If the cliche “one for them, one for me” has a face, it’s Steven Soderbergh. Since “retiring” for a year in the late-2000s, Soderbergh has gone from middle of the road mid budget studio movies like Logan Lucky, Magic Mike, Contagion, and The Laundromat to less expensive formal experiments in genre like Unsane, No Sudden Move, High Flying Bird, and Presence. That’s a limited selection; if the word “prolific” calls anyone to mind, it’s again Soderbergh, but at this point, that’s about all that come to mind when one thinks of the 62-year-old director. The first breakthrough cinema success of Generation X, Soderbergh preceded Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, and many others by a few years with his sex, lies & videotape, 1989 Palme d’Or winner and a key Miramax success. Harvey Weinstein ascended, and soon found a Mickey Mouse in the form of Tarantino, while Soderbergh drifted with flop after flop after flop.
Kafka, King of the Hill, The Underneath: the first is unavailable on home video, the second has nothing to do with Mike Judge’s television series, and the third is a remake of Criss Cross, an excellent 1949 noir starring Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo, and Dan Duryea. By the mid-1990s, Soderbergh had nothing, and, like so many others, dug into a ditch with nothing to lose, he made one of his best movies: Schizopolis. Brilliant, but still not a hit. And then he stood in line for Out of Sight, and after 12 other directors turned it down, he got to make his comeback and help George Clooney achieve superstardom. “We were both viewed as having potential that was not yet realized,” he recently told Men’s Health.
Clooney and Soderbergh were steady presences in multiplexes through the 2000s and 2010s, but their age has come and gone. Soderbergh got lost in streaming for a few years, first with Netflix and then with HBO…Max, and while Clooney had an inexplicable hit with Julia Roberts a couple of years ago in Ticket to Paradise (a fake movie if there ever was one), he’s essentially but an okay actor. So what’s the problem? He wants the weight of someone who can write an op-ed in The New York Times and have it change the direction of an election. I don’t think Clooney’s plea for Joe Biden to drop out affected Biden’s decision at all, it was just another obvious move by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi—but that’s beside the point, like Clooney. He was heckled on Broadway while trying to act shortly before and after the election last fall, and I’m sure he’ll incorporate the experience into some future film or play. Or not, too embarrassing, but it’s good material: what happens when an Adonis is washed out? There are plenty of movies about women down and out in Hollywood: Mulholland Drive, Sunset Boulevard, The Star, The Killing of Sister George.
George Clooney doesn’t appear in Black Bag, but he should’ve over Michael Fassbender, who I’ve never responded to and don’t particularly like as an actor. He drags down everything he appears in, an actor with a remarkable LACK of screen presence. Cate Blanchett plays his wife, and she’s great, but phoning it in here. Not much to work with from David Koepp’s script, one that doesn’t take off until a deadly dinner at the end, and even that isn’t particularly exciting or even alive. Soderbergh’s experiment films, like this year’s Presence, are flashy and work within their insignificance, often exceeding it; his bigger films (Black Bag cost $50 million) are straight down the middle, nothing memorable, nothing particularly compelling or vaguely interesting. I usually like Soderbergh’s cinematography, but here, everyone is poorly under-lit, and there’s no rhythm or strategy to the coverage or the cutting.
Salad for dinner—at least his experiments are closer to Big Macs. A healthy American cinema can’t survive on Soderbergh’s alternations alone; he was merely one fish in a much bigger pond 20 years ago. Now, as one of the last filmmakers of his generation standing (Sean Baker is a recent addition to the Gen X canon; shockingly, he’s older than Harmony Korine), Soderbergh has no place in the multiplexes he maintained for so long. When was the last time he broke above baseline? Magic Mike? The Contagion (2011) revival during the first weeks of the global coronavirus pandemic? I’m not sure he’s had a smash, an iconic hit, since directing Traffic, Erin Brockovich, and Ocean’s Eleven in a row. Just like at the beginning of his career, Soderbergh entered the millennium with a bang, and while he’s certainly not running out of juice, his “one for them, one for me” ping-pong gimmick has run its course. He needs to work with a cinematographer again, but he won’t, and that’s why there’s a ceiling on the kind of movie he gets to make. He’s approaching wash-out on his own island.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @monicaquibbits
