The
Limey
Rated
R
Opens Friday, Oct. 15
It's been 10 years since writer-director Steven Soderbergh
single-handedly changed the meaning of the term "independent
cinema." His stunning debut, sex, lies and videotape,
earned the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and, more
importantly, shook the Sundance Film Festival. The once-quiet
festival, where cinephiles came to watch movies that Hollywood
wouldn't touch, suddenly became the battleground for an infamous
bidding war. Soderbergh entered the festival an unknown and
emerged, 10 days later, as America's most promising new director.
Both Sundance and independent cinema changed: The former was
transformed into a glitzy launching pad for the latter, and
both became more commercialized with each passing year.
And Soderbergh? While his film may have been the catalyst
for the Hollywoodization of independent film, the writer-director
simply continued making intelligent, modest movies outside
of the system. From the coming-of-age drama King of the
Hill to the neo-noir The Underneath to the playfully
surreal Schizopolis, Soderbergh has never been bound
by genre. "As long as a film is character-based and performance-driven,
then I'm comfortable, no matter what the genre," he said
during a recent telephone interview.
Last year, Soderbergh finally released his first studio
picture, Out of Sight, a crime-romance based on Elmore
Leonard's novel. True to form, the movie was more of a subtle
character study than a crime picture. Though it was one
of the best films of 1998, audiences, perhaps miffed by
the film's unconventional narrative, missed the point, and
Out of Sight did only reasonably well at the box
office. Soderbergh is now back with his follow-up, The
Limey, a film that once again has the director working
outside of the studio system. Soderbergh says, however,
that this wasn't an intentional move to regain independent
status.
"I wanted to go to work immediately [after Out of Sight],"
he says. "I felt good and wanted to continue right away,
and knowing how slow the studios move, I thought the best
way to do this was to go with an independent. We met with
Artisan [Entertainment] in June 1998, and we delivered the
movie, finished, in March 1999." Though much smaller, The
Limey is a revenge story firmly rooted in the crime
genre and feels like a natural extension of concepts and
tones Soderbergh explored in Out of Sight. Terence
Stamp stars as Wilson, a just-released ex-con who comes
to L.A. to investigate the death of his daughter. Though
a car accident is the official cause of death, Wilson believes
she was murdered. Soon, through numerous ass kickings, he
learns of her relationship with a mysterious millionaire
and '60s record producer named Valentine (Peter Fonda) and
plots revenge.
Soderbergh says the film grew out of a feeling of dissatisfaction.
"[After Out of Sight], there were still some ideas
about narrative that I had in mind that I didn't get to
try," he adds. "I was searching for something that I could
experiment with, and I suddenly remembered The Limey,
a script [screenwriter] Lem Dobbs and I discussed making
after King of the Hill. I was thinking about films
like Point Blank and felt that this was something
that would be really well suited to the kind of experimentation
I'd been contemplating."
Soderbergh has called The Limey "a very simple revenge
film with a lot of '60s baggage," but he's being too modest.
Inside this "simple" story, there's a lot going on. Within
the first five minutes of the film, Soderbergh sets the
story's events within Wilson's jumbled, disturbed point
of view. Jump cuts, flashbacks and flash-forwards are all
used to fracture the story line. Though Wilson is a man
who appears focused and completely in control to those around
him, Soderbergh's chaotic visual style indicates otherwise.
In reality, Wilson is an outsider, a relic of the past who's
isolated by his dated English slang vocabulary. Often alienated
by himself within the frame, Wilson is a man who has imploded
psychologically, and within this psychosis, The Limey's
fragmented narrative feels justified. It also works seamlessly.
Despite its risky, non-linear nature, the story never loses
us; it's complicated but never confusing.
One of the joys of experiencing a Soderbergh film lies
in watching a natural filmmaker who completely understands
the medium's endless capability to express meaning through
style, editing, composition or music. So many filmmakers
overuse these elements, often as gimmicks or distraction,
yet rarely give them any meaning. "Style must be organic,"
Soderbergh says. Out of Sight, which the director
calls his "'70s film," uses a variety of techniques appropriately
suited to that era, including a number of freeze frames.
This device isn't merely a flashy homage, however. On one
level, the film--and the relationship between George Clooney
and Jennifer Lopez--is about freezing time, and capturing
a moment, if only for an instant. Freeze frames are a natural
extension of this idea.
Likewise, The Limey is about men consumed, damaged
and defined by events and actions from their past. The disjointed
visual style not only characterizes Wilson's mental state
but also suggests a fractured perception of time and memory.
The past and the present are uninterrupted in these characters'
minds. The Limey becomes an authentic representation
of how humans perceive time.
To bolster this idea of the past bleeding into the present,
Soderbergh came up with a unique storytelling device for
the flashback sequences. He and Webb wrote The Limey
specifically with Terence Stamp in mind to play Wilson.
Stamp is best known as a '60s actor, and Soderbergh thought
it'd be appropriate to insert early footage from another
film to use as the flashback sequences. "Since it's a film
about the past, and we were casting Terence partially because
he was famous then, and there's this idea that [like Wilson]
he'd been away, I felt that old footage would add another
layer of meaning to the film," he says. "The day after I
mentioned this to Lem, he sent me a fax, saying, 'It's Poor
Cow,' the Ken Loach movie, which I'd never seen."
Poor Cow was Loach's feature-length debut, in which
Stamp played a petty thief, also named Wilson, torn between
his duties as husband and father and a life of crime. Acquiring
the rights to the footage took six difficult months, but
Soderbergh believes this may be a cinematic first. "I don't
think anybody's actually used footage from another film,
using the same actor playing the same part as an actual
plot device," he says. "The only other thing like it that
I know of is the montage at the beginning of The Shootist."
On the assured strength of Out of Sight and The
Limey, it feels as if Soderbergh is peaking creatively.
He says that his lack of a box-office hit doesn't really
bother him; he focuses on the picture itself, not the response
it receives. "Ten years ago, if you described to me the
eight films that I made, I'd have said, 'Yeah, that's a
pretty eclectic group,'" he says. "For better or worse,
I've been allowed to make them the way I saw fit, and that's
a real luxury."
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Willamette Week | originally
published October 13,
1999
|
