Full Frontal (July 28/02)
Though he stopped making movies with tiny budgets a while ago, Steven Soderbergh has nonetheless been applying techniques honed during his early days as a filmmaker to his more recent projects. Out of Sight and Traffic contained a wide variety of film stocks and filters, while The Limey and The Underneath played around with time. Now, with Full Frontal, Soderbergh has essentially gone full circle and made his artiest flick yet. Trouble is, it's just not terribly interesting.
Like Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Full Frontal follows several characters over the course of one unusually pivotal day. Carl (David Hyde Pierce), a frustrated writer, is forced to re-evaluate his life after getting fired from his job at a prominent Los Angeles based entertainment magazine. It doesn't help that his marriage to Lee (Catherine Keener) is on its last legs, with neither having the time or energy to simply to talk to one another. Across town, a play written by Carl is set to debut that night, with a temperamental actor starring as Hitler (Nicky Katt). Meanwhile, Lee's sister Linda (Mary McCormack), a masseuse, spends the majority of the film wandering around depressed because she's never had a relationship last more than two months. Finally, there's the movie within the movie, starring Julia Roberts and Blair Underwood as a reporter and actor that fall in love.
Full Frontal's been shot on digital video and, according to Soderbergh, the image has been played around with to such an extent that it's virtually unwatchable. To make things worse, whenever sequences from the movie within the movie pop up, they're shot with normal film - which, after watching the grainy digital footage, is akin to finding water in a desert (treasure it, because it doesn't last long). But besides the aesthetic problems with Full Frontal, the lack of storyline prevents it from becoming anything more than a well-acted movie. Which is fine, I guess, but from someone like Soderbergh, you expect a heck of a lot more than that.
The acting is uniformly fantastic, with Frasier's David Hyde Pierce giving a performance that comes as a total shock to anybody who's only seen his work on that sitcom. As this miserable character, Pierce has to run the gamut of emotions and proves to be up for the task. If the film itself wasn't so weak, he'd be a strong contender for an Oscar nomination next year. Keener's playing the usual sarcastic and sardonic character she always plays (she can currently be seen playing a similar person in the still-playing Lovely and Amazing), which isn't necessarily bad, but it does lessen the impact that her character should have had. Julia Roberts is Julia Roberts, but Blair Underwood - as a big-time Hollywood actor - gives a performance that should open doors for him. Specifically, there's one sequence in which he goes through this rap bemoaning the lack of parts available for African-American actors, and it's easily the highlight of the film. For that brief two or three minutes, the movie finally becomes alive and exciting.
Though Soderbergh insists Full Frontal is a comedy, it's not particularly funny. Nicky Katt, as Hitler, provides the film with its scarce laughs but that's about it. The movie might appeal to those with a skewed perspective on what makes a movie enjoyable, but really, this isn't anything more than a filmed experiment. Do you really think that if Soderbergh hadn't just come off a string of hits, any of these well-known actors would have wanted to perform in this? Not likely.
