UNDERNEATH

“There’s something very powerful about being absent.” –Allison Elliott, The Underneath

I’m an unabashed Steven Soderbergh fan, and have been his whole career. I like the photos they used of him next to the words “mercurial” and “aloof” in the dictionary. I cheer when he has a hit. I drink when he has a flop. His career arc is an eventful one: Palme D’Or winner at 26 (at the time, the youngest winner ever), virtually out of the business at 30, Oscar-winning director of two blockbuster hits in one year at 36, and now in his 40s either the director of another hit installment in the Ocean’s Eleven series or tilting at non-linear micro-budget DV windmills. My personal history with Soderbergh’s work goes back to 1992, when my junior high acting teacher distributed a Xerox about the nationwide casting call for King of the Hill; I thought, “Hey, I’ll audition for a movie, why the hell not,” until a “friend” informed me that fat kids didn’t get parts in movies, and because my “friend” was “cool” I assumed he knew what he was talking about and didn’t go. Sigh.

Without my box-office magnetism helping out, King of the Hill ended up underperforming at the box office (grossing $1.3 million on an $8 mil budget). After the similar disappointment of Kafka, Soderbergh’s career momentum from sex, lies, and videotape had almost vanished by the time he decided remake the film noir classic Criss Cross as The Underneath. His will to direct had left him as well—he said about making The Underneath: “To sit on a movie set at age thirty-one and wonder whether you even want to do this, having no other real skills, is so terrifying and depressing. . . I was bored, I was empty, I’d just run out of gas. I felt, If I have to set up another over-the-shoulder shot, I’m just gonna shoot myself.” (source: Down and Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind; ISBN: 0-684-86529-X). Atta boy, Steve! Positive mental attitude!

He’s since virtually disowned the resulting movie, for a variety of reasons above and beyond his gloomy mental state during production. One being that at the time it came out—April 1995—crime pictures and noir were very much in vogue due to the advent of one Quentin Tarantino. As a result, when The Underneath jumps around chronologically and in scenes like the one where an uncredited Soderbergh explains to Peter Gallagher the difference between “probable” and “doubtful” on a football injury report, one feels the shadow of QT. While unfair, it’s inevitable, kind of like being an English rock ‘n’ roll band in the mid-60s—people were going to lump you in with the Beatles no matter what you did.

Criss Cross itself had a bit of a troubled production history—the producer died during production, and Burt Lancaster subsequently got pissy when director Robert Siodmak and screenwriter Daniel Fuchs decided to shift the focus of the story from the heist to the love triangle between Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo, and Dan Duryea. (That the remake should also be a source of discontent in its creators makes ya wonder whether we’re dealing with the film noir Scottish play here).

(requisite spoiler warning)

The Underneath stars Peter Gallagher and his magnificent eyebrows as Michael Chambers, a compulsive gambler who’s cleaned up his act and is returning to his hometown, Austin, Texas, for his mother’s wedding. On the bus on the way into town he meets and hits it off with a pretty young woman (the very pretty indeed Elisabeth Shue) who’s just starting work as a bank teller. They exchange numbers. When Michael gets home he meets the guy his mother’s marrying (Paul Dooley), who offers him a job driving an armored car (which, in the opening shot of the movie, Peter Gallagher is driving with Dooley in the passenger seat). Michael’s cop brother (Adam Trese) tells him that his ex-girlfriend is still around, and dating “some hood.” Michael says, “I’m just here for the wedding,” but of course in the next scene he’s pursuing his ex Rachel (Allison Elliott) at a bar, and meeting her new boyfriend Tommy, the aforementioned “hood” (William Fichtner, even more caffeinated than he usually is).

This is all established within the first 15 minutes. We spend the next 40 revisiting Michael’s past as a chronic gambler and how it torpedoed his relationship with Rachel, all while in the present day he’s trying to get back with her, much to his cop brother’s disapproval. The heist, to which we’ve been flashing forward periodically for the whole movie, isn’t even proposed until the 54 minute mark, almost two-thirds of the way in, as a means for Michael to avoid being killed by Tommy for messing around with Rachel. This is the point where the intriguing, well-acted family drama transitions into the slightly less plausible world of the heist thriller, but fortunately it stays intriguing and well-acted.

