Unsane (Steven Soderbergh, 2018)

Hot Ones is a show which pits celebrities against an array of increasingly hot sauces. With a Scoville measurement of 135,600, Da Bomb is the sauce which usually takes out even the toughest guests. But that has less to do with the hotness than the taste which Charlize Theron describes in her episode as "battery acid": "There's no flavor. That's just 'I want to fuck with you...' I like spice but...that's like somebody being an asshole. That's like a dick move right there...I just want to flip that bottle off. You just ruined this whole thing for me." Steven Soderbergh's Unsane is the movie equivalent of Da Bomb.

It boggles the mind trying to determine what on earth attracted Soderbergh to such a juvenile project. Perhaps the novelty of shooting the thing entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus quite o'er-crowed his spirit. In any event, he's ignored the bankruptcy of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer's screenplay. Unsane is a film of lies. It lies about stalking. It lies about mental health. It lies about involuntary commitment. It lies even about the very architecture of its own setting, a mental health facility which somehow houses a torture/death chamber that none of the employees know about. And while all films tell lies by their very nature, Unsane tells lies just to fuck with you, i.e., it consists of nothing more than a string of empty methods to generate horror. It's a dick move, a film that could ruin your whole evening. You just want to flip off Soderbergh, Bernstein, and Greer. Unsane is so bad, in fact, that I may up Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997*) to a D-minus since at least Haneke is honest about wanting to fuck with you.

Some critics have twisted themselves into a wiener package claiming that Unsane is an exercise in pure cinema or that it evinces Soderbergh's adeptness at making genre movies, both tactics providing an escape valve for a film's godawfulness. For instance, in his New Yorker review, Richard Brody praises the thin characterization of the protagonist Sawyer (Claire Foy): "Soderbergh approaches Sawyer merely as a collection of traits that embody the idea of a victim of stalking; she is a character composed solely of pieces that fit the needs of the story." But that's how all mainstream narrative films work. The very function of plot (as opposed to story) is to delimit character in ways that serve the story. It's just that there are tastier ways to go about doing so.

Celebrities on Hot Ones try two hotter sauces including Hot Ones: The Last Dab, a show creation with a Scoville measurement of 2,000,000+. As host Sean Evans (the hottest one of all!) explains: "There's a real culinary challenge to making something that's hot and tasty. Anyone can make something hot." With Unsane, Soderbergh is that cheap, anonymous anyone, an intermittently prestigious director who has forgotten that most viewers prefer not to suck on a battery for 98 minutes.

 Grade: F

*I consider it a spiritual triumph to have avoided the 2007 remake.

 

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

I'm of two minds about this one. Its 106 minutes move like five, especially since its when-not-if scenario is happening now. This is the result of Soderbergh's unwillingness/inability to bring the film's many mini-stories to conclusion. Not only do the clipped narratives add to the overall breathlessness but it augments the panic and confusion engendered by the pandemic. But it's clear that Soderbergh was biting off more than he can chew since he brings the grandest narrative to a close with the creation of a vaccine. And in keeping with Hollywood's propensity for narrative redundancy, he reminds us that the film is coming to a close with the formation of a heterosexual couple (i.e., the teens who finally get to enjoy prom) before the epilogue tracing the exact moment of animal-to-Paltrow transmission (although note that it's humans clearing trees with tractors that kick it off). Add some anti-union sentiments with respect to protesting nurses and you get a film with radical and conservative energies battling one another, a perfect model for Soderbergh's cinema.

Edit: I totally forgot that the pandemic is blamed on the perfidy of woman, i.e., Paltrow's affair so I'm bumping the grade down.
Grade: B-minus

Behind the Liberace biopics

Any reservations about Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra should dissipate upon contact with Liberace: Behind the Music, a godawful TV movie rushed out a year after the maestro succumbed to complications from AIDS in 1987.  

Behind the Candelabra honors Liberace as the first rock 'n' roller and as such seems based less on Scott Thorson's memoir of his tenure as Lee's bejazzled boytoy than on Dave Hickey's essay "A Rhinestone as Big as The Ritz" from his collection Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy. In Hickey's estimation, Liberace's first tour of England in 1956 marks the beginning of rock 'n' roll. The British press, stinging from postwar austerity measures, recoiled from his gender-bent displays of gross accumulation, most notoriously Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra (William Connor) who worried about the effect this "deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love" had on teens and middle-aged matrons alike and lost a libel suit as a result. Little Richard, meet Liberace who was you before you were you, a game changer poised to get under the skin of moralists everywhere.

By reducing Liberace's bio to his relationship with Thorson, Behind the Candelabra bubblebathes in his queer quotient and reeks of rock 'n' roll excess. Ringing with cicadas and disco, saturated in canola oil yellows, fulfilling a grossout quota with grody plastic surgery footage, recoiling not from amyl nitrate-assisted gay sex and judicious makeout closeups, ensconced on HBO away from Hollywood's safe tentpole franchises, Soderbergh's latest (and reportedly last) act of rebellion gives off the hothouse feverishness of McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Flowers of Shanghai, precisely the tribute a squirm-inducing icon deserves.

By dreary contrast, Liberace: Behind the Music purports to tell the man's entire life such that the script (by Gavin Lambert!) reads as if delivered by telegram. A typical stroke occurs when Liberace (an uncomfortable Victor Garber) embraces a photograph of his mother (Maureen Stapleton, wasted) and exclaims "Well, we all have to go sometime" mere seconds before Thorson (Michael Dolan) experiences a drug freakout, killing two story points with one shot. He's shown kissing two women in closeup, with the lipstick to prove it to Mama in the first instance, but consummates a post-Thorson relationship (Shawn Levy) with a handshake. And despite dramatizing his crucial meeting with Elvis, the movie remains safely within a pre-rock reality. Where Behind the Candelabra kicks off with the poppered-up narcissism of "I Feel Love," Liberace: Behind the Music is larded down with endless renditions of Beethoven and "I'll Be Seeing You." The entire sorry production is best summarized by this Wikipedia note: "A TV film of noteworthy production value^{[citation needed]}." Indeed.

A supposedly even less queer biopic from the same year, entitled simply Liberace, remains unavailable at the moment, thank gawd.