Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey and Reverberations of the Past

Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey sounds on paper like an old-fashioned, lean and mean noir, following a British ex-con who travels to Los Angeles to avenge his daughter’s death, which he knows in his bones was perpetuated by her record producer boyfriend. With flamboyantly macho crime films in season in the 1990s, thanks to the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, The Limey could’ve easily been a pastiche with R-rated seasoning. As overseen by Soderbergh, though, it’s something richer and more mysterious.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs fashioned The Limey into a collision of three waves of cinema: British New Wave, New Hollywood, and ’90s Hollywood. The Brit of the title is played by Terence Stamp, the record producer by Peter Fonda, with Barry Newman as an underworld connection and Lesley Ann Warren as a voice of conscience. On the periphery, embodying the flavor of the then-current moment, are ace cuckoos like Nicky Katt and Luis Guzmán, as well as Soderbergh himself, behind the scenes, as one of the preeminent rising ’90s auteurs. The actors are all vivid and moving, yet there’s something intellectualized in their assemblage, collectively suggesting found objects who’ve been curated by Soderbergh into a cinematic gallery.

The Limey is one of many American films released in 1999 that seemed to be saying goodbye to the rebel spirit that allowed indies and mainstream movies to comingle as they had in the ’70s. David Fincher’s Fight Club ended with an act of rebellion or terrorism, depending on whom you ask, but it’s infused with futility. Blow up banks all you like, but the pull of IKEA, Starbucks, and blockbuster movies is too strong. The Matrix has virtually the same ending, concluding with an act of resistance, yet it’s enslavement to corporate culture that the Wachowskis express most viscerally. Magnolia is Paul Thomas Anderson’s last attempt to date to craft an Altmanesque tapestry, before its initial rejection sent him into less populated, stylistically austere realms of regret and melancholy—making films that don’t even try to register on the mainstream radar. One could go on, as there’s a book to be written about the American cinema of 1999. Nine years later, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man would start a blockbuster wave vaster and more decisive than even the one begotten by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in the late ’70s.

The Limey understands that rebellion often yields complacency or irrelevancy. Settling might be in the human DNA. Wilson (Stamp), a hood who’s spent much of his life in prison, who’s haunted by pastoral flashbacks that Soderbergh visualizes with borrowed footage of Stamp from Ken Loach’s 1969 debut feature, Poor Cow, may have never sold out exactly. But he’s aged into obsolescence. This taut fox still has teeth, but so what? His mucking about in L.A., killing people to put a scare into Valentine (Fonda), accomplishes nothing apart from rubbing each man’s part in the death of Wilson’s daughter, Jenny (Melissa George), in their faces.

Valentine played his hand much better than Wilson, cashing in on the California soft-rock craze of the ’60s, which mirrors Fonda’s fling with the zeitgeist courtesy of Easy Rider. But the dreams Valentine sold of freedom and love were bankrolled by raw, mercenary American power that bled over into criminal enterprises. The flipside of such dreams are the nightmares of violence and financial and sexual exploitation that the Manson family murders signified and that were signified once again, as the underbelly of the ’90s cinema wave, by the uncovering of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual crimes. The Limey’s ruing of the lost vigor of the British and New Hollywood waves is intentional, while its requiem for the ’90s arises inevitably in hindsight.

This baggage is mostly subtextual, though it pushes to the surface in startling moments, such as when Valentine describes the ’60s to his young girlfriend, Adhara (Amelia Heinle)—a dead ringer for Wilson’s daughter—as a half-remembered dream of something that perhaps never existed, yet while you were there you knew your way around, you knew the language. Valentine is describing nostalgia in general, but he captures what the wild art and hedonism and sense of possibility of the legend of the ’60s sounds like to those who weren’t there—those bored with the timidity of corporate-controlled, ruthlessly branded, relentlessly politically correct pop culture. In other words, those who could get drunk on Easy Rider’s sense of pleasure without having to consider the turmoil and politics of its time. And Valentine says his piece while impeccably dressed, while cleaning his teeth in a luxe bathroom in his house overlooking one of L.A.’s canyons. His is a place that seems as if it could tumble over at any moment.

