By 1998, nine years after the sensation of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh might’ve been courting obscurity. The films he directed in the wake of his initial success—among them Kafka, King of the Hill, The Underneath, and Schizopolis—are worthy of your time. With the exception of King of the Hill, though, they seem designed to mostly amuse their creator. These obsessively insular films find Soderbergh experimenting with moods and tones and stylistic gambits that he would mine throughout his career. And, in this context, 1998’s glamorous and gritty Out of Sight can be seen as yet another experiment, as the sort of fusion of formal flexing and commercialism that would enable Soderbergh to rise to the forefront of American filmmakers of his generation. It’s a “one for the studios” project that also allows Soderbergh’s talents to flourish.
Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, with a script by Scott Frank, Out of Sight was supposed to be directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who was coming off the Leonard adaptation Get Shorty. That film, which was also scripted by Frank, sanded down the viciousness of Leonard’s characters. Get Shorty felt in many ways like an SNL sketch, a watchable yet featherweight victory lap for John Travolta the year after Pulp Fiction revived his career. Soderbergh, however, allows the threat of real brutality to hang in the air as counterweight to Leonard and Frank’s jokes and twists. The hoods of Out of Sight are funny and scary, blinkered into lethal incompetency by self-absorption, and rendered by the actors and filmmakers with little of the postmodern smugness that was leaking into the post-Tarantino crime movie.
Yet Soderbergh’s fealty to Leonard isn’t total either, as he invests Out of Sight with the grandeur of ‘60’s- and ’70s-era star-driven crime films such as Bonnie and Clyde and Three Days of the Condor, which is at odds with Leonard’s down-home absurdism. This cocktail of sex and glamour and dirt and decay, in which a bougie star vehicle coexists with a hard-bitten exploitation film as well as a chronologically bifurcated crime pretzel, is irresistible.
Given the myriad, borderline contradictory ambitions and influences and acting styles swimming around in this film, its sense of casualness is amazing. Out of Sight positively swings. It’s also a reminder that Soderbergh’s best films usually exist in the realm of pop art. Stars and genre gimmicks unleash his imagination, particularly his sense of style and texture. In many cases, Soderbergh’s lo-fi art films seem to function as tests for devices that appear in his more extravagant audience-courting projects: blasts of color and jazz, freeze frames, electric, jagged editing rhythms, and narratives that backflip upon themselves.
Like most Elmore Leonard novels, the plot driving Out of Sight matters mostly for housing a tangy collection of shaggy-dog anecdotes. Jack Foley (George Clooney) is a suave yet careless bank robber on the verge of striking out with the law for the third time, the kind of guy who can make robbing a bank with merely a bluff look impossibly cool, yet flood his engine while starting his getaway car. After escaping from prison with the assistance of Buddy (Ving Rhames), and meeting cute with U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), Jack plots to navigate from Miami to Detroit to rip off five million dollars’ worth of diamonds from a rich former cellmate, Ripley (Albert Brooks). Other crooks are after the rocks as well, particularly a retired boxer, Maurice (Don Cheadle), and a clueless stoner double-agent, Glenn (Steve Zahn).
The film’s narrative is split into two primary timelines: the present-tense, in which Jack escapes from jail after the failed opening bank caper and simultaneously pursues Karen and the diamonds; and two years or so before, when Jack, Buddy, Maurice, Glenn, and Ripley all served time together, forging a variety of intricate friendships and rivalries. Soderbergh, working with cinematographer Elliot Davis, refines a trick that he utilized in The Underneath and later in his Oscar-winning Traffic and many other films, subtly color-coding timelines and cities. For instance, Miami is depicted as a hot blast of washed-out, erotic reds, while Detroit exists in an ocean of melancholic blues that signify Jack’s approaching end of the line as well as the regret and carnage that comes to hang over Out of Sight as Maurice and his brother, Kenneth (Isiah Washington), come closer to invading Ripley’s home.
The film is a lark that develops an emotional undertow. Jack and Karen’s could-have-been-absurd romance benefits from two stars tapping into the supernova of their charisma. Neither Clooney nor Lopez have ever been better than they are here, as they invest their sexiness with vulnerability without making a show of it, which only makes them sexier. They’re aided by Soderbergh and Davis, who film them somehow majestically and unsentimentally at once. The soft grit of the images, so very ’70s, humanizes the stars, emphasizing the wrinkles of their clothes and the sweat on their skin, while feverish close-ups render them icons.
When Jack and Karen meet again under the pretense of being civilians, in a posh Detroit hotel, Soderbergh springs one of the greatest images of his career. Karen looks out through a window from a hotel at the city as it snows, annoyed and forlorn after a few schmucks hit on her, and Jack’s reflection in the window materializes out of nowhere, as if she conjured him in a dream. And that’s what Out of Sight is: a daydream. Soderbergh took Leonard’s novel, honored its stylish anarchy, and invested it with a contemporary sense of yearning. Jack and Karen are the stars of a faux ’60s and ’70s crime movie who wish they could be in the real thing. They have to settle for appearing in one of the most purely pleasurable American films of the ’90s, which would set its orchestrator, a poet of displaced characters, onto a stratospheric trajectory.
Image/Sound
The image of this 4K restoration, overseen by cinematographer Elliot Davis, is highly textural, emphasizing the contrasting stocks and grains that have been utilized to vividly differentiate Out of Sight’s various settings. The hot, over-exposed colors of the desert prison and Miami landscapes practically burn through the screen, while the blues of Detroit exude a volatile lushness. Detail in this transfer is superb, honoring the tactility of skin and clothing textures as well as the bold and intricate lighting that gives the film such an intense visual pulse. The two audio tracks, a 5.1 and 2.0 respectively, are highly immersive and attentive to the small diegetic resonances that can be so key to establishing mood and place, from the blaring of a prison alarm to the swift, startling crunch of a baton shattering bone.
Extras
The audio commentary by Steven Soderbergh and Scott Frank isn’t new, but it remains essential, especially for cinephiles. The filmmakers discuss the nuts and bolts of putting a film together with a liveliness and sense of detail that should appeal even to the uninitiated, while offering quite a bit of info about their own collaboration. Frank, not Leonard, invented several of the film’s most memorable scenes, as well as compressing other moments and finding ways to dramatize the novel’s various asides. Meanwhile, Soderbergh, with his dry sense of humor, remains one of the few craftsmen who can render tales of location scouting entertaining.
An archive documentary about the making of Out of Sight is a cut above standard fare, though it’s skippable. A deleted scenes assortment most notably includes, as in previous DVDs, the original version of the famous trunk scene in which Jack kidnaps and flirts with Karen while eluding the feds. Soderbergh isn’t kidding, as this scene, done in one rhythm-killing take, is terrible, especially when compared to the wonderful sequence that would make it to the final cut. George Clooney is especially off his game, giving a schticky, eager-to-please performance that would be more tonally appropriate to his O Brother, Where Art Thou? goofball than to the smoothie he’s playing here. A few trailers round out the package.
Overall
Out of Sight, one of Steven Soderbergh’s best films, and a classic of the American crime film genre, is afforded a beautifully visceral transfer.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
