FULL FRONTAL (2002)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Steven Soderbergh's "Full Frontal" is quite a movie experience but it is not a coherent one, and I kind of appreciated that. Soderbergh has created a mini-canvas of lives in Los Angeles but without the multi-layered connections of a Robert Altman or an Alan Rudolph flick, or for that matter Paul Thomas Anderson.
"Full Frontal" takes place in Hollywood where movie stars like Brad Pitt make movies on the city streets and people walk around dressed in full Dracula costumes. This is also the Hollywood of screenwriters, massage therapists, producers, reporters, personnel directors, animal doctors, and so on. They are all conflicted in their lives because of bad relationships that need desperate mending. Lee (Catherine Keener) is a personnel director who loathes her job and humiliates her employees by asking them personal questions (get it?) while holding a globe. She is unhappily married to Carl (David Hyde Pierce), a screenwriter who also writes magazine articles and gets fired from that job because he has confused quirks with standards. Lee feels frustrated and takes her frustrations out on her sister Linda (Mary McCormack), a masseuse who can't find the right man in her life so she looks for one on the Internet. Their relationship is the most arresting and fascinating of the lot.
Meanwhile, there is a director named Ed (Enrico Colantoni), who Linda is about to meet for the first time in Tucson. He is working on a new play about Hitler as some sort of buffoon (it is entitled "The Sound and the Fuhrer"). The terrifically funny Nicky Katt is playing Hitler though there is a method to his madness - he likes to rewrite the stage directions and insult the actors. And let's not forget Blair Underwood as a movie star in the film-within-the-film called "Rendezvous," who begins to explain the method to his madness and his standing as a black actor to a smitten reporter (Julia Roberts). So what we are seeing is a movie relationship and the real relationships in "reality" - what is the real truth being explored here? Or perhaps Soderbergh is saying that life is like a movie, hence all relationships are like movies. It is possible we are not seeing a "realistic" relationship in the entire film.
"Full Frontal" is one quirky film alright, as playful and entrancing as Soderbergh's "Schizopolis." The point of the movie may be that a movie is a movie, never a reality. This is not a new conceit. Consider that Alejandro Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain" had the director appear in the last scene showing that his film was not a real film, hence a film crew is seen in the shot. Ah, but a film is still being made and someone is still shooting a scene of the director making his remarks. The point is that film is not a reality anyway, only an approximation. Still, the last shot of "Full Frontal" is what I call a "glass breakage" scene where the reality of the film is broken by its reflection of an inner truth nobody was aware of, or thought of. It's nothing new but it did catch me by surprise.
"Full Frontal" is shot on grainy, low-grade video and 35 mm film. Again, the technique of applying different film stocks is nothing new but it feels appropriate for the material. It feels like Soderbergh made this film to renew his faith in the magic of filmmaking at a guerrilla stage, and who can blame him? After making the excellent "Traffic" and the fluffy "Ocean's Eleven," he is back on track making the kind of films that gave him his shot of recognition in the first place. Maybe in a few years I'll look back at this review and say to myself, "how could I have given 'Full Frontal' a rave review?" Well, nothing will hinder my praise - "Full Frontal" is one of the few engaging films of 2002.
