Putting in a good word for Soderbergh's
Full Circle now that it's out in full. Didn't anticipate the post would be this long but maybe it will encourage anyone still trying to fill a
Succession-sized hole in their schedule to seek it out.
I quite enjoyed the ride. It marks the third collaboration between Soderbergh and screenwriter Ed Solomon (after
Mosaic and
No Sudden Move), but it also seems like the latest installment in a project that began in earnest with
The Laundromat, which found Soderbergh (and there, writer Scott Z. Burns) attempting to find ways to dramatize complex financial crimes. While its aims—untangling labyrinthine global schemes and elucidating the Calvinball rules of capital—are ambitious,
The Laundromat's messy patchwork of genres and tones doesn't come off, and Soderbergh's bizarre sense of humor ensured its reach would be more limited than Adam McKay's earlier companion piece
The Big Short.
No Sudden Move represents a reworked approach and a kind of lateral advance. Instead of direct-to-camera addresses about the big issues, Soderbergh and Solomon integrate ideas about corporate conspiracy, environmental crimes, and the effects of urban renewal on the poor into a twisty genre plot. What begins as a home invasion sets two hired criminals of different backgrounds on a path cutting through a cross-section of Detroit's wealth strata, leading all the way up to an automotive company boardroom.
Matt Damon's climactic monologue was reportedly directly inspired by Ned Beatty's Network speech, with Soderbergh wanting to stop the narrative dead in order to have him deliver what amounts to a rhetorical thesis for the film. It's a grand gesture, and though it does come uncomfortably close to the Banderas/Oldman/Streep addresses of The Laundromat, it also functions within the film as a satisfying way of contrasting the means, methods, and character of white collar and blue collar crime. A good film, and if nothing else No Sudden Move ought to be commended for accomplishing in under two hours what the dreadful fourth season of Fargo labored to do in many more.
builds on the formula set by
No Sudden Move, multiplying characters and plot complications across a larger canvas and moving the action to the current day, and it strikes me as the most confident iteration of this particular storytelling preoccupation yet. Solomon's script is extremely dense in plot incident and backstory, and it's a testament to Soderbergh's Premingerian skill with balancing multiple narrative strands and a large cast that it comes off as cleanly as it does. The story involves two families, one of well-to-do Manhattanites, the other a Guyanese crime syndicate, which converge in a botched kidnapping that subsequently reveals secrets and connections between them.
As a narrative tapestry it's an impressive feat, and it should come as no surprise that Soderbergh's directing instincts remain sharp and robust. In his post-"retirement" phase, Soderbergh has been pretty sparing with handheld camerawork, but
Kimi seems to have decisively broken the seal—
Full Circle finds him back in the jittery-precise handheld mode that made
The Knick so exhilarating. He keeps things at ground level, moving with the characters as they move through city streets and suburban residences, police stations and hospitals, hotels and motels, posh apartments and parking garages (and, memorably, the back of a van), privileging no one character over the rest. The first two episodes, which lay out the characters and then let the kidnapping play out in real time, are thrilling work. The texture of his digital images here looks grittier than usual to my eyes; it looks very nice and occasionally quite striking. The colors of the Guyanese street market in the first episode are so warm and vibrant—enough to leave an impression of a paradise lost once the boys find themselves having to carry out a horrifying initiation ritual in a dingy, hellish back alley in NYC.
One of Soderbergh's not-so-secret strengths is his facility with actors, and the cast here, consisting of veterans and newcomers alike, is almost uniformly great. (The one surprising bum note for me was Zazie Beetz, who plays her stock maverick cop a little too casually obnoxious at nearly all times). The actors playing the Guyanese crew are real standouts (and one wonders why this colorful accent and slang haven't graced the screen before!). I don't think I've seen a character quite like CCH Pounder's superstitious criminal matriarch Savitri Mahabir, whose sweet grandmotherly demeanor (at one point she winkingly quotes Bobby McFerrin) can shift on a dime to cold authority and menacing single-mindedness. The moral and emotional center of the series rests on newcomer Adia's Natalia, an impressive performance with some delightfully funny banter as well. Even a one-note character like Jharrel Jerome's Aked is enlivened by the actor's intense eyes and Kanye-esque snarl, a lively soloist in the symphony.
In interviews Soderbergh has stressed the difficulty of adapting drama to a world where smartphones make people accessible to one another 24/7, but he and Solomon deserve praise for how seamlessly they integrate smartphones within the thriller mechanics and general fabric here. Many initial press articles about the series highlight the tense moment in E2 where a character
must race against his rapidly dying phone battery—not as contrived as it seems given that the events are taking place at the tail end of a very long day.
But even their passive existence in the show's world feels just right. For example, in the middle of a furious brainstorming session in E3, a character suddenly thinks to make a quick Google search only to find "Not an article, not even a fucking New York Post!", stoking his suspicions and providing him an epiphany. At another point, a character figures out where someone is by
accessing his fiancée's account on a food delivery app (a common enough practice among couples) and checking the last location where she had food delivered.
And many more examples. The economic issues relating to First World exploitation of the Third World are for the most part right on the surface, though the depiction is uncommonly nuanced. In
Full Circle, the exploiter/exploited dynamic doesn't fall cleanly along racial lines; Mrs. Mahabir is very quick to take advantage of the migrants in trouble in Guyana, whom she knows about because she employs Natalia as a personal masseuse (a suggestive upstairs/downstairs dynamic). And the final plot revelation is about
the collusion between the McCuskers and a Guyanese politician to rewrite zoning laws in order to profit from an investment scheme.
The focus on class is refreshing, and it is embedded in the drama's genre stratification as well. For the Brownes, the kidnapping sets off a kind of domestic melodrama involving questions of fidelity and parentage, exposing secrets about the origins of the family's wealth and jeopardizing their marriage. (Their son remains safe in a cabin upstate, and the worst they have to put up with is Zazie Beetz's insistent postal inspector). The young Guyanese characters however remain trapped in a film noir; the kidnapping sends them spiraling through increasingly claustrophobic, life-or-death situations where they find themselves at the mercy of more powerful forces, requiring constant movement and quick thinking.
These plots intersect again a few more times, and the final encounter between Louis and Sam in the latter's apartment is unexpectedly reconciliatory and immensely satisfying. Sam's decision to give Louis the painting is the first step in her atonement, a recognition of her responsibility for the chain of events set in motion decades ago that has led all the way to the arrival of this boy, thousands of miles from home, at her door. The past's tendency to resurface is a quintessential noir theme, and it is all over
Full Circle, popping up even in the prohibition era tunnel underneath Garmen Harry's house that allows him and Xavier to escape the raid—the city itself bears traces of the past.
Soderbergh also caps off the Guyanese plot with one of the strongest images of his career:
Without a big ad campaign centering it in the conversation, the series unfortunately seems destined to be overlooked among the glut of streaming options. It's a shame, because while it is by no means flawless, it is very good—clean, fluid genre filmmaking, the kind that's easy to undervalue but which is very pleasurable to watch.