UNSANE (US - 2018) Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer. Cast: Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Amy Irving, Aimee Mullins, Matt Damon, Polly McKie, Sarah Stiles, Michael Mihm, Robert Kelly, Gibson Frazier, Raul Castillo, Will Brill, Stephen Maier, Myra Lucretia Taylor. (R, 98 mins) Steven Soderbergh emerged from his four-year, big-screen "retirement" (during which he directed an HBO movie and two seasons of the Cinemax series THE KNICK, and produced several projects for others) with last year's charming and funny LOGAN LUCKY. By the time that film was in theaters, Soderbergh had already secretly made UNSANE, described as a low-budget horror film shot entirely with an iPhone 7 Plus, with the exception of a drone camera for some exteriors. Fans of Italian horror with recognize UNSANE as the title of the severely-cut US version of Dario Argento's 1982 classic TENEBRAE, but the comparisons end there. UNSANE was written not by Soderbergh but by the team of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, whose writing credits include such classics as Lindsay Lohan's JUST MY LUCK, Jackie Chan's THE SPY NEXT DOOR, and their crowning achievement, LARRY THE CABLE GUY: HEALTH INSPECTOR. Nevertheless, through the iPhone 7 Plus and other recurring themes, Soderbergh, once again handling cinematography duties as "Peter Andrews" and editing as "Mary Ann Bernard," makes UNSANE his own, and it's a mess. Even the iPhone gimmick isn't original: several years before he directed THE FLORIDA PROJECT, Sean Baker made his indie breakthrough with TANGERINE, shot entirely with an iPhone 5S. Though he's had major box-office hits with films like TRAFFIC, ERIN BROCKOVICH, and the OCEAN'S ELEVEN trilogy, Soderbergh has found some success and critical accolades with more offbeat and, to varying degrees, experimental projects (THE LIMEY, BUBBLE, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, the ambitious four-hour epic CHE), and has even gone "slumming" in genre fare before with 2012's enjoyable Gina Carano actioner HAYWIRE. UNSANE is one of his worst films, but at least it's better than 2002's FULL FRONTAL, his unwatchable, star-studded, self-indulgent homage to French New Wave shot with the Canon XL-1s. There's several scenes in UNSANE, especially in the early going, where Soderbergh's use of the iPhone 7 indeed adds to the sense of unease he's trying to establish, but the longer the film goes on, the dumber and more ridiculous it gets. By the time the heroine wakes up in a trunk and Soderbergh's breaking out the night vision, it's hard to shake the feeling that he's either bored out of his mind or hasn't seen enough low-budget indie horror films over the last two decades to recognize the cliches.
The improbably-named Sawyer Valentini (THE CROWN's Claire Foy) has just moved to suburban Pennsylvania from Boston. She works as a financial analyst and doesn't seem to be well-liked by her colleagues, though she tells her mom Angela (Amy Irving sighting!) that everything's great and moving 450 miles away was a career opportunity she couldn't pass up. She's on Tinder and meets guys for one-nighters, but what she hasn't told her mom or anyone else is that she moved from Boston to get away from a stalker who trailed her for two years, and whose face she still keeps seeing everywhere--at work, on the men she meets--and she never feels safe, which isn't helped by her boss not very subtly propositioning her to go on business trip to New Orleans with him. Feeling a one-on-one session might help sort out her thoughts, she makes an appointment with a counselor at the reputable Highland Creek Behavioral Center. Handed some paperwork requiring her signature after mentioning she had fleeting thoughts of suicide in the past, Sawyer realizes too late that she's been duped into signing an agreement to be voluntarily committed for 24 hours, which turns into seven days after repeat instances of violently lashing out at staff and patients when they refuse to release her. She's endlessly taunted by white trash patient Violet (Juno Temple), but befriends another, Nate (former SNL cast member Jay Pharoah), who's recovering from an opioid addiction and has a secretly stashed phone that he loans to Sawyer after she loses her privileges. She calls her mom, who drives to Highland Creek only to be stonewalled by chief administrator Ashley Brighterhouse (Aimee Mullins), and to make matters worse, the stalker from Boston, David Strine (Joshua Leonard, looking and sounding like Zach Galifianakis), is also at Highland Creek, working as an orderly under a phony name. Or is Sawyer's mind playing tricks on her?
