In anticipation of two days of extreme heat earlier this
summer, we bought two new fans to compensate for our air conditioner being on
the fritz. The one we’re using in our living room ended up being a regrettable
decision for a couple reasons, one of which is that it’s got tripod legs. That
sounds like a good idea, except the thing is always on the verge of tipping
over if you clip it with your elbow while walking by. (I resisted the tripod
legs as long as possible, but the other ones were too expensive or didn’t fit
what we were looking for.)
The second reason is that it’s too loud, even on its lowest
setting. You don’t notice it if it’s not competing with anything. But once you
throw the TV into the mix, it can be quite difficult to get every bit of spoken
dialogue, especially if it’s delivered in a rush. Even turning up the volume
doesn’t totally help, as the additional noise pollution still degrades the
quality of the words and makes you less able to discern small differences in
consonants and other intangible elements of speech.
The High Flying Bird
dialogue is delivered in such a rush that it’s like a competition between Aaron
Sorkin and David Mamet to see whose characters can speak faster. The writer of
that dialogue is Tarell Alvin McCraney, which makes it all the more
disappointing, as the dialogue in Moonlight
is nothing like that. (Thanks, Barry Jenkins, for your steadying hand. As I
look at it now, Jenkins got the Moonlight
screenplay credit and McCraney the “story by” credit.)
But the director of that dialogue is Steven Soderbergh, so
he’s equally to blame, perhaps more so, for failing to require pauses and
moments for the other actor to react. I appreciate Soderbergh’s economy (the
movie is only 90 minutes), but he should have cut scenes (of which there were
ample good choices to select from) rather than cram 105 pages of dialogue into
90 minutes.
I wondered, though, if my failure to get oriented in this
story – so much so that I went desperately looking for a plot synopsis
afterward on Wikipedia, to no avail – was more a function of the fact that I
wasn’t appreciating the nuances of this rapid-fire dialogue, because I couldn’t
hear them. There were certain scenes where when I got to the end, I said “I
just hope that gets explained in the next scene.” It usually didn’t.
Because of my fan, I’ll never truly know if the failure of High Flying Bird was due to the
narrative being presented in an incomprehensible jumble, or if my appliance
took a challenging form of exposition and pushed it over the edge into
incomprehensibility. I’m certainly not going to watch it again to find out. I
paused this movie no fewer than ten times because of just how much it was
boring me.
I certainly can’t only blame the dialogue. Soderbergh’s
camerawork and editing – which he credits to the pseudonym Peter Andrews in the
former case – were driving me crazy. He kept breaking the 180-Degree Rule, a
cinematic convention that states that you should not break an imaginary plain
between the actors when shooting them in a particular scene. To put it simply,
if one actor is on the left and one on the right, they should remain on those
sides, at least relative to one another, for the duration of the scene, for the
ease of orienting the viewer. There are reasons to break that rule, but as a
general rule, it should be followed.
Soderbergh repeatedly breaks this rule without any reason.
It was like he was saying “Why don’t I put my camera on THIS side now?” In
discussing with a friend afterward, he posited that maybe Soderbergh was trying
to disorient us. To what purpose, neither of us could determine.
Then, the interviews with real NBA players were a total
waste. The only purpose for those that I could discern was to give a nod to the
pseudo documentary style that the director has always favored. But this is not
really a movie about basketball players – it’s not really a movie about
anything, as far as I could tell. Therefore, the real-world basketball players
contributed nothing.
What shocked me most was going online afterward and seeing
the 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the robust score of 78 on
Metacritic.
Huh?
Maybe it was the fan.
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