Beyond the Multiplex

Soderbergh's vision of life in a "Bubble"
As far as I'm concerned, most of the attention devoted to Steven Soderbergh's twisted, deadpan little murder mystery, "Bubble," is for the wrong reasons. Yes, it's noteworthy that Soderbergh and his production partners are pioneering a new distribution model, known as "day-and-date," and like everybody else who follows the film biz, I'll be eager to see how it works. On Friday, "Bubble" will open in a fairly typical roster of big-city art-house theaters, but that night it will also be available as a pay-per-view movie on the HDNet network. Then, on Tuesday, Jan. 31, the DVD will be released through normal retail outlets.

This is an inevitable switch in the indie distribution model, with a lot of upside and a lot of downside. The cool part is that people in Hawaii and Alabama and downtown Baltimore and upstate New York -- basically, anywhere in the 98 percent of the country's land mass where movies like this don't play -- can see them almost as soon as jerk-ass urban-dwellers like me. The less cool part is the question of whether this sounds the death knell of the moviegoing experience, and the fact that film critics and other so-called experts will whine about this in panel discussions from now to kingdom come.

And yes, it's also interesting that Soderbergh has walked away, at least temporarily, from directing a bunch more sequels to "Ocean's Eleven," and has undertaken to make a series of six (!) new zero-budget films, shot in authentic American locations on digital video with nonprofessional actors. These fascinating news items tend to overwhelm the question of whether A) the resulting movie is any good, and B) anybody will want to see it.

I long ago stopped believing I could predict moviegoers' tastes -- the best way to do that, I think, is to throw the I Ching or consult the entrails of a vole -- but I'd rate "Bubble" at no better than a C-plus for artistic achievement and a D-minus for audience appeal. In one sense, it accomplishes its goals efficiently by making you feel, in less than 80 minutes, as if you've gotten permanently trapped in the dead-end, trailer-park lives of its working-class characters. I've never been so grateful to get out of a theater, turn my cellphone back on and plug myself into a $4 Starbucks latte.

A friend of mine calls this kind of thing "guilt art." Don't get me wrong: Taking us places we've never been, and giving us some vicarious experience of lives very different from our own, are among the noblest missions motion pictures can perform. But if there's no reason to make the journey, beyond a sort of voyeuristic horror at the wasted lives and poverty -- spiritual and material -- that we can find in our own country, I'm not sure what the point is. Compared to the America of "Bubble," Lars von Trier's mythical America is a beacon of hope and a barrel of laughs.

Set in the depressed factory towns along the West Virginia-Ohio border, "Bubble" offers a grim documentary-style realism that is intermittently impressive. Soderbergh's always been an able visual craftsman with an eye for the striking detail, and much of the so-called action here occurs in a factory where the heads, arms, legs and bodies for dolls are made. Watching the workers pry these naked pink forms from the machine that has molded them out of liquid latex is creepier, and more interesting, than anything that actually happens in Coleman Hough's screenplay.

Unfortunately, I think those mass-produced dolls are also meant to be symbolic of Hough's characters and their extruded-latex lives. The principal character is a doughy middle-aged woman named Martha, played by Debbie Doebereiner, whose real-life day job is managing a KFC franchise. Martha becomes enmeshed in a sort-of triangle involving her sweet, feckless friend Kyle (Dustin James Ashley) and a pretty, pushy girl named Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins) who has just started at the plant. One of these people winds up dead, but if you don't figure out almost instantly who killed her and why, you've flunked Obvious Plot Twists 101.

The things I liked about "Bubble" were its incidental, almost-documentary elements, and didn't have much to do with its bonehead mystery plot: Kyle's mom on the couch in their trailer home, cracking up at "America's Funniest Home Videos"; real-life Parkersburg, W.Va., detective Decker Moody, playing himself with a Zen-like, methodical calm; Kyle and Rose on a date, pretty bored with each other but even more bored by their environment; Rose's ex-boyfriend Jake (Kyle Smith), a self-aggrandizing "graffiti artist" who seems like this town's only spark of life.

I don't know how aggressively Soderbergh prepared these people to perform for the camera, but the fairest thing to say is that some, like Smith and Wilkins, can do it a little, while others rely on that deadpan staring-at-the-floor mode that passes for naturalism in a lot of independent films. Doebereiner struggles valiantly to go from stolid normalcy to the edge of psychotic breakdown, but I don't think the script or the director do her any favors by veering suddenly into existential melodrama.

Whatever Soderbergh is trying to do here -- knockoff Dostoevski? an American grotesque, à la Harmony Korine? a study in unblinking moral-spiritual realism, in the vein of Bresson's "Pickpocket"? a never-produced episode of "The Twilight Zone"? -- I suspect you have to file the whole thing under Noble Experiment Gone Awry. Without a famous director and a news angle attached, this film wouldn't be on pay-per-view or in theaters, on Friday night or any other night.

"Bubble" opens Jan. 27 in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tucson, Ariz., Washington and various other cities, with more to follow. It also airs on HDNet beginning Jan. 27, and will be released Jan. 31 on DVD.

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