FULL FRONTAL
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Coleman Hough
With Catherine Keener, Julia Roberts, Blair Underwood, David
Hyde Pierce, David Duchovny and Mary McCormack
***
Reality has left the building...at least in FULL
FRONTAL's hall of mirrors. The Dogme 95 manifesto claims that its directors
will forsake the comforts of genre, artificial lighting, sets, costumes
and other tools of the Man in order to get closer to the truth of their
subjects. Grubbily shot on video (for the most part), FULL FRONTAL would
look a lot different if not for the widespread impact of THE CELEBRATION
and Lars von Trier's films. (It never quite achieves the home
movie look of THE CELEBRATION but gets pretty damn close.) Nevertheless,
it wins up affirming that there's no way out of Hollywood, especially if you've
become one of its most celebrated players. You can't return to Sundance and
take back all those Oscar nominations. Thus, Soderbergh uses video to get
to the essential artifice of his subject.
FULL FRONTAL includes a film-within-the-film, shot on 35mm and called
RENDEZVOUS. In it, Nicholas (Underwood) is an actor being interviewed by
Francesca (Roberts) while making an action film with Brad Pitt. (David Fincher
plays the director, although according to the credits, he's not playing
himself.) In the video portions, supposedly a documentary, a frazzled
journalist (Pierce) has a very bad day, while his wife (Keener), a vice-president
of human resources, revels in her power to abuse people. A playwright lies
about his age on the Internet and goes to Tucson for an encounter with a
woman he "met" in a chat room, while the ludicrous play he's directing -
THE SOUND AND THE FUHRER - looks destined to flop. All these threads are
supposed to come together at an enormous 40th-birthday party thrown that
evening by Gus (Duchovny), the producer of RENDEZVOUS.
Potentially, there's 3 different films in FULL FRONTAL: an expose of
why we shouldn't believe what we see (a pretty sharp idea), a comedy of
manners about Hollywood (not a bad idea) and an excuse for Soderbergh to
show off how many celebrity friends he has (something I don't really want
to watch.) Juggling these different mode, it's most successful with
the second one. The actor who plays Hitler in THE SOUND AND THE FUHRER (Nicky
Katt) throws neurotic fits and complains when the actress who
plays Eva Braun leaves because of his blood-drinking habit. Typecast again
as a snarky bitch, Keener is just as amusing, while Pierce is quite funny
as a man whose day is one long mishap, culminating when his dog overdoses
on hash brownies. However, both RENDEZVOUS and FULL FRONTAL fit equally
recognizable genres: the former is a romance, the latter a sitcom version
of SHORT CUTS.
Soderbergh doesn't miss a chance to show off what a Hollywood
insider he is. Actor Jeff Garlin does a very convincing impression of
Miramax head honcho/Aspiring King Of New York/Tool Of Satan Harvey Weinstein
in several scenes. At first, I believed that Garlin was Weinstein
and grew irritated by his self-serving cameos. (Of course, other characters
make fun of Weinstein, but no one calls him "Harvey Scissorhands," my favorite
nickname..) Brad Pitt pops up in the credits as "Brad Pitt/himself."
As an in-joke for people who've followed Soderbergh's career well enough
to remember THE LIMEY, Terence Stamp also drops by to reprise a few lines
of dialogue and then show up in a hotel as "himself." Even so, the director
sympathizes with the people who are on the margins of this world: the
hapless theater director, the actor who's infuriated that black men
can't kiss white women onscreen (a set-up for one of the funniest jokes),
a masseuse (McCormack) who's never had a relationship that lasted longer
than 3 months. If this sympathy is anything to go by, he thinks he's one
of them.
Deep down, he may be, but in the real world, he's made 3 major
hits. FULL FRONTAL makes a stab at going back to his indie roots by using
DV. If New York's intrepid street bootleggers sneak their camcorders
into the theater, tape FULL FRONTAL off the screen and press "LL FRONT"
onto DVD-Rs, the film's look and feel might even be enhanced. The video
segments have the texture of a 5th-generation dub, or even Pixelvision,
at their grainiest. (It's fitting that a song by former lo-fi kings Guided
By Voices plays over the end credits.) Amidst the blur, incidents and
small gestures bleed from RENDEZVOUS into FULL FRONTAL. Unless you're asleep,
you should be able to pick up on the clues.
In FULL FRONTAL, video (despite its fuzziness) = film =Hollywood.
DV static is just a red herring. Soderbergh may expose this depressing equation,
but he offers no clues about how to escape from it. (Here's a hint: don't
get Julia Roberts to appear in your film, even if you use her "ironically."
Perhaps you should even cast unknown actors. ) His diagnosis is inseparable
from the quicksand he's stuck in. If he could find a way out of it, he'd
deserve plenty of credit, but the implicit cynicism of FULL FRONTAL is more
than a little facile. Even so, it has the courtesy to end on a generous,
crowd-pleasing note. I'll honor this tone: if it's little more than a gritty-looking
sitcom, it's a pretty entertaining one.