Out of Sight
With George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Dennis Farina, Albert Brooks, Steve Zahn, and Catherine Keener.
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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I saw these movies on successive days and couldn’t give you a coherent synopsis of either one to save my life–not only because both pictures leap about in time with willful abandon, but also because they have much more to say in terms of style than in terms of plot. Both films strongly convey the estrangement of exiles–literal exile in the case of Iosseliani, a Georgian based in Paris, and vocational exile in the case of Soderbergh, hired this time not as an auteur but only as a journeyman director. He appears alienated from the story and cast he’s been assigned and from the reason (as opposed to the way) the pieces in his jigsaw puzzle are supposed to fit together. By contrast, Iosseliani–a wry, poetic filmmaker with about a dozen features to his credit–seems alienated from most ideas of human progress and maybe from human behavior as well, though when it comes to filmmaking he seems right at home.
I didn’t believe anything that happened in Out of Sight for a millisecond, but it became clear early on that I wasn’t supposed to. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel I haven’t read and chock-full of familiar faces–including a couple who aren’t credited–the film lives exclusively on generic expectations, not on notions about life or personality that exist independent of other movies. That’s why when Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson turn up we’re supposed to think of Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson–not to mention Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard, and Jackie Brown–more than the characters they happen to be playing. That’s also why when some characters alternate between being brainy and brainless, it isn’t because real people behave that way but because thrillers require brainy characters in some scenes, brainless ones in others. (At least the brains of the spectators, who are expected to sort out all the time shifts, are treated with a little more respect.) The story has something to do with the mutual attraction between a longtime bank robber (Clooney), who breaks out of prison in Florida and plans to rob a billionaire ex-convict (Brooks) in Detroit, and a federal marshal (Lopez), who’s supposed to bring the bank robber in. But what these people actually have on their minds is neither clear nor functional, beyond what’s needed to motivate a few set pieces. By the end the story line has so many loose strings I gave up caring about any of them.
Betrayals abound in every era (Georgia under Stalinism seems especially close to Iosseliani’s heart). Before going off to fight, the medieval king locks his queen’s privates in armor, and the key promptly gets tossed out a window to her lover. A Stalinist official gives his little boy a friendly tour of his torture compound–lovingly inventorying his torture instruments–before packing him off to school, where the boy promptly reports to a teacher a couple of innocuous things his father once said, which eventually yields a report that’s read to a higher-ranking Stalinist official.
