Soderbergh has always been an intriguing director. Sometimes you want to praise him, sometimes you want to throttle him. Whilst he birthed the cool American indie scene in 1989 with Sex Lies and Videotape (praise), flirted with noir in 1995 with The Underneath (praise), made an unnecessary self referential arty mess in 1996 with Schitzopolis (throttle) it wasn’t until 1998 with the George Clooney Jennifer Lopez vehicle Out Of Sight (praise) that people began to take notice again and the Oscars started flowing. Bubble comes on the back of 2004′s Oceans 12 (that’s a throttle in case you hadn’t guessed) and couldn’t be more different than its manipulative bloated idea starved predecessor. There’s no star power, the budget is tiny and the script and filmmaking style slight. It’s somewhat of an experiment in process. A loose script was written before Soderbergh and his band of merry filmmakers trotted off to a small midwestern town and recruited real people to play characters like themselves, infusing their own life stories into the narrative. The dialogue is naturalistic, possible partly improvised, and there’s a certain grace these characters bring to their portrayals that is refreshingly free of ego or self consciousness. You have never seen acting like this. It feels free from the artifice of film, like we’re finally not being manipulated. It’s slow, gentle and very powerful.
Extra Features:
There’s a directors commentary, a Soderbergh interview, an alternate ending and deleted scenes, yet the real bonus is the original interviews of the cast talking about intimate details of their real life, a great making of doco detailing the difficulty the actors faced acting for the first time, also a cast commentary.
Bob Baker Fish
*
