Why didn't HAYWIRE make Gina Carrano a star?

Fassbender on his back, but this isn't from Shame.

Steven Soderbergh is probably the most prolific major feature director working today, which has its good and bad points.  Because he is very talented, many of the films he makes will  be very good, or at least will repay the viewer's time.  But because he makes so many films, some of them will have to be sub-par.  And because Soderbergh is willing to experiment, when he swings and misses, he misses hard.

So on the one hand, you have Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic, Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brokovich, King of the Hill and Ocean's Eleven.  But you also have Full Frontal, The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble, Solaris and Ocean's Twelve.  And then there's the interesting middle- range films, including The Good German, Che, The Informant! and Contagion -- all films worth seeing, but not going to be in anyone's pantheon.

I suppose Haywire (2011) belongs in that middle class.  It is not without merit, but it clearly doesn't succeed on its own terms, which were to make Gina Carrano, a very successful mixed martial artist, into a movie star.  It was not a feckless task.  Carrano is exciting to watch in a fight, with real flair and personality.  Soderbergh engaged his Limey collaborator, Lem Dobbs to come up with a snappy hard-boiled spy script.  He got actor pals Ewan MacGregor, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum (now starring in Soderbergh's Magic Mike) to agree to be beaten up by a girl on screen.  And Michael Douglas agreed to drop in the way he seems to do these days.  I don't know what else he's got going on, but ol' Mikey's acting appearances all seem to be drive-bys these days.  (Antonio Banderas turns out to be the bad guy, but the film ends just before Gina gets to beat him up.)

So why is Haywire a misfire?  A few possible reasons, plus one essential reason which makes enumerating the others unnecessary.

First, the stakes involved are neither big enough or small enough.  Today in 2012, after almost a century of spies in the movies, there are really only two ways to go with spy stories.  One must threaten the entire existence of the world, a la Bond, or you go the way of LeCarre or a film like The Matador and center it around the existential crisis of the spy.  But Haywire merely documents a routine surveillance and security assignment, coupled with the familiar story of the spy who is framed and must clear himself (see the Bourne films).  So the story itself is unlikely to engage us.

Second, the fights, which are to a film like this what songs and dances are to a musical are not shot or edited well (although they seem to be well staged).  Somebody has to tell Mr. Soderbergh that the experiment is over, that he need not continue to be his own cinematographer, and that he needs to be recommence engaging more talented photographers than himself and thus benefit from their expertise, experience and taste.  He is not a bad cinematographer, but he is not inspired, and some inspiration would be useful here.  Several different tactics are attempted -- long, single take fights, quick, cutty fights, fights shot objectively, fights shot first-person, but none of them are well assisted by the shooting and cutting, and one can't help wish that a Jackie Chan or other expert had been brought in to give the action the impact it should have had.

Third, having robbed Ms. Carrano of her strong suit, that is, her ability to make an impression through her fighting skills, Mr. Soderbergh failed to give her the support she needed to achieve the projection of personality necessary to be a movie star.  Stars come in all varieties, from the most loveable to the creepiest, but the one thing they all have is the ability to virtually emerge through the motion picture screen itself.  When they are doing nothing but listening, they still draw attention and focus and we always feel their characters in their scene.  When Ms. Carrano is not talking or walking or fighting or doing something or other, she virtually disappears.  She is very attractive, but somehow she never suggests that a man would change the course of his life to be with her.

It's hard to describe an absence, but we all know that stars have something in the eye, or just behind the eye.  Some kind of light that regular mortals, like Gina Carrano, simply don't have.  I wish her well, and expect her to be prominent and successful in her own sphere, but Haywire suggests that film is not the place for her.

When a picture doesn't tell a story

Is it possible that Steven Soderbergh's decision to become his own cinematographer about 11 or 12 years ago has brought down his skill as a director and a story teller? I think Che (2008) offers evidence of that.

When you speak of the film "Che" you need to clarify which of three products you're speaking of. In Europe, the film was shown in two distinct parts, Che: The Argentinian and Che: Bolivia. In the US, where the release was very limited, it was shown in Soderbergh's preferred format, a single 4-1/2 hour exhibition with an intermission. This demonstrates why some directors should not meddle with exhibition or distribution. Specifically, the film was reviewed much more critically in the US than abroad, and I believe largely because of the butt-numbing experience Soderbergh put the press through. (The review in the Maltin guide more or less admits this.)

