Trailer trashed
‘Logan Lucky’ proves Hollywood still doesn’t get Trumpland
IT has a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s the first feature film directed by proven hitmaker Steven Soderbergh (“Erin Brockovich,” the “Ocean’s 11” series, “Magic Mike”) since 2012. It stars A-listers Channing Tatum and Daniel Craig. In the weeks leading up to its release, Soderbergh enjoyed glowing profiles with The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly. His comeback is a stylish, joyful heist movie aimed at grown-ups, one Soderbergh financed and distributed on his own. His stated hope: This new business model would shake up multiplexes otherwise dominated by superhero franchises.
Yet “Logan Lucky” bombed, debuting with $8.1 million on 3,031 screens last weekend — stomped by “The Hitman’s Bodyguard,” a poorlyreviewed action comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson that nonetheless pulled in $21.6 million on 3,377 screens. Why? One theory: Soderbergh, aware or not, is mocking the dispossessed Americans he thought would flock to his movie.
Credited to an unknown screenwriter named Rebecca Blunt (believed by industry insiders to be Soderbergh himself), the film is set in rural West Virginia and built around a plot to steal millions during the biggest NASCAR race of the year. Tatum plays an unemployed coal miner and single dad; Adam Driver, his brother, a one-armed bartender who lost his limb in Iraq; and Craig a tattooed explosives expert named Joe Bang, whose white-blond hair and piercing blue eyes suggest an Aryan menace.
Craig’s character enlists his two brothers, and here’s where the white-trash southern stereotypes explode: They are unwashed, greasyhaired and speak with thick accents. They play horseshoes with unhooked toilet seats. One has a tattoo misspelled “DANGERUS.” They don’t know the difference between a landline and a cellphone. “Dramastically” is their mispronunciation of “dramatically.” They’re too stupid to pre-read instructions for detonating a home-made explosive.
The caricatures aren’t limited to supporting characters. Tatum wears American-flag boxer briefs. He refers to “the Google.” His sister is a garish beautician with extra-long fingernails, and his daughter an aspiring child beauty-pageant queen. There’s a bit about whether Driver’s prosthetic arm is actually his arm, which, given his character’s tragic circumstances, falls flat.
In these moments, writes Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, “the movie points and snorts. When historians come to tell the tale of the Trumpian epoch, and of confused cultural attitudes toward the heartland, ‘Logan Lucky’ will be part of the evidence.”
Watching the film, it’s clear that Soderbergh isn’t uniformly contemptuous of his characters; in fact, it’s Tatum’s under-educated character who masterminds several inge- nious, complicated plots. But it’s disappointing that Soderbergh couldn’t sustain such tone, something the late, great series “Justified” — set among heroes and villains in the coal-mining towns and hollers of rural Kentucky — mastered over six seasons. And it’s hard to believe that the cosmopolitan Soderbergh, who annually posts an expansive list of everything he’s watched, listened to and read, would be unfamiliar with J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which explores the specific plight of forgotten rural Americans. (That, too, is soon to be a film, produced and directed by Ron Howard.)
“The red-state drag show that Soderbergh convenes here feels not merely unconvincing, but a tiny bit uncomfortable too,” wrote Sean Nelson in The Stranger.
“Logan Lucky,” along with the recent box-office flop “The Glass Castle,” constitute the most current examples of Hollywood’s inability to accurately reflect America’s poor and dispossessed. It feels almost institutional, this deep care given to portrayals of anyone on the margins of physical, racial, sex- or genderbased norms while red-state America — where Soderbergh targeted much of the advertising for “Logan” — remains a one-dimensional joke.
Soderbergh himself is from the south — born in Atlanta, raised in Virginia and Louisiana — and told Vanity Fair that his origins should inure him to exactly this criticism.
“The foundation of comedy is stereotypes,” he said. “That’s where they start. When the Coen Brothers make ‘A Serious Man,’ do they get attacked for indulging in Jewish stereotypes?”
Actually, yes. Upon that film’s release in 2009, The New York Times noted that the Coens have been “accused of engaging in grotesque ethnic stereotypes and even of being anti-Jewish.” Perhaps no matter a filmmaker’s origins, decades spent in the Hollywood bubble inevitably result in this kind of cultural tone-deafness.
Soderbergh shot his heist at an actual NASCAR race, much of it widelens, in saturated color, a grandeur that’s undercut when one character exclaims that hurting NASCAR is like “hurting A-MUUURICA.”
In that moment, it’s hard not to conclude that Soderbergh’s cultural snobbery, however unintentional, is equally painful.