The heist itself, arranged by an anonymous figure who the scary-in-his-own-right Tommy professes to find scary, does not go well. Michael, as an armored-truck driver, is to act as an inside man, and anonymous gunmen are to relieve him on the truck’s contents, which Michael speculates may contain as much as a million dollars in cash (it ends up being a million three). But, Paul Dooley insists on riding with Michael. The bank at which they decide to rob the armored car is the one where Elisabeth Shue works, and she comes down to meet the armored truck at just the wrong time. Michael, trying to protect both Elisabeth Shue and Paul Dooley at the same time, gets shot, and Paul Dooley gets killed (what sick son of a bitch would do such a thing to Paul Dooley is not revealed—the heist guys’ faces stay obscured). Michael becomes a bit of a hero in the media for nobly though unsuccessfully defending the truck. He ends up laid up in the hospital, where he’s visited by his distraught mother, a suspicious, recently-interrogated Elisabeth Shue, the cops who interrogated Elisabeth Shue, the president of the armored truck company (Joe Don Baker), and the cop brother, who is convinced that Michael is the inside man and informs him that his police protection has been pulled, since “who would want to kill a hero?” Sure enough, Tommy sends a guy to the hospital to abduct Michael, who brings him out to a remote cabin where, in short order a) the errand boy is killed, b) Rachel engineers things so Michael can get his hands on a gun, c) Michael shoots Tommy, d) Tommy, not quite dead, knocks Michael out of his wheelchair before Michael shoots him a second, fatal time, and e) Rachel gives Michael a speech about the joys of being emotionally and physically remote before leaving with all the money. The movie ends with Rachel buying a scratch-off lottery ticket at a gas station, as Joe Don Baker follows her into the night (whether to ambush her and recover his money, or because he’s in on the whole scam remains ambiguous).

There are a lot of interesting elements in The Underneath. The lottery ticket business recurs throughout the movie, with Rachel auditioning to be the girl who calls the lottery numbers on TV, and Michael’s mother compulsively playing the lottery, as a way to get rich quickly without having to work for it, much like the armored-car heist. The idea of shooting different narrative strands with different tints and film stocks to make them readily distinguishable that Soderbergh later employed in Traffic originated here, with the flashforwards to Michael driving the armored car in a neon green, all the scenes where he’s trying to reconnect with Rachel in an icy blue, and a multicolored window in Michael’s mother’s house through which Michael, photographed from different angles, ponders different things.

On the other hand, there are other things that make one understand Soderbergh’s dissatisfaction with the movie. It’s a heist movie where you don’t realize it’s a heist movie until it’s almost over. The hospital sequence, where Michael is laid up in bed while everyone comes in to chat, is shot first-person from his perspective for a little flash and rambles on forever before getting to the point, making it kind of a fractal for the whole movie. And, much as the quote I prefaced this post with implies, it’s not the warmest of movies. In fact, all of these elements make The Underneath the perfect Soderbergh picture for its detractors: a whole lot of visual flash, but a mess story-wise and so cold your tongue could get stuck to it.

So why, you may ask yourself, have I gone on at such length about it, and furthermore, even more confusingly, why do I like it? The latter is something I can’t explain and don’t particularly want to, aside from the fact that flashy camerawork and shit like matching edits by color rather than continuity work on me the way fake tits work on other men. The former, though, I will explain. Coming as it did at a low ebb in Soderbergh’s career, the failure of The Underneath made him hit rock bottom creatively and personally. He followed it with an absolutely batshit insane picture called Schizopolis, which renewed his will to direct and—bizarrely—led to an old friend of his at Universal offering him the chance to direct Out of Sight, which in a way was his second debut, and inaugurated the style he’s been working in ever since.

All the pieces matter, ladies and gentlemen. A director’s failures are sometimes even more characteristic of his/her vision—not to mention even more important career-wise—than the successes. And, a good director’s worst pictures are usually better than a bad director’s best.