Soderbergh’z Southern Hospitality
Polite & Loud : Atlanta Born, Virginia Raised, Louisiana Ignited
As summer season dissolves into fall fare, Logan Lucky aims to bridge the gap between Oscar-craving showmanship and pure-fun romp. Unpretentious flicks that shine with old-Hollywood polish are sorta Steven Soderbergh’s forte. The Ocean’s Redneckz-take is all too obvious. Logan Lucky trades Danny Ocean’s globe-trotting heists for a trip to Charlotte Motor Speedway, and pins Soderbergh’s heart on its denim sleeves.
Adventurous in his producing endeavors, structuring narratives through memory-leap edits under a pseudonym, and boasting a conspicuous fetish for a frame’s composition, Atlanta-born Soderbergh emerged onto the scene with 1989’s Palme d’Or-winner sex, lies, and videotape. On his personal website you can find educational cinema studies, a boutique referentia shop, and elsewhere he peddles a Bolivian brandy. This is a filmmaker for whom every perspective is an act of creation, for whom character studies populate the frame in relatable shorthand, secondary and tertiary characters holding their aspirations close to their hearts. They’re as liable to derail plot as much as the protagonist. Autobiographical threads recur throughout his filmography: Passionate yearning, an isolated protagonist, dysfunctional families, and now with his most recent outings, messed up functional ones, too.
Among all this yarn (and the dude is prolific), one finds a muted thematic trail, an American, moral maxim: Southern Hospitality. It keeps rust-and-dirt states bound to an embracing set of principles. Keeps moral focus attuned when an environment itself is spiraling out of trajectory, or expanding past the provincial. It weighs equal and opposite reactions, signifies the relation of bodies and objects. We’re all neighbors down south.
Aware of your self-conscious distance, and maintaining it as a part of your habitat, even while hosting strangers at home, sex, lies, and videotape invites you into a domestic affair where dangerous material (herein: taped confessions of adultery and sexual guilt) imposed onto Andie McDowell’s seemingly-demure housewife Ann Bishop Mullany by her guest, James Spader’s Graham Dalton, presents the opportunity for soulful catharsis. Either through taped expression, or something more duplicitous. A coerced confession, perhaps. Baton Rouge glistens hot-white off the costume and production design, even when the characters are together indoors. The probability of grace increases with humility and compassion. For Soderbergh’s characters listening to your heart is a volatile kind of living, and this could be a much longer essay, indeed, if one were to detail his entire filmography’s multilayered portrayals of hollowed out characters striving to once again feel self-possessed. If they ever had felt so before. Soderbergh, cinematically insatiable, went as far as remaking Solaris to articulate this point-of-view, that space between our souls.
In the years immediately following Soderbergh’s supposed-retirement the director expressed himself just the same as his characters : At home, yet estranged. He purportedly was leaving cinema after a string of visceral films — 2012’s Magic Mike, 2013’s psychological pharma-thriller Side Effects, and HBO’s Behind the Candelabra. He would announce his return three years later with Logan Lucky, and Channing Tatum surely helped in reigniting Soderbergh’s analysis of the velocity of desire, our charging, collective dreams. What do you see when you look at yourself? And how about when you look at me? As Soderbergh describes it, Magic Mike is about when “a man finds himself facing a mirror (the character of Adam, who Mike Lane takes under his wing) rather than a window.”
Magic Mike stars Channing Tatum as Mike Lane and is based on the actor’s own experience as a stripper. During its press circuit, Soderbergh was sure to attribute the film to Tatum, as star, co-producer and muse. Part dreamboat, part gig-economy-entrepreneur, Mike is built off strength. Tatum’s physique comes to embody his integrity and resilience. In his vulnerabilities and aspirations we notice a lifetime of longings: For economic stability, For sexual expression, balancing worship with humility, and ultimately, For the party people and friends that keep us going.
Meanwhile, Adam’s sister, Brooke (Cody Horn), a medical assistant with her feet on the ground, provides the film’s forceful voice of practical reason, a character written as subtle as your conscience. Some of the movie’s most splendidly choreographed moments involve Mike and Brooke, just-friends doing their own moral-dance around Adam. Soderbergh (doing his own cinematography under his usual pseudonym, Peter Andrews) goes to great lengths to make The Tatum Stripper Movie much, much more. With the same emotional intelligence that lends his Emotional-Voyeur Debut an urgent energy, asking for necessary exposure. The sum of longing is always introduced as subtext, and pulls focus with the changing of each reel.
For all of its entrepreneurial dimensions (bolstered in Magic Mike XXL:, Mike Lane returns from retirement to roadtrip through Soderbergh’s old haunts) you would be hardpressed to another character-driven franchise with such interactive eye-candy. The frames invite us to Tampa, ATL, and Myrtle Beach, placing you in the crowd, or viewing a hangout through telephoto lens. Then the film asks: Do you want to join in? All it takes is some neighborly sharing. Magic Mike XXL (shot by Soderbergh… err, I mean… Peter Andrews, written by the original’s Reid Carolin, and directed by constant-collaborator, second unit director Gregory Jacobs) is either a road-trip bromance or a couch-surfing trial of labors toward rejuvenated creative expression. The boys can only make it to their explosive “final show” through the hospitality of old friends. As Jada Pinkett Smith’s Rome puts it, ghosts. In one of the film’s funniest sequences, Andie MacDowell plays an uninhibited southern-divorcee: “That’s my daughter,” she says, greeting the male performer tribe with a sweet-molasses drawl, “always makin’ new friends!”
When they get to the climax, Soderbergh captures the mirror itself, and a roaring crowd cheers this triumphant ‘Resurrection.’
The “Logan Lucky experiment,” as he calls it in a recent three-part talk with GQ, reunites director and alter-ego, driving both Soderbergh and Tatum’s endearing sense of purpose at full throttle. A family stitched together by West Virginia country roads. Be considerate, do good works, share your dreams, and host without prejudice. Logan Lucky is currently underperforming at the box office, but Soderbergh has come back from everything, and at this point, he’s just playing in a sandbox, about to release a nonlinear app experience Mosaic months before its HBO premiere.
I, for one, am so glad Tatum and Mike Lane found Steven Soderbergh, that together they introduced audiences to Mellie, Jimmy, Clyde, and Sadie Logan, my West Virginia neighbors.
