You know you're watching Steven Soderbergh if..
A scene's audio comes in first before the image catches up to the sound.
At the beginning, we often hear a voice while
the screen is totally black, or displays some abstract image or a wide-shot of a location.
[You know that orange juice you have every morning? You know what's in that? Corn.]
[And when you're good and help with the trash, you know what makes the big green bags biodegradable?]
This signature Soderbergh technique disorients and engages the viewer
dropping us into an atmosphere or feeling before we can actually make sense
of what’s going on.
Once the setting is established and the visuals eventually match up with the audio.
Soderbergh focuses in on a particular character to anchor us in their personal story.
Soderbergh takes his time getting to the plot, choosing to prioritize the introduction of his characters.
Erin Brockovich starts with a job interview that reveals Erin’s charm
and her inability to land a job.
[You've got a really nice office.]
[Thanks.]
Traffic begins with Javier talking about his dream in which he feels powerless
to save his dying mother, much like he feels powerless to stop the crime and corruption
in his native Tijuana.
And Ocean’s Eleven shows us how calm and charismatic Danny is in any situation.
[Beware, this video may contain a few spoilers for Soderbergh movies]
Soderbergh's sustained close-ups make us feel intimately connected to his characters.
Directors traditionally use close-ups during a pivotal emotional point, but Soderbergh
gives us a close-up on off moments, like when they character isn’t speaking.
He lingers on a character’s feelings, making their emotions a part of the visual storytelling.
In Sex, Lies & Videotape, when Ann discovers Cynthia’s pearl earring on the floor of
her bedroom, this confirms her suspicions that her sister’s having an affair with
her husband.
The moments leading up to and through this painful realization are patiently documented
by the unwavering camera.
When she impulsively tries to smash the earring, the focus of the close-up shifts from her
face to the earring on the floor, since it is no longer her expression, but her action
on the earring, that communicate her feelings at that moment.
In Magic Mike, as the men socialize in the dressing room, we keep
cutting back to this close-up of Mike’s long pensive gaze.
The shot wordlessly includes us in his thought process, as he decides whether or not to
leave the club, and his stripping career altogether.
Soderbergh’s technique of playing a new scene’s audio over the previous visual is
particular effective with his sustained close-ups.
This delay suggests that although life continues to go on as usual, the character is still
mentally stuck in that moment of deep thought and feeling.
A poignant example is in Traffic, after Judge Wakefield's conversation with the Chief of Staff.
[Don't worry about that thing with your daughter. Anyway, if it came out we could turn it into a qualification.]
[I've been in the trenches of the drug war; I've seen the face of the enemy, etcetera etcetera.]
The conversation follows Wakefield into his next scene.
And he seems to be replaying the words over and over again in his head, as he finds
himself unable to make the speech he planned.
Soderbergh gives us the sense that we’re voyeurs entering hidden or illicit worlds.
Instead of feeling immersed, as we do with many films, especially in the action genre,
we feel rather like we’re observing from just outside of the action, given a window
into things we shouldn’t be seeing.
Imitating the gaze of someone spying on a stranger, Soderbergh will take a wide shot
on a character and follow that character uninterruptedly, like human eyes fixed on
a moving object.
He will position the camera so that the character starts far away, at one side of the screen,
then follow them as they approach the camera, often crossing right in front of it before
distancing themselves a little so we get a better view of them.
The voyeuristic feel also comes from shooting conversations through obstructions or using
over-the-shoulder shots, often at an angle that makes us feel like we're an extra
guest eavesdropping on the conversation from slightly further away than the participants.
We’re present to its intensity, but the shoulder, head, or material blocking our view
reminds us we’re not meant to be the recipient of these words.
In the same vein, Soderbergh might leave out the expected establishing shots or conventional
coverage that most directors use.
Instead he might stick the camera in one place and film most of a scene from one vantage
point -- making us feel like we’re really in the room because we’re not constantly
skipping around to different parts of it.
And he's very comfortable using jump cuts instead of cutting away to hide skips forward in the action.
Soderbergh’s frequent jump cuts counter his focus on the individual by providing the
pace of an action film.
Like a selective fast-forward function, jump cuts create momentum and the heightened reality
of action-like entertainment.
All these camera techniques together give his visuals a hand-held documentary feel,
emphasizing that he’s giving us windows into real-feeling worlds that we don’t usually
get to see, but are curious about.
We get a glimpse into the lives of people in marginalized or taboo situations.
Soderbergh humanizes characters we often dismiss or reduce to a type -- like an escort, a male
stripper, or a single mother who doesn’t dress like a saint.
The director plays on our desire to fetishize these people, but he’s also showing them
to be complex or different than we expect, defying clichés and revealing depth to their
personalities that take us by surprise.
In Traffic, Javier has a profound sense of loyalty and justice, but he finds
the right thing to do isn’t clear-cut when he’s surrounded by corruption everywhere.
In Erin Brockovich, we come to respect Erin’s refusal to act, speak, or dress as people
expect her to. While it makes it easy for others to underestimate her, it shows a brave confidence
in her own intuitions and style of doing things.
[Well, it just so happens, I think I look nice. And as long as I have one ass instead of two
I'll wear what I like, if that's alright with you.]
In The Girlfriend Experience, Christine treats her occupation like any other business
in the service industry, and we might be taken by surprise by her high level of professionalism.
The calm, understated, business-minded Christine is the opposite of the flashy, loud personality
we might expect coming into a story about an escort.
And in Magic Mike, Mike, too, has been underestimated by others and -- indirectly -- by us, at first,
as we come into the movie with certain assumptions.
We learn that Mike has ambitions like starting his own custom furniture business, and he’s a sensitive,
caring guy looking for a meaningful relationship.
