor as an inherent element of chaos against a director’s perfectly-planned production, in turn questioning the authority placed on the writer’s name for what is said on-screen. This is something I often find myself struggling with in terms of giving credit where it’s due, considering how much emphasis I place on names in these reviews, and coming from a director who famously eschews possessory credits on his own films, it’s a sentiment that certainly fits in with his larger methodology.
And yet, for as fascinating as this all is, the film itself doesn’t carry anywhere near that same level of fascination. I mentioned all the dialogue being improvised mainly because that same dialogue is basically all of the film’s main focus: It exists for these actors to talk with each other. While that approach can lead to a breezy and conversational effort, it can end up going too far into that direction and making a lot of the words being spoken seem superfluous, no matter how fun they are to hear in the moment (Bergen and Wiest in particular have some crackers throughout).
Watching this felt like I was stretched out on a lawn chair, half-asleep after a heavy lunch, while bits and pieces of outside conversations around me occasionally bled through my semi-conscious state. Sure, I definitely giggled quite a bit at Wiest’s Susan saying “Bow, bitch” after a particularly good Scrabble move, but outside of fleeting moments of interest, I honestly had trouble keeping everything together in my mind because the film’s structure is too loose to latch onto. But with how much I’ve gushed over Soderbergh as a creator, it should come as no surprise that I’m kinda okay with that. The man regularly makes these lightweight productions that seem to function more as his version of Leg Day than as any substantial artistic statement, and even in that mode, his approach to filmmaking still manages to unearth some interesting ideas about the artistic process.
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