How many different directors is Steven Soderbergh? Saturnine indie wanderer, impish blockbuster engineer, digital dissector of bodies and systems—it’s been twenty-five years and almost thirty features since his first picture, and, as he currently enjoys a hopefully brief retirement, we’re scarcely closer to an answer. No directorial career is a completely straight line, but Soderbergh’s zigs and zags are like the results of a particularly turbulent polygraph test, the lopsided chart of a restless, inquisitive personality. His first three releases (Sex, Lies and Videotape, Kafka, King of the Hill) had established him as a deft art-house presence, and 1995’s The Underneath pointed towards a new direction; it was his first genre effort, and the genre was film noir.
From the very start, it’s clear that generic conventions will be bending to Soderbergh’s aesthetic, rather than the other way around. A driver gazes intently through a truck’s windshield as saturated lighting drenches the images in ominous green. A disembodied conversation bridges the moment to earlier rides, with the character aboard a Greyhound bus and a taxi. The sequence is just two minutes long, and yet it lays the foundation for Out of Sight’s seductive temporal fractures and Traffic’s geographic color filters.
The man in question is Michael Chambers (Peter Gallagher), just out of prison and heading back home for his mother’s (Anjanette Comer) second marriage. The homecoming is an unstable one: Michael’s dinner with brother David (Adam Trese) and new stepfather Ed (Paul Dooley) is shot with rhomboid angles that squeeze the protagonist from one side of the frame to the other, as if the unspoken bitterness beneath polite surfaces were warping the lenses themselves.
Gradually, pieces from Michael’s old life emerge as he sets out to begin a new one. At the center is his relationship with his ex-wife Rachel (Alison Elliott), an aspiring actress he’d left behind with a pile of debts when he went to jail for gambling troubles. Hostility gives way to renewed ardor, and soon she’s confiding in him about the jealous brutalities of her beau Tommy (William Fichtner). Confronted by Tommy, Michael’s shifty reflexes reappear and he proposes himself as the inside man in a payroll robbery, a specially risky gamble given his new position as an driver for Ed’s armored car company. His scruffy compulsions are a nice contrast to the complacent Mr. Me-Decade he played in Sex, Lies and Videotape. Gallagher gives the rhythmically fragmented narrative an effective center, a specter of anxiety always peering from behind his character’s aloofness. “You’re not very present tense,” Rachel murmurs to him, a nifty summary of Michael’s (and the picture’s) discombobulated sense of consciousness and desire.
Updating Don Tracy’s novel Criss Cross (adapted by Soderbergh under the pseudonym Sam Lowry), The Underneath finds noir shadows in bright Austin. Far from the teeming panoramas of Richard Linklater (who, incidentally, pops up in a brief cameo), the Texan city is here unsettlingly metallic and sparse, filled with unspecified grudges and dreamers mooning about TV sets and lottery numbers. In the 1949 film Criss Cross, also adapted from Tracy’s novel, German director Robert Siodmak contemplated the volatile triangle of Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea from a fatalistic distance, watching as fate’s steel traps inexorably snapped around them. Soderbergh’s grasp is less ruthlessly detached and more slyly mannered, with his own set of evocative themes. The inevitably botched heist interests him far less than the liaisons around it, where a half-whispered line from Michael’s brother (“Can’t believe you wore Dad’s suit to Mom’s wedding!”) is enough to suggest an entire welter of tangled relationships.
By his own account, The Underneath was a creative low point for Soderbergh: “How did I become a formalist,” he asked himself in the book Down and Dirty Pictures, dismissing the film as “so sealed-off, it’s just somnambulant.” The director would refresh himself with the experimental Schizopolis and kick off a whole new phase to his career, yet The Underneath remains underrated both as an entry in his oeuvre as well as a prime example of the mid-1990s resurgence of neo-noir tropes. Soderbergh’s camera has always combined the clinical with the oddly sensual, and here it gets quite a workout, from Michael Mann-style, split-diopter widescreen compositions to an astonishingly woozy, seven-minute POV sequence. And, in the violently bungled robbery, there’s already a hint of his Kubrickian fascination with short-circuits that would, in later films like Contagion or Side Effects, expose whole systems. Routinely criticized upon its original release as a throwback, The Underneath instead intrigues as the work of an auteur who can’t help but push forward.
One thought on “Looking Back: “The Underneath””
It’s interesting to me that Soderbergh is so low on The Underneath. It doesn’t match the highs of his best work, but I saw plenty that I liked within it. Gallagher makes for a good leading man who seems harmless, but Soderbergh keeps using flashbacks to under cut everything that we see. The structure really lifts the movie, though it can be a little confusing at the same point.