Happily for us all, Soderbergh’s productive retirement goes on
Film No Sudden Move 15 cert, 110 min ★★★★★
Dir: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, David Harbour, Amy Seimetz, Brendan Fraser, Kieran Culkin, Noah Jupe, Bill Duke, Ray Liotta, Julia Fox, Frankie Shaw, Jon Hamm
Steven Soderbergh claimed he was retiring from cinema in 2013. Likely story: his run of six films since then would be the envy of many a director. None is quite what you’d call premium Soderbergh; a couple were damp squibs. But there’s a relaxed pleasure in his dabbling across genres these days – a sense of making low-to-mid budget films for the heck of it, rather than because a burning need compels him back.
His latest, No Sudden Move, is a moody crime drama set in 1954 Detroit, with one pronounced eccentricity of style. To signal a period look, Soderbergh and his cinematographer attached wideangle lenses to modern cameras, producing a strange, bug-eyed distortion effect around the edges of the frame. It takes some getting used to. Perhaps the director felt the need to challenge himself with the quirk of visual novelty, but it’s a needless distraction – especially given how sturdily written and played the film turns out to be.
In a dark fedora and leather jacket, Don Cheadle begins shuffling down Motor City’s back streets, playing a small-time criminal called Curt Goynes who’s scrabbling to pay the rent. Along with a fellow called Ronald (Benicio del Toro), whom he has yet to meet, he accepts a job, which is naturally a lot more complex than it sounds, from a hulking heavy (Brendan Fraser, diabolically shady in Sydney Greenstreet mode).
These two think they’re being used to pressurise a mid-ranking autoindustry executive (David Harbour) into stealing a blueprint from his workplace, but the extortion planned off the back of that is well beyond their pay grade.
Thanks to the duplicitous presence of a third guy, Charley (a never more out-for-himself Kieran Culkin), they find themselves in the thick of a suburban hostage situation with Harbour’s wife (Amy Seimetz) and son (Noah Jupe), with the fingers of all involved closer to pressing triggers than was ever part of the plan.
The plot, from Ed Solomon’s Elmore Leonard-ish screenplay, unfolds with suave ease, but it’s the way Soderbergh aces the details, such as the skull-like cloth masks the trio wear during this home invasion, that elevates it in style terms. Seimetz and the reliable Jupe could hardly play these scenes better than they do, as nervy victims of an escalating mess, while Culkin drives Harbour to his office to improvise a sweating, one-man heist any which way he can.
David Holmes’s twanging score is like urban Morricone: it keeps the clock mournfully ticking. Soderbergh buys time to keep layering in characterisation, shot by shot. As reluctant partners, Curt and Ronald get off to a rocky start which settles, at best, into a wary groove. Curt is the first to cotton onto a set-up, during a kitchen stand-off with an unanswered phone shredding everyone’s nerves.
Perhaps we’ve seen del Toro play too many enigmatic mafiosi for his character to seem entirely fresh, but Cheadle does his best work in years as this other little guy, fuming to be used as fodder and craftily turning the tables. He handily atones here for that excruciating Cockney accent in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy.
The film has something different from the crackerjack noir swagger a younger director might have brought. Decades since his Out of Sight prime, Soderbergh invests the film with a deluxe sense of fatigue. It’s in Cheadle’s greying hair and rueful self-knowledge; in the fusty despair of Harbour’s character; and that sour squint of Jon Hamm’s as a suspicious cop.
A major A-list star – if you’ve followed Soderbergh’s work over the years, you’ll have several clues who – has an uncredited late cameo as a boardroom bigwig much taken by his own wealth.
“It’s like a lizard’s tail... I work, it grows. I sleep, it grows.” The speech is a gift to him, just as the whole film feels mainly like a gift to Soderbergh’s cast: Julia Fox, too, as the conniving trophy wife of Ray Liotta’s rotten Mob boss, and the great Bill Duke never taking off his shades as a lugubrious kingpin.
The story hinges on two footnotes, about a real-life corporate conspiracy to block environmental reform, and the razing of homes in Detroit’s black neighbourhoods. But Soderbergh isn’t packaging this up for anyone’s moral good, so much as reminding us that whatever cinema did to disillusion him a decade ago, his connoisseurial flair with actors is nowhere close to diminishing.