Waste watching

National Review, June 8, 2009 by Ross Douthat

THERE are very few directors in Hollywood--below the Steven Spielberg league, that is--who can make absolutely any film they want. Consider Ron Howard and Steven Soderbergh, for instance, both wildly successful moviemakers by any standard. The two have taken different paths to fame and fortune--Howard as an insider's insider, a child actor turned studio go-to guy; Soderbergh as an indie-movie pioneer--but they've ended up in similar places, alternating between big-budget popcorn movies and less commercial projects, with the former's box-office grosses making the latter possible.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Allowing for such constraints, though, both Howard and Soderbergh have about as much artistic freedom as anyone working in a big-budget, high-risk industry can reasonably expect. They own their films--blockbusters and prestige projects alike--in a way that few directors can ever hope to do. Which makes it fair, I think, to look at their most recent efforts and wonder, What is possessing them to make these movies?

This month, Howard is doing the blockbuster thing with Angels and Demons, the sequel to his 2006 adaptation of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Soderbergh, meanwhile, is releasing his latest low-budget effort, The Girlfriend Experience, a minimalist affair set in New York City during the financial crisis. One will make a bazillion dollars; the other will show up late at night on the Independent Film Channel. And they're both almost entirely lousy.

Presumably Howard did Angels and Demons for the money. (Presumably Tom Hanks, back for another go-round as Robert Langdon, the "symbologist" hero of The Da Vinci Code, did the same: His sour, smug performance suggests a man killing time till he cashes his next paycheck.) But at some point, surely, the millions piled atop the millions aren't worth pouring your time into making Brown's talky, turgid thrillers come to something approximating life.

Angels is actually marginally better than the deservedly panned Code: There are fewer lectures and more movement, as Langdon & Co. race through Rome trying to foil a plot to blow up a papal conclave, and the anti-Catholicism isn't slathered on quite as thick. (The screenplay lops away some of Brown's more lurid digressions--the pope fathering a child on a nun by artificial insemination, and so forth.) But the modest improvements only heighten the uselessness of having talented people involved not once, but twice, with this money-minting but misbegotten franchise. After all, Brown's philippics against institutional religion and, more to the point, his evangelizing on behalf of pantheism, syncretism, and so forth are crucial to the books' success. Toning down the propagandizing produces a slightly less irritating movie, but a much more pointless one.

Howard is no auteur; his best films, from Parenthood to Apollo 13, are squarely middlebrow, and his worst ones are glossy, predictable Oscar-bait. (Think of A Beautiful Mind--or better, don't.) But even his failures usually seem like good-faith attempts to make good movies. Not so this one.

The Girlfriend Experience is tripe of a different sort. The original idea isn't a bad one: Soderbergh's film follows a high-priced Manhattan escort who moves from client to client during last autumn's financial degringolade. Sex, money, power, ruin--from such ingredients great movies can be made.

Instead we get a gimmick, and a void. Soderbergh has cast Sasha Grey, an upand-coming porn star given to spouting off about existentialism between orgies, as the intimacy-peddling prostitute, and she delivers exactly the kind of vacant, attitudinizing performance you'd expect that kind of stunt casting to produce. The emptiness at the heart of the movie is matched by the emptiness at the extremities, where a dull supporting cast improvises its way through an underdeveloped script. Between last year's Che and this, Soderbergh has managed a rare twofer: He's made both guerrilla warfare and prostitution deadly dull to watch.

I suppose you could claim the deadness is the point: Through Grey's call girl, her personal-trainer boyfriend (get it? he's selling his body to clients too!), and the various market-watching Masters of the Universe who line up for their services, we're getting a portrait of a society that's sold its soul and lost its personality along the way. But that's just excusemaking. The vacancy--intellectual, moral, personal--isn't an artistic statement; it's just an artistic failure.

And as with Angels and Demons, it's a failure of conception, rather than of execution. Even the finest director can have a misfire now and then. But "misfire" implies that the film in question had a chance of firing right--and it's hard to imagine a world in which either Howard's thriller or Soderbergh's porn-inflected little mood piece turned out as anything save dross. Both are bad ideas in theory as well as in practice; both seem like projects that a good director shouldn't even consider touching. And their very existence should reduce our estimation of the men responsible for them.