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Full Frontalis such a triumph of style that you may
overlook its substance. This is Steven Soderbergh’s
12th movie, in about as many years, and it is appropriate
that this movie would issue from Miramax, the house that Soderbergh
built with sex, lies, and videotape in 1989. His has
been a career to be proud of. His seeming ease with several
film genres evokes the breadth of interests that used to define
a truly educated person.
Soderbergh has spoken of Full Frontal as the lovechild
of sex, lies, and it’s not hard to see what it inherited.
There’s sex, and there are lies, but most expecially, there’s
videotape. A concentration on having us, the theater audience,
watch the characters in Full Frontal as they either
create movies or plays for others to watch, or watch others
perform in them, produces that falling-down-the-rabbit-hole
feeling. This is a veritable Saragossa Manuscript of
cascading, and ultimately related, stories.
Because the dots of those narrative relationships aren’t
fully connected in the beginning of the movie, it would be
heartless to reveal much of the plot. But then again, there
isn’t actually a lot of plot to spoil. Twenty-four hours in
the lives of a bunch of characters who all live in L.A. and
who are all invited to movie producer Gus Delario’s 40th birthday
party. What there is a lot of, is characters. Characters who
are fun to watch, being played by actors who make nary a misstep.
What’s the last movie you saw where you could say that?
One explanation for the uniformly exceptional performances
may be the level of responsibility Soderbergh expected from
each of his stars. Much has been made of the no-kid-gloves
treatment he told the actors to expect during the roughly
three-week shoot. There were no limos, no trailers, and no
craft services, plus they bore total responsibility for their
“look,” doing their own hair, wardrobe, and makeup. (Note
to JR: How right you were to choose acting.) I have to believe
that making them responsible for so much of their characters
allowed the actors to create characters they could inhabit
so well.
Catherine Keener’s perfectly realized (yet again)
rage-fueled corporate bitch, Lee, is a mass of contradictions.
It’s interesting that she’s married to Carl, whom David
Hyde Pierce plays as a man with a very clear sense of
who he is. (I like “Frazier” as well as the next person, but
it’s a shame that it’s Hyde Pierce’s claim to fame. Watch
some of his film work. The man has a mortal lock on thoughtful,
melancholy duty.) Blair Underwood and Julia Roberts
are actors in a movie about an interview between a
journalist and a movie actor who fall in love. Underwood is
actually a three-fer here, as the actor who plays an actor
playing an actor in Delario’s movie, Rendezvous. Enrico
Colantoni is apprehensive over the opening of his play,
The Sound And The Fuhrer, with Nicky Katt in
the title role, and his imminent weekend getaway with a woman
he met over the Internet. Masseuse Linda (McCormack)
is apprehensive about the fancy Hollywood party her sister
Lee is bringing her to and her Internet date. It’s a tense
crowd, and none more so than deceptively laid-back Gus Delario
(Duchovny), who just wants a release.
The opening of the movie gives you no idea of where you’re
headed but an excellent idea of how you’ll get there—surfing
on a wave of popular culture references. The first two minutes
alone were loaded with so many film in-jokes my head was spinning,
and it didn’t let up a whole lot. Too bad, because it causes
the movie to occasionally devolve into the sort of spot-what-he’s-referencing
game snarky-smart film students sometimes play. The pop-cult
overload is there in cameo casting—Look! Is that the famous
author or a look-alike? Look! A noted young director and the
star of two of his ultra-popular movies! Look! A Miramax honcho!
It’s there in the story, where character traits and even of
plot lines from “The X-Files” are lifted wholesale. It’s there
as reality TV meets the movies, when Roberts’ Francesca meets
a charming and unexpected lighting guy from the crew.
As long as there are actors and movie fans, there’ll be circular
movies about the industry. Many of these movie-movies are
some of the finest work Hollywood has made (All About Eve,
A Star Is Born, and the more recent State And Main
come to mind). Lately, however, there’s been an accelerating
trend toward pop-culture cannibalism. Sure, it’s fun on our
end to recognize the origins of and inspirations for stuff
in a TV show or movie. And on the writer/director end, it’s
probably even a little stroke to the audience to show them
that you’re a regular guy who watches “COPS” just like they
do. But it’s a trend that can only lead to the sort of ugly
scenario where that mythological beast devours its own tail.
And in Full Frontal, with its issues of the mind-blowing
expectations we place on love and our increasing reliance
on voyeurism and gamesmanship as entertainment, it’s an unwelcome
distraction.
So am I bitching because I didn’t like it? Nope. I liked
it fine. I felt oh-so-clever and worthy as the next person,
when the writer and the director borrowed from stuff that
I, too, consume, on the screen. And I left the theater with
the same knowing smile as the rest of the critics I attended
with. I just figured Mr. Soderbergh would’ve gotten some playfulness
out of his system with Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s
Eleven. Not that there’s anything wrong with being playful,
especially after the emotional heft of movies like Traffic
and Kafka and my personal fave, King Of The
Hill. All this pop-cult fingerpainting just seems like
the work of a talent who’s aging backward. Yeah, like Mork
and Mindy’s baby.
Notes: The soundtrack may be worth buying just to hear Blair
Underwood’s performance of the rap, “Hue-Man’s Love Call,”
written by D-Knowledge.
—Roxanne Bogucka
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out
of 5
While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