Soderbergh shows his cards too soon with almost every plot twist, whether the orderly is really Strine or what Nate is really doing at Highland Creek. Characters also start doing stupid things when it's convenient for the plot (with eyes everywhere, how does no one ever catch Nate on his phone?). The iPhone 7 approach does yield some initially intriguing results, with Soderbergh keeping the camera at a distance as Sawyer goes about her day, almost like you are voyeuristically stalking her. He frequently plants the camera right in Foy's face, getting you up close and personal with someone who's either cracking up or completely sane and freaking out because she's being gaslighted and can't convince anyone that the new orderly is a lunatic creep. But after a while, when everything becomes clear and there's no ambiguity left, UNSANE devolves into what looks like the kind of no-budget horror indie that might break out and maybe get some attention and help establish a first-time director. To that end, the presence of Leonard, one of the stars of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT almost 20 years ago, can't be coincidental.
For a young filmmaker trying to make his bones--Sean Baker, for instance--a gimmick like shooting an entire movie on an iPhone is a feat of overcoming obstacles and a triumph of DIY aesthetic. But for someone like Soderbergh, an Academy Award-winner who's been lauded as great filmmaker for nearly 30 years, works with the biggest stars in Hollywood, and has several huge hits to his credit, it comes off like cynical wankery. It's not an example of a master filmmaker subverting genre expectations, and if it was made by a young no-namer, it would likely be premiering at your nearest Redbox. UNSANE starts out fine but Soderbergh seems to lose focus quickly, unable to decide if he's making a no-budget indie horror movie or an ERIN BROCKOVICH-meets-SHOCK CORRIDOR-type expose on medical and insurance industry corruption. There's hints at a timely #MeToo or #TimesUp angle with Sawyer's lecherous boss and the way she recoils from a Tinder hookup ("You initiated!" the guy pleads), but that goes nowhere. Foy gives it her all and Pharoah is natural and likable (one very likely ad-libbed line from him gets a huge laugh), but a mannered Leonard is a cartoonishly cliched antagonist and there's also a pointless and distracting appearance by Soderbergh pal Matt Damon in a flashback as a security expert advising Sawyer about stalkers. It all leads to a weak and unsatisfying conclusion that ends the film on a frustrating note. Soderbergh's name and history will get this some significant critical cache since it's a planned move instead of one borne of a stalled career (UNSANE isn't good, but we're not talking Roland Joffe's CAPTIVITY here), but at the end of the day, there's nothing here that a kid just out of film school couldn't have done just as well.
LOGAN LUCKY (US - 2017) Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Rebecca Blunt. Cast: Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Seth MacFarlane, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Katherine Waterston, Dwight Yoakam, Sebastian Stan, Brian Gleeson, Jack Quaid, Farrah McKenzie, David Denman, Macon Blair, Jon Eyez, Deneen Tyler, Ann Mahoney, Jim O'Heir. (PG-13, 118 mins) Steven Soderbergh cried wolf on retiring from feature films a number of times before finally making it official after 2013's SIDE EFFECTS, but he never really went away. He directed HBO's Liberace biopic BEHIND THE CANDELABRA and all 20 episodes of Cinemax's two-season series THE KNICK. He didn't direct the MAGIC MIKE sequel MAGIC MIKE XXL but he served as its cinematographer under his D.P. pseudonym "Peter Andrews" and he edited it as "Mary Ann Bernard." He was also executive producer on other series like Amazon's RED OAKS, Starz's THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (a spinoff of his experimental 2009 Sasha Gray vehicle), and Netflix's upcoming GODLESS, in addition to producing indies like WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN and Spike Lee's DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS. In short, Soderbergh is working more than ever, and with an arsenal of pseudonyms that's approaching Joe D'Amato and Jess Franco levels, his return to the big screen was only a matter of time. LOGAN LUCKY, shot by "Peter Andrews," edited by "Mary Ann Bernard," and written by the unknown "Rebecca Blunt," which is already assumed to be yet another Soderbergh alias, finds the filmmaker in familiar territory, insofar as it's a heist movie that puts it in the same wheelhouse as his OCEAN'S ELEVEN trilogy and OUT OF SIGHT, and like the OCEAN'S movies, it's played for laughs, but Soderbergh's feature film homecoming has some tricks up its sleeve that make it very much its own unique thing.
