À fleur de peau

Soderbergh's showoffy stylistics (color filters, flashbacks, first-person point-of-view shots) try - and mostly fail - to "spice up" a cliched and insignificant plot. Don't bother looking for anything fresh in this movie, it's the same old drifter-back-to-his-hometown / femme fatale / dangerous husband / heist-gone-wrong / last-minute-betrayal storyline. Peter Gallagher's detached, almost catatonic approach seriously affects the movie, but Alison Elliott shines playing the most complex by far character in the film and William Fichtner impresses even in his completely stereotypical bad-guy role. (**1/2)

These days, Stephen Soderbergh has a reputation as a director capable of pleasing arthouse critics and mainstream fans alike. Personally, I'm unconvinced of his claims to greatness even now; but it's certainly clear, whatever its absolute merits, how "Underneath", which dates from 1995, is lacking in slickness compared with the director's subsequent works, which it nonetheless resembles in form if not in competence.

Basically, this is a bank-heist thriller, but shot in a very tricksy style. To list a few of the devices employed, we get colour-filtered lenses, flashbacks (confusing because the main character has a big grey beard in the chronologically earliest scenes, and thus looks younger when supposed to be older), disjunctions of speech and image (used more successfully four years later by Soderbergh in "The Limey"), edgy-camera work, contrived (though sometimes powerful) scene-framing, and the pseudo-documentary time stamps that flash up on screen almost at random. In fact, it's less of a mess than the length of this list suggests; but it never seems natural. The viewer always feels that he is being set up. What is not clear is why.

The real problem is that it is very hard to care about any of the characters. Soderbergh hints at motivation, but fails to follow through. One could argue that the film is trying to be intelligent, leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps. The problem here is not that this is difficult (except at the very end) but that it happens too often - there's more gap than substance, the script plays with itself instead of fleshing out. With no real insight into human nature here, the end result is not so much bleak as pointless.

There are many worse, more stupid films than this. But trying to be clever does not in itself make a great movie. These days Soderbergh does clever without trying. Whether that makes his recent work better, or simply better-disguised, is an interesting question.

Not really noir, as it is in color, so we can call it neo noir and be done with that.

Michael (Peter Gallagher), the prodigal son, returns home for his mom's wedding after being exiled for some past trouble. The flashbacks throughout the movie show us what happened, but it really doesn't matter.

What matters is the fact that he takes up again with his old flame, Rachel (Alison Elliott), who is now married to a local hood (William Fichtner), a fact she neglected to tell him.

To get out of trouble with the hood, he agrees to do an armored car robbery. His own brother (Adam Trese) suspects him.

One of director Steven Soderbergh's early works, it will not blow you away, but it will entertain you.

I suspect the ending will leave you furious.

"The Underneath" tells of a man of dubious character who returns to his home to a less than warm reception and becomes involved in a web of intrigue with money and a woman at the center. This film is good technically and artistically. Good but not great. And there the goodness ends. We're fed bits and pieces of a story involving the elements of corruption, jealously, conspiracy, robbery, murder, betrayal, and more. However, the characters are so superficial and mechanical and the film so clinical and rigid we're left to idle disengaged voyeurism. With no emotional involvement we, the audience, have nothing at stake, have invested nothing in the characters, and don't care how it ends. We're just glad it's over. (C+)

Ex-con and recovered gambler Michael Chambers returns home to Austin, Texas to attend his mother's wedding. He looks up the girlfriend that he walked out on many years prior, immediately causing problems with her criminally-inclined boyfriend. When his new father-in-law helps him get set up with a job driving an armoured car, things begin to look better for Michael but his desire for Rachel remains, sparking a cycle of events that run out of his control.

Working almost like a test bed for things he would do better later on, this film allowed the director to try various techniques and styles that didn't really work for him in this case. The plot unfolds in three different time periods are the same time, we are helped out by Michael having a beard in the earliest time periods. The point of these was to create a history for the characters and help keep the interest as we went by not knowing the past until it is significant (a trick he did again in Out of Sight). However here the characters are painted so flat that it's hard to notice any difference in them between the time periods. Also the actual past is quite straightforward and sheds light on nothing of real significance. This stalls the film for the majority and it only really gets going again towards the end, but even that is killed by a series of little twists that culminate in a final shot that simply doesn't make sense and was clearly a cheap way of ending the film on a dramatic note.

The direction is OK but perhaps a little heavy on the style. Constant shots through coloured glass makes it all look very clever but it doesn't add anything. At first I thought it was to help distinguish time period (all the armoured car stuff looks green) but then I realised he was just doing it when the mood took him. In Traffic, the emphasis on colour worked well between the three stories but here it just feels like a director trying too hard.

Gallagher is an OK actor but can't do much here to shed light on the character. We know that Michael is blessed with poor judgement but beyond that he is a mystery that even Gallagher seems incapable of getting in touch with. Elliot is pretty but also a flat character. The support cast is interesting as it has plenty of well known faces including Fichtner, Dooley, Baker and Shue but really the weakness at the top is the problem here.

Overall this is watchable despite it being a little slow and too stylish for it's own good. The overriding impression I got from watching it was that Soderbergh was trying out some ideas to work out what the weaknesses with them were. Add to this a quite straightforward story that is told in three timelines for no discernible benefit to the film and then a cheap series of dramatics when all else fails and you've got a film that doesn't tend to get mentioned in the same breath as his more recent hits.