Nostalgia drives The Limey, uniting its tarnished men. Wilson’s quest to avenge Jenny is an effort to invest his wasted life with meaning. Jenny is the yearning to reclaim and re-account for the wilderness of the ’60s writ in doomed flesh. Like that of Fonda, Stamp’s career burnt out in a hot flash, with glimmers here and there, before he resurfaced as a distinguished character actor. Like Fonda, Stamp effortlessly projects a need to make what’s left count. Wilson’s crimes and stints in prison could thematically mean anything. They could also just be a character detail, but they feel like so much more, stand-ins for frittering something away.

Wilson, an absent father, might’ve driven Jenny toward Valentine, an absent boyfriend. Even Valentine’s new girlfriend, who prides herself on superficiality and a sense of self-preservation, describes Valentine as being more of a “vibe” than a person. Valentine embodies vampiric ease, while Wilson is iron-clad fury. In one of the film’s subtlest, strangest tricks, Valentine arises as the more likeable of the men. Fonda plays him as a passenger in his own life, which renders Valentine vulnerable even when he’s at his most manipulative.

It often feels like a fool’s errand to linger on theme so much when discussing Soderbergh’s work. In the tradition of artists who’re thinking of the long game in terms of how their work will continue to resonate, Soderbergh is resistant to thematic decoding, to the sort of think pieces, including the one you’re currently reading, that run the risk of rendering haunting art banal. Taken literally as one of Soderbergh’s formalist objects, The Limey is a terse and atmospheric crime film with an unusually vivid sense of regret that’s palpable, one presumes, even for audiences unfamiliar with what a Stamp and Fonda juxtaposition may symbolize. Yet that vividness is achieved via all of these submerged textures. When there’s truly little under the surface of a Soderbergh film, when he truly seems to honoring his claim as an unpretentious craftsman, the result is stylish yet forgettable genre films like The Underneath or Kimi.

The weight of Stamp and Fonda’s presences deepens Soderbergh’s aesthetic. Whereas Sex, Lies, and Videotape lingered on long stretches of talk, The Limey turns dialogue into action. Soderbergh frequently splits conversations across multiple timelines, having Wilson speak of Jenny over footage of her as a child, or over a close-up of his face as he sits on a plane either entering or leaving L.A. This sort of cross-cutting occurs throughout the film, wedding various timelines into a strand that suggests both a singular, collective timeframe and no frame at all. The Limey captures that sense we can have of missing out on a moment before it’s even occurred, as we can trap ourselves in the amber of preconceived nostalgia.

Such an emotion was conjured by the fragmented sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland’s characters in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which Soderbergh emulated for a sequence in Out of Sight. Such “out of time” sensations were also evoked by one of The Limey’s influences, John Boorman’s Point Blank, which turned a sequence of Lee Marvin walking down a corridor into hard-boiled existentialist poetry. In The Limey, Soderbergh does these filmmakers one better by sustaining such sensations for the entirety of the film’s running time.

The Limey ultimately belongs to the tradition of the classic L.A. film, neo-noir division. Its sense of male inadequacy and anxiety connects it on an atomic level to David Lynch’s Lost Highway from two years earlier. The Limey’s notion of women squandered over and over in a loop of male avarice retrospectively suggests Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which would be released two years after The Limey and also feature Melissa George as a woman at the center of a violent tragedy that implicitly indicts the entertainment industry. All of these reverberations in an 88-minute film with a handful of characters that’s tight as a drum and will certainly give crime film aficionados their traditional money’s worth. Soderbergh couldn’t have planned for all The Limey’s facets. It was a perfect storm: Wedding technique with intuition and personal taste, he opened up a vortex, fashioning a genre film as art object as ravaged ode of longing.

Steven Soberbergh’s The Limey is now available on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray form Lionsgate.