In his fourth Soderbergh film, Channing Tatum stars as Jimmy Logan, a West Virginia construction worker fired by his crew boss after failing to disclose the bum knee from a high school football injury that ended his once-plausible chances of making it to the NFL. His ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes) lives just across the state line in North Carolina and is planning to move with their daughter Sadie (Farrah McKenzie) to Lynchburg, VA, where her wealthy second husband (David Denman) is opening a new car dealership. Jimmy receives little consolation from his younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a bartender with a prosthetic left arm in place of the one he lost in Iraq. Clyde reminds Jimmy of the "Logan Curse," which has affected generations of their family, prompting Jimmy to take drastic measures to reverse it. With the help of their baby sister Mellie (Riley Keough), the Logan siblings team up to rob the cash deposit vault of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during the final NASCAR race of the season by taking advantage of the pneumatic tube system that moves throughout and under the speedway via chutes, a system Jimmy discovered on his last job with the construction crew, remedying a series of sinkholes that formed beneath the speedway property. The Logans enlist the aid of appropriately-named explosives man Joe Bang ("introducing Daniel Craig"), and are not deterred by the problematic fact that he's still locked up ("I am in-car-cer-ra-ted!" Bang sounds out for the Logans) for another five months and the job needs to be pulled off before the construction crew completes their work in four weeks.
Other figures drift in and out of the story in inspired, Coen Bros.-like situations, from obnoxious British business mogul and NASCAR team owner Max Chilblain (Seth MacFarlane, looking like a cross between Mandy Patinkin and Avery Schreiber); Dayton White (Sebastian Stan), a Chilblain driver who suffers a bad reaction after being contractually obligated to drink a Chilblain-endorsed energy drink on camera; Joe Bang's lunkhead brothers Sam Bang (Brian Gleeson) and Fish Bang (Jack Quaid); and, much later, humorless, no-nonsense FBI agent Sarah Grayson (Hilary Swank). Soderbergh goes against your gut expectations by avoiding the easy trap of milking these characters for condescending laughs, instead opting for a Coen Bros. approach where he shows much empathy for the Logans, and even for Joe Bang's brothers, who are more the stereotypical hillbilly yokels to a certain degree (they're introduced toilet seat-pitching and bragging that they "know everything there is to know about computers," including "all the Twitters"). Jimmy's plan is ridiculous and damn near impossible but time and again, he, along with Clyde, Mellie, and Joe Bang, prove themselves quite resourceful and have clearly thought this whole thing through even as obstacles constantly threaten to halt the job. The often absurdist humor doesn't approach the lunacy of, say, RAISING ARIZONA, but rather, the more deadpan side of FARGO. Tatum and especially Driver really nail the tone here and are gifted with numerous bits of quotable dialogue. Sure, Clyde's prosthetic arm is played for some easy laughs, but they're great laughs, and one brief detour into a prison riot negotiation (the standoff arranged to get Joe Bang out of jail) between the exasperated warden (Dwight Yoakam) and inmates demanding the prison library stock the titles in the Game of Thrones series that George R.R. Martin has yet to publish is brilliantly funny, as they refuse to believe that the new books don't exist and the warden can't convince them that the TV series has moved past the novels. LOGAN LUCKY could maybe run 15 minutes shorter and it has a few too many characters than it has time to properly showcase (MacFarlane, Stan, and Katherine Waterston as a nurse in a mobile free clinic are barely in it, and Swank doesn't even appear until 95 minutes in), but it's a lot of fun and a reminder that "offbeat" and "quirky" can still be a good thing. Plus it's got one perfect scene involving Sadie and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," that's maybe the sweetest thing Soderbergh's ever done.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Richard LaGravenese. Cast: Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Dan Aykroyd, Rob Lowe, Scott Bakula, Debbie Reynolds, Paul Reiser, Cheyenne Jackson, Nicky Katt, Tom Papa, Boyd Holbrook, Bruce Ramsay, David Koechner. (Unrated, 118 mins)
The prolific Steven Soderbergh's seventh or eighth consecutive "last movie" is based on the memoir by Scott Thorson and the film retains what's largely Thorson's side of events in his relationship with legendary pianist and entertainer Liberace. Set between 1977 and 1987, everything is seen through his eyes, and it's less a Liberace biopic and more a study of an average young man seduced not just by an older man, but by fame, fortune, and excess.