The surprise can go in the other direction, too, as we see in Traffic when an upstanding
pregnant mother is willing to smuggle drugs and order a hit in order to keep her family intact.
It makes the political or social into a personal story.
Many of Soderbergh’s plots center around broad, global issues, like crime, drugs, illness,
and poverty.
But these big issues are filtered through individual stories.
Soderbergh shows how a social issue looks from the inside, to a person directly affected
by the problem.
Striking this balance between a macro-view of global issues and the micro-view of individuals,
his thesis often seems to be that these big political problems can only be solved by remembering
that society is made up of individuals.
People are both the cause of and solution to society’s ills -- and true progress may
only come about one by one, person by person.
Many of his characters are on a mission to fight some injustice.
Yet the big fight is always personal.
[Not personal?! That is my work. My sweat. My time away from my kids.
If that's not personal, I don't know what is!]
Erin Brockovich knows what it’s like to be the victim: thus her drive to vindicate
the victims of PG&E is fueled by genuine understanding and personal emotion.
“Traffic” illustrates how the United States government’s war on drugs becomes an intimate,
family issue, showing that it is easy to hate a faceless problem, but much harder to battle
an enemy so close to home.
While he’s made plenty of star-studded Hollywood fare, Soderbergh also works with non-actors
on experimental low budget indies.
He even secretly shot a film on an iphone.
In addition to directing, he also acts as editor, writer and DP on many films, but
to avoid giving himself too many credits, he likes to use pseudonyms drawn from
variations on his parents’ names -- Mary Ann Bernard and Peter Andrews.
The remarkably prolific Soderbergh has shown an aptitude for a wide
variety of film genres -- from the action and heist movie, to the social drama, mystery,
romance, or comedy.
Many of his films blend several of these genres.
Soderbergh achieves subtle humor by making images play in counterpoint with words.
[Duck, thank you very much.]
[Helena, you never order duck]
[I know, I know. Well, it's not me who ordered it. Somebody else.]
[Well he or she has very good taste.]
Often, he will follow up a character's speech with a contrasting image to illustrate in
a tongue-in-cheek way the difference between a character’s perspective and how things really are.
The discrepancy between a character's words and their actions can also reveal a depth to their character,
as it does when Erin tells her kids she's not eating dinner with them at the diner.
[Mom, you're not eating?]
[Well, my lawyer took me out to a fancy lunch to celebrate and I'm still stuffed. How 'bout that?]
The very next shot proves she’s lied,
[Sixteen is the number of dollars I have in my bank account.]
So we sympathize with her and respect the brave face she puts on for her family.
Soderbergh likes washing his frames in blue or yellow or another color, often using the
interplay of of these contrasting palettes to illustrate opposing forces in his plots,
both between and within characters.
In Magic Mike, the everyday and backstage life of the performers is colored in yellow,
while their on-stage moments strongly feature blue.
The opposing colors underline the contrast between their stage personas and their private
selves.
In Traffic, Soderbergh distinguishes the different threads of his plot with color:
yellow for the Mexico story, a cold monochrome blue for the East coast story, and an unfiltered
Tungsten for San Diego.
The colors create not only a mood, but a psychological identity for each location.
Tijuana’s sepia-tinged wash captures the heat and looks like it was shot on old film
-- reminding us of the frontier of old Westerns, which also feature prominent yellows.
The exaggerated cold look of the East Coast story shows that Judge Wakefield’s political
war on drugs is worlds away from the trade it’s trying to crack down on, and it underlines
the isolation, loneliness and alienation of his daughter’s descent into addiction.
The more-balanced color scheme of the San Diego plot corresponds to the facade of normalcy
in Helena’s life before she realizes her husband’s involvement in drugs.
When she crosses into Mexico to plot murder to free her husband, she enters into the Mexico
yellow wash in the most significant scene that shows what her survival instincts make
her capable of.
[And I want the principal witness against my husband, Eduardo Ruiz, killed.]
The way that the characters ultimately cross over into the other colors comes to also show
how they are, at their core, not truly divided but connected.
In other films, Soderbergh uses a blue-tinge or yellow-tinge on a more case by
case basis, to depict a range of atmospheres, moments or emotions.
Yet it’s striking how often he does apply such a dramatic monochrome wash to his visuals
to express the mood he wants.
In “The Knick,” Soderbergh uses the contrast of black and white to create the sterile,
austere environment of the hospital.
The heightened contrast plays into how the themes and conflicts of the series develop.
Soderbergh has a penchant for films about vengeance or retribution, and justice.
Whether or not the characters succeed and how they define justice, can vary widely between films.
And Soderbergh often gives us mixed unresolved endings.
Erin succeeds, but Soderbergh’s other characters get more mixed results as they struggle against
broken systems to overturn the established way of things and bring about a better way
of life.
More typical of Soderbergh’s films are endings with conditional happiness-- or they’re
sad, but not necessarily tragic; there is usually a somber taste of reality.
Even in “Ocean’s Eleven,” which mostly feeds our desire for
escapist fantasy, some reality re-enters at the end when Danny Ocean takes the fall for the
rest of his team and goes to prison.
Overall, Soderbergh’s endings are rarely neat, giving us a sense that the characters’ struggle
against a personal or universal issue is not over and may never end.
In Traffic, Monte realizes that his actions might not make much of a difference in the grand
scheme of things, but he doesn’t give up, continuing the battle to avenge his friend’s death.
The key is to keep trying, even if results are small and slow.
By the end, our focus is not on the often-unresolveable global issue but back on the individual.
And Soderbergh’s final question to us is whether we think the character has succeeded.
Soderbergh masterfully blurs the lines between personal and universal, between intimate drama
and large-scale action film, between humor and tragedy.
Soderbergh’s art expertly captures the liminal, multifaceted, un-categorizable
nature of our human existence.