As biography, Che gets an important principle right: decide what your story is and focus on that to the exclusion of all else. But that is only true as far as the design of the film goes, not in its execution. Biopics, when they fail, usually fail from research poisoning. The people preparing the story and script get so excited by the wealth of incident one finds in most public lives and so desirous of putting as much as possible in, both to make the film truly representative of the subject's life and to reap the benefit of all that research.

But life is not drama, and an entire life is usually a complicated, meandering thing without a clear narrative line. Narrative is artifice, so in biography, just as in any story, you must decide the spine of your story, and then dip into your source material to construct the story from the raw materials of a person's life. It must by necessity simplify, and therefore distort. If you are afraid of distortion or misstatement, you have no business even embarking on a biographical film.

The story concept behind Che is very sound--to take two central, defining episodes of Che's life and set them side by side. Triumph in Cuba, fatal catastrophe in Bolivia--and that catastrophe brought about by both the nature of the revolutionary to continue seeking more revolutions, rather than administer a government, and by following a plan devised for another place and another circumstance. It is Butch Cassidy wanting to do it all over again (appropriately, also in Bolivia), it is any conqueror who seeks that one more conquest which undoes him.

And the first film sets off on this course very well. The documentary style works well, especially the juxtaposition of imitation newsreel photography of 1965, when Che is addressing the General Assembly and visiting New York with the "real" color images of the revolution. Other than the simulated interview, we do not get to know Che well-- he is almost never seen in close-up, or indeed without other people in the shot. The cinemascope frame rarely gets near anyone, and so does a good job of depicting an entire society undergoing change. Although Che's accomplishments seem heroic, he does not appear to be glorified--we only know him through his effect on others.

But the first film introduces the poison that will kill the second film. The filmmakers are so anxious to create an "objective" point of view, that they are not willing to explain anything. A sample scene might sound like this (I do not want to insult anyone with made-up Spanish names, so I will just use random made-up names). "Did you talk to Flebus?" "Flebus will not make a deal unless we have confirmed the support of the DQV." "Then we will have to go to Schenley." "But Schenley is bordered by the Rio Blatz on the West." "I see the problem. If you look at this map [a map which the filmmakers don't show us] you can see the problem here at the southwest coordinate." "Aha. General Snodgrass has us."

The film makes no effort to tell us who these people are, what the geographic disposition is, what the names of the groups refer to. Nothing. Luckily, it doesn't matter in Part One because we have a sense of ongoing motion and eventual victory.

Now imagine the same exchanges going on for 1-1/2 hours, while the characters do nothing but walk from place to place in a tropical forest, smoke and look dirty. Apparently for about an hour of Part Two, half the characters are looking for the other half of the characters. Without success. The last half-hour is somewhat interesting, once Che himself is captured, taunted a bit, executed and his body transported for public display in a very haunting MOS montage with music. It's as if Soderbergh suddenly woke up, found his apprentices had been fooling around with the video cams for an hour-and-a-half and decided to tack on some actual cinema at the end so we might forget what we had been put through before.

It is hard to imagine as skilled and experienced a filmmaker as Soderbergh plunging into Part Two (which was filmed first) without a solid narrative concept. A hint as to how this could have happened is found in the interviews on the Criterion edition in which Soderbergh talks about almost nothing but the RED digital camera used, and how amazing it is the film got done on the budget and schedule they had. He scarcely mentions Che. (Soderbergh was brought in as director by producer Laura Bickford and star Benecio Del Toro, for whom this was a passion project. Soderbergh may have had passion for the film, but he doesn't show much for Che.)

The film does look great, through and through, even the long boring parts of the Bolivian conflict. From an outsider's point of view, Soderbergh seemed much more interested in making the shots and making the day (filmmaking jargon for completing the shots scheduled for a given day of production) than in telling a compelling story.

It seems perverse to say about a man who has preserved his independence amid a great deal of mainstream success, but maybe Soderbergh needs to get back to Hollywood.

Acquired Intimacy Syndrome

Steven Soderbergh has been shooting many, if not most of his films on video for a number of years. Among the qualities video provides is an absence of film grain, especially if one is viewing the final result on digital video. This gives each image a stillness, a placidity, which is impossible in film, with its grains, flecks, scratches and even at times splices.

