Soderbergh’s films range from micro-budget experiments to big-budget blockbusters
The latter half of director Steven Soderbergh’s career has been timed perfectly with the stages of my life. I began watching (and remembering) movies right around the time Soderbergh was making slick commercial flicks in the late nineties and early aughts.
The first Soderbergh film I watched was Ocean’s Eleven, a charming, breezy and immensely cool movie that served well as an introduction to Soderbergh’s improvisational, unforced work. Ocean’s Eleven may have a ludicrous plot, but it’s amply sold by the game cast and polished visual work. It still remains a permanent fixture of my family’s movie rotation, something we put on whenever we want to watch something funny and charming.
Not long afterwards, I caught Out of Sight on cable. Another one of Soderbergh’s accomplished populist flicks, Out of Sight also found itself in the movie rotation, and is, perhaps, the number one reason why I like George Clooney.
When I first watched the movie, I didn’t know that both it and Ocean’s Eleven were made by the same director, nor did I understand the importance of a director, but something about the two movies felt as if they were of a piece of art.
Even now, I still have trouble exactly pinning down Soderbergh. All of his films, from his esoteric, borderline experimental work (e.g. Schizopolis, The Girlfriend Experience) to his big studio projects (Traffic, Contagion, etc.), feel distinctly Soderberghian, but I struggle to explicate why.
It’s not really any grand, overarching thematic concerns that tie his work together — though Soderbergh does like exploring habitual liars — and it’s not really any specific visual trademarks, though Soderbergh has an uncanny eye for composition.
A few years passed before I caught up with another Soderbergh film. By then, I had become more of a budding cinephile, and started exploring more exotic, less conventional films. Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris came on TV as a double billing with Ocean’s Twelve. I hated both of them. Midway through Ocean’s Twelve, I hit info on the remote control and resolved never to watch a Soderbergh film again.
Looking back, I still don’t have any particular fondness for those two misfires. Having now watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s original, I can see what Soderbergh was going for — leaning more heavily on the emotional relationship between the main character and his dead wife — but I’m much less moved by the film than I was by the original. I can appreciate the French New Wave homage of Ocean’s Twelve, but the story’s just as confusing and inert as it was when I first watched it.
I held out on my promise for a few years, until Che came out in limited release. I had just binged through some Cuban history in school and on Wikipedia, so the premise of a comprehensive Che Guevara biopic appealed greatly to me.
I convinced a friend to go watch both parts with me (about five hours in total). That was back in 2008, when we had to sneak into R-rated movies. Luckily, the theater employees didn’t care too much. We got seats in the middle of the theater and settled in for the most thoroughly engrossing cinematic experience of my life.
Che, presented in two parts with a short intermission, captured the likeness of its subject to an astonishing degree, working in both concrete facts about Guevara’s career as a revolutionary and wrangling cohesive themes and character observations out of Guevara’s life. I was blown away by the way the battles were filmed, particularly how the victorious fights in part one contrasted with the soul-crushing attrition of part two.
During the intermission, I found out that Soderbergh directed both parts of the film. By the time credits rolled for part two, I had completely forgiven Soderbergh for his earlier transgressions and resolved to seek out more of his work.
Five years and many more movies later, Soderbergh is planning to retire from filmmaking. In preparation for his last theatrical release (Side Effects, out this Friday), I revisited his filmography, in the likely vain hope of figuring out what made and drove Soderbergh to a career of such disparate highs and lows.
There’s not much, superficially, to connect Soderbergh’s films. A lot of them deal with breakdowns in human communication, whether it be through willful lying or subconscious biases. Many of his films tackle some of the worst in humanity, while others are bits of flighty escapism.
Partway through The Informant!, I came to understand at least part of Soderbergh’s allure: In all of his films, Soderbergh manages to invest enormous empathy in his characters. He has, repeatedly, burrowed into unsavory people — robbers, escorts, strippers, cult members, drug traffickers — to find a common shred of humanity that unites us all.
In a cinematic age that has grown increasingly invested in irony, nihilism and depravation, I’ll miss Steven Soderbergh’s humanism profoundly.
Here’s hoping his retirement won’t last.
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