‘HIGH FLYING BIRD’ SOARS
ANDRÉ HOLLAND STARS IN ‘HIGH FLYING BIRD,’ WITH DIRECTION BY STEVEN SODERBERGH.
You don’t need to know basketball or its jargon to appreciate “High Flying Bird,” a sports drama out Friday on Netflix.
The director and cinematographer is Steven Soderbergh, who has recently returned with manic energy after a blessedly brief 2012 retirement. “High Flying Bird” continues his stream of crafting the tightest, snappiest pieces of movie work in recent memory — “Logan Lucky” and “Unsane,” to name just two.
Howard Hawks once said a movie is three good scenes and no bad ones, and “High Flying Bird” more than qualifies. Its Hawksian lack of flat foot is helped in no small sum to a fast-talking script by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the playwright who won an Oscar with Barry Jenkins for the “Moonlight” screenplay.
In his follow-up, McCraney’s protagonists talk huge bales as they ride out an NBA lockout and try to come out on top, in the hopes that the black players will gain more respect, more rights and the pay that they’re due.
The main relationship blows hot and cold between a savvy agent (André Holland) and his newest, biggest client (Melvin Gregg), the No. 1 draft pick. It’s Holland’s job, as well as his age-old mentor (Bill Duke — a well-worn, sturdy presence whose deeply sunken eyes light up any room he’s in), to softintroduce Gregg to the dog-eatdog world of modern basketball.
It’s no accident that, except for a crucial pickup game recorded by teenagers’ iPhones, we never actually see anybody play ball. Soderbergh and McCraney are more interested in the politics behind NBA games, the talky behind-the-scenes business that doesn’t show up on instant replay. The incessant chatter may bring to mind Aaron Sorkin, but McCraney is miles away from the Sorkin tendency to navel-gaze and admire its own chewy turns of phrase. McCraney’s dialogue is unobtrusive, hard and stupendous to keep up with — more than a match for Soderbergh’s gonzo film style.
Soderbergh is two for two in solidly shot movies on an iPhone (his first was the Claire Foy horror film “Unsane”). Like Sean Baker’s “Tangerine” (still the summit of what wonders one can do, cinematically, with the iPhone), much of the visual pleasure in Soderbergh’s film comes from its distinct iPhone look, as the players struggle to gain control of a subtly warped space, a visual corollary for the systems they’re bitterly enmeshed in.
The iPhone bulge and stretch remind one of CinemaScope, but the superhuman grace of studio cameras has been replaced by the human-scaled, sleek, static pulse of the smartphone. Now, a conversation seems to be filmed as if there were no camera the actors have to stare past, while filmmakers can go into the streets and capture bustling life with greater stealth.
Soderbergh has a Richard Lester-like agility of mind that is well-adapted to this stylistic future in the way movies look. He rejects the precious adoration of celluloid by nostalgic traditionalists like Christopher Nolan. (During a Q&A for the film’s premiere at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival, Soderbergh was asked by Nolan when he would come back from “the dark side” and start shooting on celluloid again. Soderbergh’s response: “When (Nolan) starts writing scripts in pencil.”)
For the kind of film “High Flying Bird” wants to be — a pop lesson about the need for disruption and revolt, an in-and-out operation without bumps or mess, a study of the dramatic mental and physical shifts in modern scale brought about by the smartphone — iPhones get the job done.