Feedback Friday: Appreciating Recent Steven Soderbergh (Patreon)

We recently did an episode tied to Kimi, the new Steven Soderbergh thriller released on HBO Max, about an agoraphobic computer tech worker who processes support issues related to the Alexa-like device of the title. When she hears what she believes to be a violent crime on a piece of audio, she investigates. Listener Dave offers these thoughts about Soderbergh’s recent work:

I’ve been having trouble grasping the critical reception (or lack thereof) to Steven Soderbergh’s recent string of work, and your discussion and Tasha’s appearance on The Filmcast really put a point on those thoughts.

Tasha in particular makes several great observations about Kimi and the issues, ideas, themes, character moments, filmmaking touches, etc. it contains — including some that occurred to me and some that left me with even more to think about — all in service of a larger point about there not being quite enough to chew on.

While I think I am responding more positively to these films than others, I do understand that nagging sensation that they aren’t quite nailing it (and occasionally sharing it — The Laundromat was a miss for me). I’m left wondering if there is any way to pick at or identify what exactly the American paranoia/crime/political/corporate thriller classics of the ’70s are doing that puts them above and beyond Soderbergh’s recent work? Maybe it’s the originality — that these recent ones are drawing so obviously from those past films while their influences were not so clear?

Or is it just time, and these will all see a critical boost in 20 years? If so, is there any way we could we learn to appreciate them in their time?

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Scott says:

As I said on the episode, I was hugely impressed by Kimi, which is not only a deft and hugely entertaining thriller, but doesn’t deny the world we’re currently living in. The pandemic does play an important role in the film, both in reinforcing the trauma-induced agoraphobia that already paralyzes our protagonist and presenting us with this Rear Window scenario where everyone is confined to their apartments. But it doesn’t affect Soderbergh’s lightness of touch at all, and I think in 20 years or so, the few films that didn’t wall themselves off from reality will be extremely valuable. And that’s to say nothing of the tech aspects of Kimi, with their implications about privacy and the villainy of Silicon Valley visionaries.

And yet, as much as I admire Kimi, there’s no doubt that it doesn’t have the weight of the films it evokes: The aforementioned Rear Window, of course, and also the paranoid thrillers that started with Blowup and continued with The Conversation and Blow Out. It is determinedly minor in a way those films are not, which may be my main issue with Soderbergh, particularly his recent work. Though I like many of the films he’s directed lately, No Sudden Move and High Flying Bird especially, his deftness has become a strange Achilles heel, as if he doesn’t have the passion to develop any one project into a more significant personal statement.

Soderbergh could be likened to 21st-century Woody Allen in that respect, prolific but underinvested, though I will quickly say that Soderbergh’s work is considerably more varied and accomplished, and always full of surprises. Logan Lucky may be a minor riff on his Ocean’s Eleven movies, for example, but the tone and texture of everything else recently, from the quick-and-dirty digital experimentation of Unsane and High Flying Bird to the luxuriant period work of No Sudden Move, has been hard to anticipate. I admire that greatly. The Laundromat is the worst film of his career, in my opinion, but even it was the second movie he made in the same year, and he moved on. And so, I think, should we. There’s always a new Soderbergh around the corner, and you never know what you’re going to get. Unpredictably is a rare and precious commodity in movies today.