PLAYING TO GROWN-UPS
Great cinema is still in crisis, filmmaker Soderbergh says
Technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh shouldn’t still be making movies.
In 2013, the Oscar-winning filmmaker delivered a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival in which, with his distinctive combination of self-deprecatory wit and stinging insight, he diagnosed the economic, cultural and corporate forces that were turning Hollywood into a monoculture of escapist spectacles and bombastic action flicks. Differentiating between movies (“something you see”) and cinema (“something that’s made”), Soderbergh bemoaned how “cinema, as I define it and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience.”
It was around the same time that Soderbergh announced his retirement from directing. Although he did retreat from feature films, he produced and directed several episodes of the TV series The Knick, only to surprise and delight his fans in 2017 by re-emerging with the left-handed caper comedy Logan Lucky, followed by the psychological thriller Unsane, which he shot on an iPhone.
Although Soderbergh’s reports of his own retirement turned out to be premature, he believes the trends he identified have only taken hold more strongly in the ensuing years.
Soderbergh now is no more optimistic than in 2013. “The speech I gave in San Francisco six years ago still holds,” he said, “in terms of what’s working and what’s not working.”
One thing that has changed is that streaming sites have largely stepped into the breach created by the studios’ blockbusters-only business model, lavishing Soderbergh, Scorsese and their fellow auteurs with money to make their passion projects. Earlier this year, Soderbergh released another iPhone film, High Flying Bird, on Netflix, which is also released his new film The Laundromat, a darkly comic anthology film based on the corrupt tax-avoidance schemes revealed in the 2016 release of the Panama Papers.
“The Laundromat is the perfect example of something that I think doesn’t get made (anymore) at a studio,” Soderbergh said. “This is a mid-range-budgeted film for grown-ups (that’s) just not something the studios are seeing as a viable business.”
While bricks-and-mortar exhibitors go to war with streamers over how many days movies must play in theatres before being made available on TV and while fanboys and cineastes fight over what counts as a movie, Soderbergh has been surfing the economic and technological disruptions like a Zen master. For the most part, he has stuck with the same nimble, format-and-platform-neutral course he’s followed for a career that’s been markedly versatile, starting with his breakout film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, through such classical genre exercises as Out of Sight and the Ocean’s Eleven franchise and Oscar-winners such as Traffic and Erin Brockovich, up to and including such straight-tovideo experiments as Bubble and the old-school black-and-white Second World War drama The Good German.
The Laundromat — which stars Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas — is yet another example of the spontaneity Soderbergh prizes. It’s constructed of various chapters illustrating the arcane financial dealings that allow criminals and the superwealthy to protect their assets in offshore accounts while remaining unaccountable to the millions of people victimized by the shady practices of anonymous shell companies and unethical lawyers.
In November, Soderbergh will release The Report as one of its producers. Linear where The Laundromat is kaleidoscopic, methodical where The Laundromat is interpretive, sober-minded where The Laundromat is irreverent and wry, The Report stars Adam Driver as Senate staffer Daniel Jones, who wrote the 2012 intelligence committee report about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the war on terror. Both films continue a Soderbergh theme, in which he deconstructs multilayered, largely invisible systems that condition contemporary life.
“Everybody is subject to these forces,” Soderbergh said. “We’re all living in the middle of some system, some political system, some system at work. You can’t escape it. So I guess I’m interested in how you navigate that, especially when you’re dealing with a system that’s corrupt or dehumanizing. How does that sustain itself and what happens when you go up against it?”
Nearly two decades after Erin Brockovich and Traffic, movies seem to occupy a shrinking cultural space, not only in terms of artistic importance, but in their ability to forge social consensus around themes and issues. Back in 2013, Soderbergh said audiences gravitated toward escapism in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as a form of coping with trauma they had never fully processed. He stands by what he calls that “crackpot theory,” and is less optimistic than ever that we’re capable of engaging with substantive — and maybe unpleasant — ideas.
“In a world that feels like it’s getting more complicated, a lot of people revert back to a sort of reptile-brain position, just because it’s quick and easy,” he said, adding “we have this very Western secular idea that most people want certain freedoms and they want certain choices, when in fact a lot of people on this planet actually want freedom from choice. They actually want to be told what to do and what to think.”
The Washington Post