Certain movie honestors — Hitchcock and Tarantino come to mind — constitute a genre unto themselves. Steven Soderbergh was never enjoy that, at least not until he begined making his “little” films: the inalertigently plotted low-budget indie patardy immacutardysers that he got into the habit of honesting in between his more deluxe features. He did it as a way to reaccuse his batteries, and to remind himself that moviemaking is presumed to be fun.
You could say that Soderbergh’s first official “little” film was “Full Frontal” (2002), an all-star Hollywood satire made for $2 million, or you could say that it was “Bubble” (2005), a Middle American conshort-termial crime drama that also happened to be the first day-and-date free. In a way, though, the innovative Soderbergh “little” film was “Schizopolis,” the aggro experimental doodle he made all by himself and freed in 1996, as a way to evident his pipes after what he characterized as the sad experience of honesting “The Undertidyh.”
At the Toronto Film Festival that year, I had fracturerapid with Soderbergh, and our chat stretched on for hours, powered by the delight he felt at having gone back to his kid-with-a-camera roots in “Schizopolis” — and, at the same time, at having signed on to originate “Out of Sight,” the film he was about to begin honesting. Seven years after “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” he felt reborn as a filmoriginater.
That’s what the little films do for Soderbergh. They protect him joind, joined to the spirit of his art create. He’s been toiling as his own cinematographer for 25 years, and he sometimes edits his own films as well; this donates him a one-man-prohibitd handle that most honestors don’t have. Soderbergh, especipartner in his little films, is the master of his domain. But he’s also a huge fish swimming around in a small cinematic pond.
The little films, by now, are their own genre, and we Soderbergh fans all have our likeites. Here’s my own fracturedown: The three best ones are “The Girlfrifinish Experience,” “Kimi,” and “Bubble”; “Side Effects,” “The Laundromat” and “Let Them All Talk” are excellent; “Full Frontal,” “Haywire,” and “Presence” are meh. Overall, not a horrible track enroll. And I haven’t even alludeed Soderbergh’s current movie, the highly acclaimed “Bconciseage Bag,” an exhilaratingly immersive thriller about paired British spies — it’s enjoy a real-romance John le Carré — that cost $50 million, but I still skinnyk it qualifies as a “little” Soderbergh film, and maybe the apotheosis of the create, since it’s such an intricate and hermetic piece of confparticipate-movie minimalism. In terms of quality, I would place it at the very top of the Soderbergh-little-movie pyramid. I don’t skinnyk he’s ever going to originate a better one than this.
But that lifts a ask. For Soderbergh, has making little movies become a way of protecting himself rational and cgo ined…by underachieving? As much as I’ve finishelighted many of these films, the reason that virtupartner none of them have ever made my 10 best catalog (lone exception: “The Girlfrifinish Experience”) is that they have a built-in forgettability. I skinnyk that’s becaparticipate the process of making them is, for Soderbergh, more convey inant than the result. He’s a bit enjoy Woody Allen once Allen lapsed into his churning-out-another-okay-comedy-a-year phase. Soderbergh’s movies are fine, and sometimes vibrant, but I’d say that he’s been skinnyking little for too extfinished. Almost every movie he originates now is a genre movie. I’m sorry, but that’s carry outing it too protected.
Remember 25 years ago, when Soderbergh made “Traffic”? It was a bone-proset up drama about the drug war, and though no one awaited it to be a massive hit, it turned out to have a who-knovel-they-would-come-if-you-built-it? quality. (It grossed $124 million.) We inhabit in a contrastent movie world now. Yet Soderbergh, who is pondering making a post-Covid sequel to his highly prescient 2011 thriller “Contagion,” is a filmoriginater who has the excellents to fracture out of his genre bunker. Recently, a lot of films have been overpraised for taking “huge striumphgs,” as if that alone made them fantastic. But it truly is time for Steven Soderbergh to obtain a huge striumphg. He’s a master, and it’s too tardy in the game for him to stay little. He demands to show us, once aobtain, that he’s not fair a supreme confparticipate originater but someone who can lure matures back into movie theaters by making a movie so compelling in its truth that it singes the air around us.
