I can't think of a director who fights boredom as
transparently as Steven Soderbergh. Since he showed up on the scene with his
indie sensation Sex, Lies and Videotape,
Soderbergh has made a career out of following whims. After entering the Oscar
discussion in a big way in 2000, directing 2 of the 5 Best Picture nominees (Erin
Brockovich and Traffic), he humors humself with the deliriously
slick and fun Ocean's Eleven. He returned to the Ocean's
franchise whenever he got bored for two more movies and last year copied
himself with Logan Lucky.
He's made an experimental microbudget drama (2005's Bubble) with no-name
actors when he could've cast any A-lister for any project. He reamed the
cerebral Tarkovsky film Solaris in 2002, even though it was doomed to
disappoint fans and confuse everyone else. After the Ocean's movies, he
opted to make a two part epic about Che Guevara. After that, he took on the
challenge of getting a good performance out of a pron star in The Girlfriend
Experience. He's gone with silly character pieces (The Informant!)
or ensemble thrillers (Contagion). He's built a movie around an MMA
fighter (Haywire). There's his thoughtful look at male strippers in
Magic Mike, a really fun and
twisty thriller in Side Effects, and an
exaggerated biopic that screened at the Cannes film festival (Behind the Candelabra).
And after nearly every film, he's threatened to retire from filmmaking so he
can go paint or something. His most emphatic retirement assertion around 2013
ended with him moving to TV for a couple years by 2014. You can never predict
his next move, because I honestly don't believe he's that calculating. I
believe he thinks "what would be fun today?"
Unsane makes
a lot more sense when approached like that. Because what is Unsane? It's
a somewhere generic thriller shot entirely on an iPhone, just because. I have
to assume the bulk of the budget went to paying the cast, because it's a simple
enough movie in terms of production design and locations.
The cast is pretty good. In the last year, I've gone
from "Claire Foy is pretty good in The Crown" to "I want
Claire Foy in all things I watch and maybe to marry me if she's not too
busy". So, you can guess that I liked her performance, even if I wasn't
crazy about her accent work. This is very different from anything else I've
seen her in. Juno Temple on the other hand, is working in very familiar
territory. I like that there's a crazy, British Brie Larson that filmmakers can
reliably plug into any movie. Jay Pharaoh does well not playing for laughs too.
Unsane
didn't turn out to be the mind-fuck I thought it would be. It starts off that
way, then moves into pretty traditional territory by the end. What frustrated
me the most though was how plot-driven it was. Repeatedly, the movie relies on
Claire Foy acting very foolishly in order to keep things going. I really hate
that kind of storytelling. It's somewhat excused because it plays into Foy's
mind being unreliable. But, once that's sorted out by the end, it makes some of
the earlier decisions less excusable.
I get the feeling that Soderbergh* read a news
article one day about how mental rehabilitation centers can hold people against
their will until their insurance runs out and thought "that could make a
fun movie, but I better add a stalker too, just for fun." I guess there's
worse reasons to make a movie. And, while Unsane turns out to be pretty
familiar, like most things Soderbergh makes, it's zippy and fun.
*I know that the movie is credited to real people,
but I don't trust any credits in a Soderbergh movie. He regularly makes up
names for his credits.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment