Steven Soderbergh professes to return to his roots with "Full Frontal," a relatively low-budget, off-the-cuff comedy that represents a far more modest scale and approach than the director's recent movies. But don't let the guerrilla-film trappings fool you: "Full Frontal" is much more lavish and labored over than it pretends to be, but it also adds up to less than its admittedly entertaining parts.
"Full Frontal's" main players are Catherine Keener, who plays a sadistic human resources executive named Lee; David Hyde Pierce as Lee's husband, a vacant, insecure celebrity journalist named Carl; Mary McCormack as Linda, a lonely massage therapist and Lee's sister; Julia Roberts as a movie star named Francesca who is playing a journalist named Catherine in a movie Carl helped write; and Blair Underwood as an actor named Calvin who's playing an actor named Nicholas in that same movie.
Blair Underwood and Julia Roberts star in "Full Frontal."
(Miramax)
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For a framing device, Soderbergh and writer Coleman Hough have the characters at a birthday party, waiting for the appearance of Gus, a movie producer who has links to all of the above; this Godot-like figure is played by David Duchovny in an even more revealing turn than his final appearance on "The Larry Sanders Show."
"Full Frontal" has to do with one 24-hour period in the lives of all of these characters – the artists, writers, posers and walking wounded who glide through Los Angeles like so many sharks and pilot fish. The most entertaining of them all is Nicky Katt, who steals the movie as a pretentious young actor playing Hitler in Carl's play, "The Sound and the Führer." Soderbergh encouraged his cast to improvise, and Katt makes the most of that freedom here, portraying Hitler as a modern-day narcissist ("I'm taking a swim in Lake Me," he explains to Eva Braun at one point) and quoting acting tips from Peter Ustinov and Tom Sizemore.
A larky Hollywood in-joke in the tradition of "The Player," "Full Frontal" resembles even more closely Mike Figgis's "Timecode," a digital-video experiment in which a group of show business stars and apparatchiks cross paths and, ultimately, fates. Soderbergh is experimenting here, too, switching from lush 35mm film to grainy hand-held video, from the artifice of dialogue written for the screen to the more ragged cadences of real life.
Soderbergh and Hough hit the audience with a constant, rapid-fire barrage of entertainment industry references, from those irritating Vanity Fair cover lines ("Brad Pitt Wants to Boil Your Bunny") to Roberts's recent marriage. Throughout, the filmmakers weave in a leitmotif of vampirism, presumably a metaphor for the relationship between the artists who make movies and the businessmen who sell them.
"Full Frontal" is a movie about people making movies about movies, and Soderbergh edits so quickly and effortlessly between those layers of reality that a concentrically ordered universe similar to nesting Russian dolls quickly begins to feel more like a hall of mirrors. Watching "Full Frontal" is a vertiginous, disorienting experience, one that reflects its characters with grotesque, funny and sometimes horrifying exaggeration. No matter how much fun it is to watch – and for hard-core movie fans, it is often enormous fun – there's a certain relief when it stops and we're popped back out to our banal, one-track lives.
Soderbergh has said that "Full Frontal" is a sequel, of sorts, to his first feature film, the 1989 sleeper hit "sex, lies, and videotape." But that might be giving "Full Frontal" too much credit.
Where Soderbergh's first film was about voyeurism but achieved levels of excruciating intimacy, his camera is closer to the characters here but the enterprise feels much more emotionally distant. And there's no denying that, although the filmmaker still approaches his material with an appealing mixture of modesty and supreme self-assurance, his vantage point has changed in 13 years.
With "sex, lies, and videotape," Soderbergh seemed to be knocking on Hollywood's door to get in. Now, as a full-fledged insider, he seems to have made "Full Frontal" to catch a breath of fresh air. More power to him. This movie seems to have been conceived primarily for the benefit of the filmmaker, his friends, and subscribers to Entertainment Weekly and sundry Internet movie gossip sites. As for those of us who have come to admire and eagerly anticipate Soderbergh's consistent dexterity, taste and keen intelligence, we can only hope that "Full Frontal" rejuvenated him enough to keep going another 13 years.
FULL FRONTAL (R, 111 minutes) – Contains profanity and sexual content. At area theaters.
