The big time

Rating: Null/10 (8 December 2001)

Can it really be that in his heart of hearts, Steven Soderbergh is not
Jean-Luc Godard, and not Martin Scorsese, and not even Don
Siegel, but...Sydney Pollack? In the vein of Scorsese's AFTER
HOURS, the OCEAN'S ELEVEN remake is a clear attempt by the
director to take his skills-set to a new level by exercising it on
material that "has nothing to say;" but where Scorsese's exercises
in pure style (like AFTER HOURS and CAPE FEAR) are triumphs of
sheer filmmaking verve over content, ELEVEN smacks of mere
yeoman professionalism (at least, until its visually sumptuous last
third).
What makes Soderbergh different from the rest? Why does his
version of this routine, Elmore Leonard-y guys-on-a-heist picture
feel richer, more human, more cinematic, more alive than the most
recent 25 to have come before it? I think it is that Soderbergh
understands disparate things, like a) the handling of a 35 camera
and b) the handling of the chairman of Warner Bros. and c) the
handling of the biggest movie stars on the planet, that no one else
has on their resume. The shaker-and-baker people, the Barry
Levinsons and the Joel Schumachers, don't have Soderbergh's
daring, his knowledge of movies, his love of the perfeect image;
the other guys, the art guys, don't have Soderbergh's conciliatory
make-everybody-feel-good tactics. Even Spielberg (a far superior
director) doesn't have a toe in both worlds the way Soderbergh
does.
But something finally makes one bridle against this. Though some
of the filmmaking in the latter half of OCEAN'S is spectacular, and
the tight, worked-out quality of Ted Griffin's script is impressive,
one wearies of Soderbergh's endless titrations of brainy-yet-slick
or slick-yet-brainy. He has proven that he can do the Hollywood
movie nonpareil. Now it's time for him to do SCHIZOPOLIS
2--before he winds up like the Elliott Gould character, a
cigar-chomping hackmo reduced to eating a meagre green salad
with vinaigrette in the back yard of a mansion the size of the Ritz.