Steven Soderbergh by Anthony Kaufman

Author:Anthony Kaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2015-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Having Your Way with Hollywood, or the Further Adventures of Steven Soderbergh

Dennis Lim / 2000

From Village Voice, January 9, 2000. Reprinted by permission

Alternately credited and blamed for single-handedly inventing the American independent film as we know it (with a little help from Miramax, Sundance, and the Palme d’Or), Steven Soderbergh spent the nineties distancing himself from sex, lies, and videotape. Or rather, from the catchall icon, deathless tabloid headline, and generational albatross that his precocious first feature soon became. He embarked instead on a quietly prolific career notable for its chameleonic about-turns and willful resistance to anything that might be regarded as repetition. In 2000, with the calm resolve and authority that has bolstered his recent work, Soderbergh once again stared down Hollywood, and this time emerged triumphant.

It’s not just that he had two high-profile studio features in a calendar year (right now there’s comparatively little fuss over Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath and Cast Away), but that they both rank among the five or so most widely lauded Hollywood releases of 2000. The Julia Roberts vehicle-cum-crusading Norma Rae inspirational Erin Brockovich has grossed $125 million domestically (his biggest commercial success to date). Released last week to rapturous reviews, Traffic, an ambitious, tough-minded panorama of the disastrous War on Drugs, has been scooping up critics’ prizes by the armful. It’s likely that both movies will wind up on the Oscar shortlist next month; Soderbergh, for that matter, could be the first filmmaker to battle himself for directing honors since Michael Curtiz was nominated for Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters in 1938.

In more concrete terms, Traffic is Soderbergh’s fourth film in three years, and it caps a prodigious winning streak that began with the neo-noir smolder of 1998’s Elmore Leonard caper Out of Sight, perhaps the sexiest Hollywood movie of the nineties, and continued with the following year’s splintered reverie The Limey, which ingeniously enlisted Terence Stamp’s still-magnificent visage to transfigure a vigilante thriller into a memory-saturated lament. The most gifted and fleet-footed genre deconstructionist of his generation, Soderbergh is also one of the very few American filmmakers working today who sees reinvention as the lifeblood of his craft. After years of apparently perverse career choices, the payoff—it’s now evident—is considerable: Soderbergh straddles Hollywood and the indies with remarkable ease and on his own idiosyncratic terms, not least because his résumé implicitly rebuffs the lazy habits and restrictive conventions of both spheres. In the ultimate irony, this onetime wild card has, for now, reinvented himself as a sure thing, an attractive hire for studios for a host of increasingly obvious reasons: speed and economy, an uncanny track record with career-making performances (his knack for casting is matched by an unfailing generosity with actors), a newfound populism (or at least a newfound ease about his latent populism) merging profitably with his abiding restlessness and longstanding taste for quirk and foible.

Soderbergh assesses his evolution with characteristic bluntness: “I’m no longer a control freak,” he declares. “The implementation of whatever aesthetic I

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