In 1977, 19-year-old Thorson (Matt Damon) meets Liberace (Michael Douglas) backstage after a Vegas show and the two immediately hit it off. Before long, Liberace's "protégé" (Cheyenne Jackson) and his houseboy Carlucci (Bruce Ramsay) are moving out of his mansion and Scott is moving in, despite his getting warnings from Carlucci that someday, the time will come when he'll find himself being moved out of the house by Liberace's loyal attorney Seymour (Dan Aykroyd) and someone younger will be moving in. Scott, who grew up in a variety of foster homes due to a mentally unstable mother, is initially apprehensive but grows attached to the flamboyant Liberace, both as a lover and a father figure, and for the first time in his life, feels like he's part of a "family," especially when Liberace offers to make him his legally adopted son. Problems develop in the relationship--Liberace makes Scott get plastic surgery to look more like him; Scott gets addicted to painkillers and starts selling Liberace's jewelry to support his drug habit; bisexual Scott refuses to be the bottom and Liberace starts looking for sex elsewhere, even resorting to glory holes in skid row peep show booths. Several years go by and the relationship grows more strained, and Scott notices a new young protégé (Boyd Holbrook) hanging around as Carlucci's prophetic warning comes to pass. Believing their relationship was practically a marriage, Scott files a palimony suit against Liberace.
Soderbergh, working from a script by Richard LaGravenese, tells the story in a very straightforward fashion, demonstrating none of his trademark back-and-forth crosscutting and tricky editing techniques (though there is a great opening shot set to the hypnotic Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder disco classic "I Feel Love"), instead presenting it as more of an acting showcase for Douglas and Damon. 42-year-old Damon manages to overcome some serious miscasting by conveying the demeanor of a guy in his early 20s rather than convincingly looking like one. Douglas, in his first acting role since recovering from his throat cancer battle, does a terrific job of expressing the flamboyance and effeminate nature of Liberace (who never came out of the closet and publicly presented an image of "just never finding the right girl," still using 1930s Olympic skater-turned-actress Sonja Henie as his beard even after her 1969 death) without resorting to caricature and clichéd broad strokes. Douglas still has some fun sinking his teeth into some scenes, particularly with the devilish grin he flashes as Liberace fondles Scott under the sheets and says "Look who's up!" before going down on him. Soderbergh complained that he intended BEHIND THE CANDELABRA to be a theatrical release (which it will be overseas) but that US distributors found it "too gay," before HBO agreed to back it. The sex scenes in the film aren't especially graphic and aren't shocking other than the novelty of seeing Douglas and Damon in them together.
There's some very humorous elements throughout--not just of the "Look who's up!" variety: Rob Lowe is ghoulish as Liberace's pill-pushing plastic surgeon who looks like he spends his spare time operating on himself; Scott's shocked reaction to a post-facelift Liberace sleeping with his eyes open because they can no longer close; and there's a marvelously dark-humored bit where Scott, regretting his new face, complains to his friend Bob (Scott Bakula, sporting a big moustache that makes him look like Gay Sam Elliott) that he doesn't even recognize himself anymore and in the same breath, this average guy ponders which of the several luxury cars at his disposal he should use today. Soderbergh leans a bit too heavily on the GOODFELLAS/BOOGIE NIGHTS "coke-fueled paranoia-cam" in the scenes with Scott and his dealer (Nicky Katt), and there's somewhat of an "unreliable narrator" feeling in the way Thorson is presented, but it could be argued that it's simply the filmmakers staying faithful to the source. It is, after all, an adaptation of Thorson's book.
With that in mind, it's never mentioned that Thorson was a key witness in the 1989 trial of the 1981 Wonderland murders and spent some time in witness-protection as a result, nor is it mentioned that, in the years following Liberace's death from AIDS in 1987 (Thorson tested negative for HIV), Thorson served time in prison for charges ranging from drugs to burglary to credit card fraud. All we see of Thorson's post-Liberace life in BEHIND THE CANDELABRA are scenes of him working at a Kinko's and living a quiet life in a small apartment. On one hand, it feels a little whitewashed, but those elements aren't part of the story being told. All things considered, BEHIND THE CANDELABRA won't go down as Soderbergh's best film, but it works thanks to the performances of Douglas and Damon.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Scott Z. Burns. Cast: Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Channing Tatum, Vinessa Shaw, Ann Dowd, Polly Draper, Mamie Gummer, David Costabile, Peter Friedman, Laila Robins, Michael Nathanson, Sheila Tapia. (R, 106 mins)
Steven Soderbergh has been announcing his retirement from feature films for several years now, and SIDE EFFECTS feels like what must be his seventh or eighth "last" film. For a guy on the verge of retirement, he's been highly prolific: SIDE EFFECTS is his third directorial feature in the last 13 months (after HAYWIRE and MAGIC MIKE), plus his upcoming HBO Michael Douglas-as-Liberace biopic BEHIND THE CANDELABRA is set to air later this year. Whether he means it or if he just needs some time away from Hollywood remains to be seen, but SIDE EFFECTS finds Soderbergh in top form, working from a script by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns (who also wrote Soderbergh's 2009 film THE INFORMANT! and 2011's CONTAGION), and fashioning a cleverly-constructed puzzler that starts out as one thing and very seamlessly and organically becomes another, all the while frequently misdirecting the audience but never cheating.