That stillness feels appropriate for The Girlfriend Experience (2009), a film about stasis which is not boring or static, as I feared at the outset of the film. [I love Soderbergh, but he has perpetrated some real stiffs - Solaris and Full Frontal each made me want to tear my own eyes out.] The protagonist, a female escort who simulates actual personal relationships with her clients, making her more valuable than a mere sex partner, is still, poised, seeking to expand her business, but not repudiating it or dismissing it. This is not about a fallen woman seeking a way out of her sordid life. She sees life in a capitalistic society in terms of transactions, and she simply wants a better grade of transactions.

In fact, the only mistake she makes is falling into the same trap as her clients--mistaking a simulated relationship with a real one. But the realization does not destroy her. It is a bump in the road, and she resumes her established course. Another of the film's virtues is its 78-minute running time, so that it does not overstay is welcome and is not tempted to expand itself into something the material does not justify.

The film is also notable for being a scripted film which successfully pulls off the illusion of being improvised. This perhaps explains the casting of adult film actress Sasha Gray, who presumably is used to working with minimal scripting. [Incidentally, although the distributors would like you to think the presence of an adult film star promises something racy, she does not do anything in the film that a mainstream female star might not do, such as wear lacy lingerie or say an impolite word.] Gray brings a poise and a self-possession to the character, never betraying an ounce of the yearning or neediness that a conventionally-trained actress might demand from a director. ("Where's her vulnerability? I have to show her vulnerability," they would say.) Though the film is premised on a life of pre-arranged and mutually agreed deception, both audience and characters are nonetheless fooled.

A metaphor for film itself?

What defines comic tone?

Don't get me wrong--I liked The Informant! (2009). But it did not feel as sure-footed as the critics had led me to believe.

For example, there's the hair. Sure, you can see that Matt Damon's hair is a bit goofy right to begin with (you can even see it in this picture). But it's too easy to ascribe that to the fact that you have a dweeb-turned-businessman in the Midwest 20 years ago. It's not clear that this hair looks as goofy to the people in the movie as it does to us. It is not until over an hour into the movie that Damon tugs at the wig and puts it askew that we can say to ourselves, "Oh, Mark Whitacre [Damon's character] is the only one who doesn't know this hair is goofy.

Yes, you have the improbably jaunty music by Marvin Hamlisch. But it is counterpoised with the fuzzy-documentary look, where everything has gone orange as if the cameraman inadvertently used the wrong filter (not to mention catching light flares in nearly every scene). See, the way you light comedy is--turn up the lights. Legendary director of stage farces George Abbott made that an iron-clad rule: "Turn up the lights. This scene is supposed to be funny." Dark is mysterious. Dark is dangerous. Dark is not funny, unless we're busting ghosts.

And Whitacre is a rather sad and pathetic character. It is hard to develop the distance we need to laugh at him. Neither Damon nor director Steven Soderbergh have done anything to give us permission to laugh at him--other than Whitacre's rambling, often irrelevant voiceovers and Hamlisch's faux-James Bond guitars and that late-arriving tug on the wig. Finally, about 75 minutes into an approximately 100 minute film, the lies start to tumble and tumble and tumble out, and thanks to the craftsmanship of all involved, the laughs start to come. I suppose the presence of actors such as Scott Adsit, Tony Hale, Patton Oswalt and the Smothers Brothers is supposed to encourage the laughs, although they seem to have been forbidden to be funny. (Oswalt in particular seems as though he could have a solid career as a character actor.)

But I can't help wondering what this film would have been with Jason Alexander as Mark Whitacre? His very presence would give us permission to laugh. And the hairpiece would have told us something about the film from the start. I presume the choice of a "dramatic" actor like Mark Damon was quite deliberate, a ploy to make the first part of the film ambiguous--maybe Whitacre really is a good, self-sacrificing guy, a little naive perhaps, but good. But if that's true, what is the music signalling us?

Stanley Kubrick had a similar experience adapting the book Red Alert. After some time with it, he informed his screenwriters that the story had to be a comedy. I understand that something similar happened with The Informant! [See the interview with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns in the September-October 2009 Creative Screenwriting Magazine -- not available online.] The problem is that the finished film feels as though nobody went back and changed the first half of the movie to fit with that idea.