Ocean's Eleven Review
by Edwin Jahiel (e-jahiel AT uiuc DOT edu)December 12th, 2001
BY EDWIN JAHIEL
From awful to acceptable.
OCEAN'S ELEVEN (2001) ** 1/2. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Ted Griffin. Photography, Steven. Soderbergh. Editing, Stephen Mirrione. production design, Philip Messina. Music, David Holmes. Producer, Jerry Weintraub. Cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner, et al . A Warners release. 110 minutes. PG-13.
A remake (in general subject and name only) of "Ocean's Eleven" (1960), that poor, smug movie in which the Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop) debuted as a would-be ensemble cast. The original's leader Sinatra played Danny Ocean. The picture's title sounded like something nautical but in fact the film was a an excuse for Rat Pack sheenanigans within a Big Heist plot. Danny gets together a bunch of his World War II buddies-- all veterans of the 82nd Airborne-- in order to relieve five Las Vegas casinos of their huge gambling-gotten gains.
The cast included non-Rats such as Richard Conte, Cesar Romero, Akim Tamiroff, Henry Silva, Buddy Lester, Red Skelton (walk-on), George Raft, Ilka Chase and Angie Dickinson. Those were big names in 1960.
That film sold many tickets on the strength of the public's curiosity about the Rat Pack. The movie proper, then and even morenow is a pretty awful pot-pourri. Slow, flat, way overacted, it shouts from the screen its cuteness and its smugness. Its first half is diffuse, taken up by expositions of too many characters, with the Rats hogging the footage, notably via especially the main oh so cool hepcats Sinatra, Martin and Lawford. Non-Rats such as Romero and Tamiroff are grotesque as they get the worst lines of their careers. Richard Conte does well, however.
By and large the dominant element is gratuitous chatter,banter, dumb chit-chat, and booze.
In the second half --the heist-- the entire robbery process is overshadowed by the hamming-it-up stuff. To be fair however, there is a fast closing gag that's excellent and worth 92 cents of a one-dollar ticket.
Sadly, the director was Russian-born Lewis Milestone (real name Lev Milstein) whose credits include several classics or near-classics: "All Quiet on the Western Front," "The Front Page," "Rain,""The General Died as Dawn," "Of Mice and Men," "A Walk in the Sun,""The Strange Love of Martha Ivers,""Pork Chop Hill," and the 1962 "Mutiny on the Bounty."
Mercifully, Ocean's Two, the 2001 flick, does not follow closely Ocean's One save for the basic, Get Rich Very Quick notion. Now most of the principals are professional criminals. The instant George Clooney, the new Danny Ocean, walks out from prison on parole, he sets a Vegas mega-heist going by recruiting old and new acquaintances. His people are a motley, heterogenous group, politically correct in its inclusion of minorities. To pick one member at random, there's Don Cheadle whose sports a Cockney accent--but it sounded more East Indian to me.
None of the too-many-to-describe accolytes steals the show or gets more focus than the others, except, of course, George Clooney. The equilibrium is OK.
The second main role goes to Andy Garcia who owns and runs the Bellagio Hotel and Casino as well as several others. His functions are a bit muddled, as, in a single viewing of the pic he seemed to be primarily a super-smart security Pajandrum, a figure of great and cold authority. But he is well cast as Clooney's tough, strong, worthy and even dangerous opponent.
In Vegas we also meet Garcia's paramour Tess (Julia Roberts.) She is the ex-wife of Danny, who wants her back more than he wants a zillion dollars. The need to include a female presence (and for customer appeal, a Big Name )gets awkwardly mixed into the plot. In fact Julia R's presence is also awkward. She plays a kind of art museum curator. Her small part is sort of shooed into the picture, her expensive outfits are chic and tasteful, but the camera does not especially flatter her looks, including her 1960s bouffant hairdo.
This brings me to the color cinematography by director Soderbergh himself. Was it a defective print I saw? Or was it planned that way? The fact is that the color was often ugly and grainy, something like a blowup of a home movie. If this technique was on purpose, I see no reason for it.
My biggest objection by far has to do with the "meat" of the movie, the heist. How it is prepared, plotted, planned, re-planned and studied; how its technical mechanism is minutely calculated and the who, what, when,
of each operation presented is something you have to take on faith. I doubt that any spectator can come up with a rational description and explanation of the heist procedure. Arbitrariness, fragmentation and ellipses abound, so much so that the more the film unfolds, the more we focus on the high-tech things, the less one cares about the characters.
It is a fact that high-tech cannot involve the viewer as much as people can--and here, the humans take a back-seat to things, machines, metal, computers and such. Gadgetry muddles the waters. Suspense suffers. Suspense needs concentration. Concentration needs clarity. Clarity needs human beings. That's what the Master, Alfred Hitchcock, knew to perfection. His movies were about people, not gimmickry and gadgetry. About interesting people, from heroes to villains and in-betweeners. King Alfred's films were "clean," which is not the case with most action movies.
Take an example of two Robert Redford movies. The thriller "Three Days of the Condor" (1975) was "clean" the way human elements blended beautifully with convincing techno-stuff. The thriller "Sneakers" (1992) was not "clean" the way techno-gadgetry was outrageously flawless and unbelievable.
Take the example of "Rififi" (France, 1955). which was directed and co-written by the American Jules Dassin. A model heist movie in every way, with a 20-minute silent sequence of burglarizing a jewelry store, the film had both powerful suspense and human content.
On the plus side, it is obvious that Soderbergh is amusing himself and trying to amuse the public. If you view the film as a tongue-in-cheek compendium which sets aside logic in favor of instant gratification through improbable footage, you may well enjoy its twists, its "scientific" approach, the succession of nicely-acted bits by its cast. But I am too attached to Hitchcock to appreciate fully this kind of fun.
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