Magic Mike, a new comedy-drama about male strippers, resembles numerous other films by Steven Soderbergh, but only to a certain extent. The subject matter promises a companion piece to The Girlfriend Experience (2009), which dealt with prostitution, but that movie was cool and detached whereas this one is warm and engaging. The lower-middle-class milieu sometimes recalls Erin Brockovich (2000), with Julia Roberts, but that was an issue drama about community building, whereas most of the characters in Magic Mike are out for themselves. Soderbergh shot the major dance sequences in long takes, using only a few camera setups, just as he did the fight scenes of his recent action movie Haywire. Yet in that movie the approach serves to generate suspense, whereas here it establishes familiarity with the people in the story.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
None of these characteristics convey any personal relationship between artist and material—which may be the most characteristic thing about them. Soderbergh is the David Bowie of American filmmaking, a chameleon who’s covered so many different genres and styles that he seems enigmatic. In the past five years, though—an extraordinarily active period in which the director has threatened to retire and then reversed himself—recurring themes and images have provided clues to his identity. In 2008 Soderbergh decided to abandon film for the Red digital camera, a lightweight model that comes closer than previous designs to approximating the look of celluloid. The technology has permitted Soderbergh to make films quickly and cheaply (Magic Mike was produced for just $5 million, the lowest budget in years for a Warner Brothers release) and inspired him to work more intuitively. As a result, a recognizable perspective is beginning to emerge.
On a more basic level, this camera setup conveys an investigative curiosity, as if the director were a fly on the wall. Working with the Red, a director needn’t spend as much time preparing each shot, and in Magic Mike the offhandness can be felt in the casual, even jokey wide-screen compositions. Introducing the title character (Channing Tatum), Soderbergh places him just right of center, one of his sexual conquests getting dressed in the lower left-hand corner while a second lies naked in bed in the lower right-hand corner; the witty image hints at licentiousness while chastely separating the players. When the action moves to Xquisite, where Mike performs in an all-male revue, Soderbergh arranges the dancers in different spatial combinations. One of the biggest laughs comes from a deep-focus shot in which two men talk in the background while a third works himself with a penis pump in the foreground, his cock taking up the entire left side of the frame.
- A fascination with how things work. This is the crucial aspect of Soderbergh’s recent films, which have concerned the minute workings of businesses, vocations, and international communications. Though rooted in the elaborate heists of Out of Sight and the Ocean movies, it flowered in the five-hour Che. Since then Soderbergh’s movies have been rife with minute details of the characters’ work (even the short scenes set in law offices in The Informant! feel meticulously researched). His protagonists are constantly—and consciously—navigating through some large system: the shrewd comedy of The Girlfriend Experience comes from showing how even a self-employed call girl must participate in a larger economic structure to advance her career.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
