KEEP 'EM GUESSING
No Sudden Move a return to `type' for eclectic Hollywood filmmaker Steven Soderbergh
No Sudden Move Crave
More than with most directors, we really don't know what Steven Soderbergh is going to do next. Looking back just a few years, he made the psychological horror Unsane with Claire Foy; the basketball sports drama High Flying Bird; and then The Laundromat, a dark comedy based on the data leak known as the Panama Papers.
He followed that up with Let Them All Talk, a chatty comedy with a killer cast — Candice Bergen, Dianne Wiest, Meryl Streep — that was filmed aboard the Queen Mary 2 the summer before the pandemic.
And now comes No Sudden Move (from HBO Max, streaming in Canada on Crave), the nearest thing to a “type” this director has — an ensemble crime thriller, set in 1954 Detroit.
Benicio Del Toro is just one of the sprawling cast of the film, alongside Don Cheadle, David Harbour, Jon Hamm, Amy Seimetz, Bill Duke, Brendan Fraser, Kieran Culkin, Ray Liotta, Craig Grant (in his final film role) and more.
“Compare this movie to Let Them All Talk,” Del Toro says of the film. “These are two different genres ... and I really enjoyed that film as well. I mean, it's amazing how he can go from one world to the next ... This crime thriller, it's very different from that other movie. That is more existentialist, intellectual, more in the Woody Allen world. And he just jumps from one to the other.”
Del Toro has worked with Soderbergh before, in 2000's Traffic and 2008's Che. “I think he's just getting better,” he says.
“He's also got better with the `toys,' with the camera and all that stuff. I guess practice makes perfect.”
Cheadle agrees. “He had a period package of lenses from that era and ... there's a lot of vignetting around the edges of the shot. He picked really specific angles to take advantage of that.”
So when I tell him that some of the wide shots in No Sudden Move look like they were filmed through a funhouse mirror, he nods. “That's not an optical illusion. You're seeing a very intentional approach. So the visual aspect of the movie also sets you in a time and place. And it's not something he had to do. He could have done it with modern lenses and it would have felt different. (This) takes the film to another level for sure.”
This kind of experimentation is nothing new for Soderbergh. His 2006 Second World War film The
Good German was also shot with period equipment and lenses, as was Unsane, sort of. Soderbergh used an iphone 7 for all the footage in that one.
“He's shown that he can really take on a lot of different genres and be exceptional at all of them,” says Cheadle. “He's definitely a cinephile and can quote all different kinds of movies. During the prep for this, he was sending me different movies to check out, very obscure movies from the '50s and '40s, and a Harry Belafonte movie. Really interesting stuff.”
Cheadle is clearly familiar with and also in awe of Soderbergh's film knowledge, having worked with him on Out of Sight, Traffic and three Ocean's movies. “It's cool to have somebody like Steven whose brain is just this repository for all of these great movies and quotes,” he says.
“And he's very proud of stealing stuff! He's like, yeah, I'm gonna take that from that, and take from that.” He laughs at the memory. “He was the first person, him and PTA, where I was like, `Oh you just steal shamelessly?' I love it.” (Cheadle was in Boogie Nights, the 1997 film from Paul Thomas Anderson.)
No Sudden Move was shot in Detroit during the height of the city's second pandemic wave last autumn, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any sense of that in the finished product. “There was a lot of trust that we had to extend,” says Cheadle. “Being on a set for the first time in many months after the pandemic hit, and very much in the middle of it.”
One pivotal scene was shot in a huge dining hall in the Detroit Club, a private social club constructed in 1891 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. It features a cameo appearance — the trailer doesn't spoil who it is, so I won't either — and a speech that plays like a combination pep talk, confession and capitalist tirade. It's electric.
“We were in that room two days,” Del Toro recalls. “Any other movie we'd have been in that room for a week. I felt like I was doing Ocean's Eleven!” When he wasn't acting, he says he just sat back and watched the magic happen.
Cheadle, who's directed some TV episodes and the 2015 Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead, chimes in. “I would have shot-listed everything, it would have been super mapped out, but (Soderbergh) was able to come in that room and kind of let Benicio and I figure out how to move around that gigantic conference table and make that not be an impediment to the scene but an addition to the scene.”
No Sudden Move is Soderbergh's 31st feature, but the 58-year-old director, who retired (sort of, not really) in 2012 isn't slowing down.
“When I did Traffic with Steven, he was very fast — one take, two takes,” says Del Toro. “I think he's got faster. I think he's got sharper in what he wants. But he's still quite flexible when working with actors. He's got this great balance between being very efficient and very quick and at the same time being very flexible to listen to and include other ideas from not only the actors but also the people around him.”
Cheadle agrees, saying Soderbergh's characters always have a sense of moral complexity.
“They're not all good and they're not all bad,” he says. “He creates these three-dimensional characters and interesting stories. Liars and truth tellers, he just throws them all in the mix and kind of has them scrum it out.
“But there is a moral centre to this story, “Cheadle says, and he is able “to smuggle in these ideas about race and community and corporations and corporate greed versus personal greed, and the police. He does a very good job of sticking all those things in there in a subliminal way that doesn't get in the way of the bigger narrative, and the thriller aspect.”
At the end of the day, No Sudden Move is, like so much of what Soderbergh does — solid entertainment.