In a performance demonstrating the same intensity she brought to David Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, Rooney Mara is Emily Taylor, a young NYC ad agency staffer who's been on her own after her Wall Street husband Martin (Channing Tatum) was busted by the Feds for insider trading. After serving four years in a minimum-security facility, Martin is paroled and Emily finds the adjustment difficult. She's battled depression in the past and it rears its ugly head once more when she's hospitalized after intentionally driving her car into a parking garage wall at full speed. In the hospital, she's consulted by attending psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who agrees to take her on as a patient and prescribes Zoloft, but the side effects leave Emily fatigued, moody, and withdrawn. After discussing Emily's situation with her former psychiatrist Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Banks decides to prescribe the relatively new (and fictional) Ablixa. Emily responds well to Ablixa, with more energy, better moods, and a hyperactive sex drive, but even it has side effects, such as prolonged episodes of sleepwalking where Emily spends the day on the subway and forgets to go to work, or wanders the apartment, blasting music and preparing elaborate meals with no memory of it the next morning.
It's during one of these sleepwalking episodes that Emily unknowingly kills someone and completely blacks out afterward. It's here that Soderbergh and Burns shift the focus to Law's Dr. Banks, who finds himself a toxic pariah under fire by the cops, the lawyers, his colleagues, the ethics board, and the media when Emily blames the medication for her actions. He's thrown under the bus by the partners in his practice, cut loose from a $50,000 contract for an experimental sleep med (which he also prescribed to Emily), has a professional transgression from his past drudged up, and his wife (Vinessa Shaw) is sent photos that seem to reveal an affair with Emily. Banks' personal and professional lives come crashing down around him, and he starts getting the paranoid feeling that this is something much bigger than Emily's Ablixa side effects.
SIDE EFFECTS initially seems like it'll be an indictment of the pharmaceutical industry done with the clinical, point-by-point approach Soderbergh brought to the 2000 drug-trade chronicle TRAFFIC and the global contamination thriller CONTAGION. But Soderbergh has always been a filmmaker who can deftly balance numerous styles and approaches to his work, whether tackling environmental issues in the form of a crowd-pleaser like 2000's ERIN BROCKOVICH, or using imaginative non-linear directorial and editing techniques on genre fare like HAYWIRE, 1998's OUT OF SIGHT, or 1999's THE LIMEY. SIDE EFFECTS finds Soderbergh on his more straightforward, commercial, OCEAN'S ELEVEN side, and though it goes in unpredictable directions, it really displays no more depth than a vintage LAW & ORDER episode and would likely be made-for-TV movie material in lesser hands (there's even a humorous bit where Emily is describing the pre-prison era of her marriage to Banks and Soderbergh films the flashback in the same style as a prescription drug TV commercial). The term "Hitchcockian" will be bandied about until the end of time, but it applies here, not just in the way the story switches gears and cleverly misdirects (think PSYCHO), but also in the construction. SIDE EFFECTS is almost quaintly old-fashioned in the way it draws you in, manipulates you, then pulls the rug out on you. When most films attempt this, it feels cheap and forced, and many filmmakers find that they have to cheat by negating earlier elements of the plot and unsuccessfully cramming pieces that don't fit into the plot holes left behind. Soderbergh and Burns are smarter than that--they don't overshoot and don't go so far as to back themselves into a corner where they have to fudge it and force things to work that don't. In our post-USUAL SUSPECTS and post-Shyamalan world of suspense thrillers, everything has to have a crazy twist or ten, and more often than not, they collapse because they're trying too hard to outdo everything else. SIDE EFFECTS plays it a lot cooler, offering twists, but they're plausible and restrained twists. That's the kind of expertise that someone like Soderbergh brings to the table.
Is SIDE EFFECTS a "great" film? Is it going to be a "classic"? Probably not, and it isn't aspiring to be. But it's smart, well-written, tightly-constructed, excellently-acted (even by Soderbergh man-crush Tatum), masterfully-directed, and above all, extremely entertaining. It's refreshing proof that commercially-geared popcorn movies can be fun and intelligent and made for grown-ups without pandering to the lowest common denominator and dumbing everything down. It expects you to turn your phone off, pay attention and keep up, and it generously rewards those simple actions accordingly. Remember when that wasn't asking much from an audience?
