No Sudden Move

 2021, d. Stephen Soderbergh - HBOmax

I took a look the other day at Soderbergh's filmography and was surprised that I've only seen maybe 60% of his output.  Having supposedly retired in 2013, his output since has been nothing short of prolific, and I've definitely not kept up.  In the past 2 years he's released four features, of which I've seen three.  I keep forgetting The Laundromat exists.

What keeps Soderbergh going, it seems, is experimentation: playing with genres, format, and the tools he uses.  I think back to his remake of The Limey, a meditative action/revenge flick starring a past-middle-age Terence Stamp, which kind of fashioned itself as a "legasequel" before such things were de rigor, and then the audio commentary was just a bonkers experiment in sound.  No Sudden Move is maybe not so audacious, but he's telling a 50's-set crime story that is both serious and satirical. 

While Soderbergh loves to disarm expectations now and again with his casting choices (Haywire, High Flying Bird, The Girlfriend Experience), he generally has fairly populist sensibilities, as well as a small stable of performers he likes to return to.  Here it's Don Cheadle (in his 6th Soderbergh) and Benicio Del Toro (his fourth) leading a terrific ensemble that also includes Kieran Culkin, David Harbour, Brendan Fraser, Amy Seimetz, Bill Duke and Ray Liotta.  It's an outstanding cast, working with a twisty, playful script that kind of feels like a both elevated and compressed season of Noah Hawley's tv extension of the Coen Brothers' Fargo.  It's like the Mona Lisa silkscreened onto black velvet... it's a replication, skillfully done, that evokes something superior, but maybe isn't presented most effectively.

Bluntly put, Soderbergh made the decision to find rare anamorphic lenses to shoot No Sudden Move to give it a distinctive look.  What it does is give this two hour neo-noir movie the visual feel of a Check Your Head-era Beastie Boys music video. It's a wide-screen fish-eye lens that pinches the view in the corners, and it's often, but not always, distracting, especially any time a shot needs to pan across a scene.  Watching it at home, any sequence that requires the camera to track someone's movement leads to a disorienting effect.  I can't imagine what that would feel like in a cinema, but I expect I would have a headache afterward.

Set in Detroit in the 1950's, Fraser hires Cheadle, Del Toro, and Cuklin to do a babysitting job, effectively watching Harbour's family as leverage, forcing him to steal some paperwork from his boss' private safe at General Motors HQ.  Things do not go as planned and Cheadle and Del Toro, wary strangers in the beginning, wind up trying to salvage the job while also furthering personal agendas. 

It's a story that keeps making 45-degree turns, ultimately stopping at about a 270. It never quite comes full-circle, but it keeps the viewer on their toes (if not necessarily on the edge of their seat). 

There's a tone here that's just shy of dark comedy (particularly in David Harbour's performance) but it's like Soderbergh is not committed to it. The desaturated color grading and slow jazzy score definitely don't fit the rhythms of dark comedy, and some performances seem at odds with each other. 

However, I still enjoyed it and in spite of what I said above, I found it quite watchable (at least as a story). What I took away from it is that Cheadle is one of the most charismatic actors alive (it reminded me we hadn't finished watching Season 2 of Black Monday which we rectified immediately).  You're with him completely on this journey.  Meanwhile, Del Toro as a performer is never not interesting, and here he's definitely sketchy the sketchy type, but in more of a benign way; you're rooting for him too, just maybe not as much as you are for Cheadle.  Even with these two powerhouses in front, and Harbour's slouched, nervous wreck of a man still looming so large over everyone, Amy Seimetz steals the picture, and her character could (and perhaps should) sustain a whole other movie.  It's just a shame that that fish eye lens distracts so much from the story and performances.

And yet... I don't think this would feel at all like a Soderbergh film without that choice.  It makes it interesting, but it doesn't necessarily make it better.  Debating Soderbergh as an auteur is a whole different post, but there's a difference between experimenting and knowing what you're doing.  It very well could be that the anamorphic lens was giving Soderbergh the exact feel he was hoping for out of every scene, or it could be he got halfway through the film with this bizarre commitment and it became too late to turn back from it.  He'll never tell.