OCEAN’S ELEVEN

Directed by Steve Soderbergh

with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Andy Garcia

Showing at CineMark in Hadley

Ocean’s Eleven is to crime movies what Erin Brockovich was to woman-against-the-system movies: perfectly acceptable fluff directed by the same young talent.

As one of Hollywood’s rising directorial stars, has Steven Soderbergh’s ascendance been predictable or what? Splashing onto the scene with sex, lies and videotape in 1989, an independently filmed drama that garnered him an Oscar nomination, Soderbergh combed the Hollywood underground waiting for his opportunity to bring his particular brand of moviemaking to the popular stage. With the late 90’s independent film boom, the slight director had his chance: the spectacularly smooth Out of Sight starred a debonair George Clooney and an authoritarian Jennifer Lopez, gritty The Limey unearthed Brit Terance Stamp as a scorned father, he hit the big time with Julia Robert’s Brockovich and his major artistic statement was Traffic, a three-perspective take on the drug war. The latter earned Soderbergh an Oscar for Best Director.

Which leaves Soderbergh in a dangerous situation. Having already done a number of career defining movies, does he revisit what he is adept at or does he continually force himself to branch out?

He chooses to abide tradition – he renews his membership in the growing club of directors who finds the world of the smooth criminal invigorating. With David Mamet (The Heist, The Spanish Prisoner) and Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch), Soderbergh originally signed up with Sight, starring the stylish Clooney and an up-and-coming Jennifer Lopez. Surrounding Clooney with likeable felons, Soderbergh made criminality seem downright dapper.

Eleven is no different.

Thin on plot – a ragtag bunch of thieves band together to take down the biggest score ever…sound familiar? – Soderbergh relies on his characters’ charisma and the skillful way in which they actually steal the money to carry Eleven. Joining Clooney is thieving partner Brad Pitt, British explosives expert Don Cheadle, super pickpocket Matt Damon, outrageous undercover specialist Bernie Mac and aged character expert Carl Reiner.

The mark? Andy Garcia, who not only owns the three casinos the thieves plan to pilfer, but dates Ocean’s ex-wife Tess (played by Julia Roberts). Criminally businesslike, Garcia is steel-jawed and without joy; Roberts can’t help but dominate her few scenes, as she is the only woman in the movie.

The theft itself is a thing of brilliance, a complex series of machinations executed to near-perfection. Therein lays the problem: while the caper itself is smart, the movie isn’t. Where Mamet takes the time to explain his criminals’ intrigues, where Ritchie takes the time to show his criminals’ intrigues, Soderbergh glides over crimes’ complexities. As long as it seems silky, as long as characters are smooth, specifics just don’t matter.

To that end, Ocean’s criminals rarely get the attention they deserve. There just isn’t enough time to explore eleven different thieves and their prodigious talents. Debuting Shaobo Qin’s Yen, whose acrobatic skills are amazing, gets little more than choppy Asian accent jokes in his direction. Damon’s Linus is similarly ignored; skillful at pocket-picking (as Soderbergh shows in a brilliantly coarse sequence), his ability is nothing more than a parlor trick to the Oscar winning director. Excusing a racial hustle perpetrated by Bernie Mac and Damon, Soderbergh further misses an opportunity for development by keeping the characters separate for large tracts of the film.

Where there could have been illicit brilliance, instead there is only Soderbergh’s straightforward presentation of a breezily plotted film. His insertion of a romance between Clooney and Roberts seems especially excessive and unimportant. So while he has a polished cast of characters in his world, he doesn’t have them do anything more substantive than being smooth.

And in this case, being cool just doesn’t hold up.