‘High Flying Bird’ is the Start of a Great Movie
When Steven Soderbergh said a few years back that he was done with moviemaking, he should have been more specific. What he apparently meant was that after a few years of playing around in theater and TV — the underappreciated series The Knick — he would be fine making movies again, but they just wouldn’t be big studio productions. Since that portends one of the great American directors being let loose to work at a fast pace with minimal equipment and fast distribution (thank you, Netflix), this is good news. But if it means a lot more movies like High Flying Bird, then the return from cinematic retirement will not deserve so much celebration.
A finely written napkin-sketch of a movie that sits somewhere between the 2011 NBA lockout and Harry Edwards’ book The Revolt of the Black Athlete, High Flying Bird feints at revolt without ever putting one in the chamber. Set during a fictional lockout, it tracks the efforts of Ray (Andre Holland, who also produced), a fast-talking and cynical anti-Jerry Maguire of an agent who is trying to keep his star client, number 1 draft pick Erick (Melvin Gregg), from going wobbly and his own career from vaporizing.
At the same time, the lockout has Ray thinking. As the players fret and fear, Ray wonders about the system that they have all been buying into, in which mostly white billionaires co-opt the likeness and earnings of a largely black class of players. Then Spence (Bill Duke, with his righteous soft scowl of a voice), a wizened friend who coaches schoolkids and runs a charity tournament, ponders aloud about how the NBA co-opted the sport decades before and managed to reap so many of the rewards for themselves: “They invented a game on top of a game.” While this formulation spells it out for the audience, from Ray’s canny look and sneaky strategizing, it’s clear he has been planning to bust up that game on top of a game for some time. “We have something they can’t bottle up,” he says during one of the many mini speeches that Holland delivers with a cool, spitting fury.
Fury, though, is one of the elements that the movie is missing. This isn’t a surprise, as emotion has never exactly been Soderbergh’s strong suit. Even the combat scenes in Che had a dispassionate feel to them, as though being viewed from a great distance. With High Flying Bird, it is not as though the characters fail to understand the import of what Ray is trying to accomplish, it’s that by the time they catch up with what he is up to the movie is over.
Both dragged out and truncated, the movie has many of the pacing issues that afflict many of Soderbergh’s lesser efforts. It’s all well and good that he shot the thing in a couple weeks on some iPhones. (Though the overuse of the fish-eye lens gives a queasy, claustrophobic feel to all these confrontational moments in glassed-in Midtown offices.) But the screenplay by Moonlight’s Tarell Alvin McCraney, is a grab-bag of fascinating riffs and hot-tempered verbal jousting scenes that never gets threaded together into a story worth of its revolutionary conceit of the athletes tossing off the league’s mantle and just playing one game to the next, like boxing: “But without the brain damage” one character quips.
Usually, when Steven Soderbergh knocks out one of these smaller guerrilla projects, whether or not they work doesn’t matter that much. Full Frontal, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experiment, none of these were going to change the face of cinema. But with High Flying Bird, he’s confronting some crucial tenets of social justice. So while it makes sense that Soderbergh doesn’t want to employ the glitzy hijinks mood of his heist movies — even though that’s essentially what all of Ray’s muddily presented machinations add up to here — essentially burying the lead until the very last shot feels unproductive at least.
In a sense, that’s the point. If we had just watched a movie where the barricades had been stormed, the unreality of that moment — as thrilling as it would be, in an alternative historical, climax of Inglorious Basterds way — could register as cheap redemptive fantasy “You were meant for more than this,” Ray tells Erick. Unfortunately, High Flying Bird isn’t able to live up to that promise any more than Ray is.
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Title: High Flying Bird
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Tarell Alvin McCraney
Starring: Andre Holland, Zazie Beetz, Melvin Gregg, Bill Duke, Sonja Sohn, Kyle MacLachlan, Jeryl Prescott, Justin Hurtt-Dunkley, Zachary Quinto
Studio: Netflix
Year of release: 2019
Rating: NR
Official site
