The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (392 page)

Indeed, it’s TV that really defines Smith: he thrives on a live audience, multi-cameras, and a sort of twelve-minute segmenting. So he made his name and his groove in TV’s
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
. That led to what was then his most demanding part, the serene interloper who might be Sidney Poitier’s son in
Six Degrees of Separation
(93, Fred Schepisi). He also had roles in
Where the Day Takes You
(92, Mark Rocco) and
Made in America
(93, Richard Benjamin). Stardom—or celebrity appearance—followed with
Bad Boys
(95, Michael Bay);
Independence Day
(96, Roland Emmerich);
Men in Black
(97, Barry Sonnenfeld);
Enemy of the State
(98, Tony Scott);
Wild Wild West
(99, Sonnenfeld);
Men in Black: Alien Attack
(00, David C. Cobb and Lymal Coleman), a short;
The Legend of Bagger Vance
(00, Robert Redford).

Then he did
Ali
(01, Michael Mann). In the ring, he was perfect. To listen to, uncanny. Yet the film foundered on its failure to explain the multitudes of Ali, or to match our memories from so much newsreel coverage. An honorable failure in a film that needed a more searching script. So back to
MIIB
(02, Sonnenfeld);
Bad Boys II
(03, Michael Bay);
I, Robot
(04, Alex Proyas).

Smith’s emergence as an industry titan, and an immensely appealing character, begins at this point. Using his own production company, and making superb deals for himself—with big advances and major percentages of the gross—he launched himself on a series of films where regular comedy and a special appeal to children was mixed with an innocent, adolescent hunger for redemption. Very few people did better than Will Smith in the 2000s. He is a major star and an assured businessman:
Hitch
(05, Andy Tennant);
The Pursuit of Happyness
(06, Gabriele Muccino); the biggest of them all
—I Am Legend
(07, Francis Lawrence);
Hancock
(08, Peter Berg);
Seven Pounds
(08, Muccino).

Steven Soderbergh
, b. Atlanta, Georgia, 1963
1989:
sex, lies and videotape
. 1991:
Kafka
. 1993:
King of the Hill
. 1995:
The Underneath
. 1996:
Gray’s Anatomy; Schizopolis
. 1998:
Out of Sight
. 1999:
The Limey
. 2000:
Erin Brockovich; Traffic
. 2001:
Ocean’s Eleven
. 2002:
Full Frontal; Solaris
. 2003:
Eros
(codirected with Michelangelo Antonioni and Wong Kar-Wai). 2004:
Ocean’s Twelve
. 2005:
Bubble
. 2006:
The Good German
. 2007:
Ocean’s Thirteen
. 2008:
Che: Part One; Che: Part Two
. 2009:
The Girlfriend Experience; The Informant
.

The published screenplay of
sex, lies and videotape
includes a diary of the production that is an excellent self-serving portrait of young, independent filmmaking scarcely able to credit how close it has come to the big time. The diary makes Soderbergh seem a good deal younger and less searching than his finished film. There are also unwitting ironies: at one point, looking ahead, Soderbergh said that Lem Dobbs’s script for
Kafka
was so good it would probably never be made. It was, but as Dobbs has said, “substantially and ruinously rewritten by its director.”

Soderbergh was a film student at Louisiana State University, the maker of several short films, who then went to Los Angeles and got some work as an editor while he wrote scripts. Thus, he wrote and contrived to make
sex, lies and videotape
at approximately the age at which Welles made
Kane
. There
are
differences:
sex, lies
was a hit; it won several prizes at Cannes; and it has a sourer knowledge of human vagary than Welles ever permitted himself. But both films possessed precocious authority.
sex, lies and videotape
is novelistic in its development and is unusually interested in out-of-the-way traits of character emerging as something like triumph. Beneath its intrigue of marriage and adultery, it also posed a remarkable view of the potency of video as an alternative to experience. The film did not moralize, or even push through with its conclusion, but not many recent movies have given the exuberant and closed community of movie maniacs so much ground for unease.

sex, lies
is many other things: a delicate blend of drama and comedy; a model in picture-making economics; and a display of wonderful acting—Andie MacDowell has never been so touching; James Spader showed how intelligent and profound diffidence could be; Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo were excellent.

With the world at his feet, Soderbergh did make
Kafka
, thereby helplessly endorsing the theories of sophomore disaster and freeing the enemies always earned by early success. More interestingly, the strained attempt of
Kafka
stands beside the mature ease of
sex, lies
so that we had to wonder who Steve Soderbergh might become.

But
King of the Hill
returned to form. Adapted from A. E. Hotchner’s book about a troubled childhood, it was assured and very well acted—as if to show that careful realism is Soderbergh’s strength.

It’s interesting years later to look back on the Soderbergh of 1996
—The Underneath
was his worst film yet (it still is—though the contest mounts), while
Gray’s Anatomy
(it was Spaulding Gray) and
Schizopolis
seemed to signal a shift to independence, or even privacy. Then something happened, and Soderbergh apparently woke up to the notion that he might be a hit.
Out of Sight
and
The Limey
were both good thrillers in which we liked the leads. They weren’t actually that good, but they were learning processes.
Erin Brockovich
was the hit he needed—a perfect star vehicle, allied to a moderately liberal story. But it worked because Soderbergh played the game the system’s way, and maybe told himself he was doing it all for Julia Roberts.

Traffic
(for which he actually won the directing Oscar—having been nominated twice in one year) seems to me a little too showy for its own good. The British TV series,
Traffik
, is superior and far more compellingly coherent. But lots of people thought it was a masterpiece. Personally, I don’t think Soderbergh has yet come within reach of such a film. But he might easily turn into our best mainstream director. In which case, we must all agree to forget the wretched
Ocean’s Eleven
.

In the years since, Soderbergh has revealed himself as chronically compromised. He may believe he is a central figure in the new, enlightened Hollywood, trying anything he can think of, while darting home for another
Ocean’s
payday. As the diary on
sex, lies
threatened, he can become far too cute with himself. The lofty aspiration of
Traffic
turned into the arty banalities of
Che
—a very pretty, bad film on an idea that doesn’t interest its maker. The
Ocean’s
films are shameful. I like
The Informant
. This is a monster in the making.

Iain Softley
, b. London, 1958
1993:
Backbeat
. 1995:
Hackers
. 1997:
The Wings of the Dove
. 2001:
K-PAX
. 2005:
The Skeleton Key
. 2009:
Inkheart
.

A career is one film after the other, and once upon a time that might mean two or three years of films—in three years Howard Hawks made
Bringing Up Baby, Only Angels Have Wings
, and
His Girl Friday
. So Iain Softley has made six films in fifteen years, as if starting afresh every time. And he might plausibly complain to me and the world, “Well, don’t compare me with Howard Hawks and that whole notion of auteurship. That can’t exist nowadays! Just leave me out of the book.” To which Howard Hawks might answer, “Auteurship didn’t exist in 1939! Don’t run away with the idea that being Howard Hawks was anything important. People didn’t notice what he did from one damn film to the next.”

The poor dumb bastards. I dislike
K-PAX
a lot (though I think, in advance, I would have been interested in its vaguely suggestive sci-fi outline). Again I think the idea in
Inkheart
—of characters escaping from a book and needing to be recaptured—is fascinating, but I don’t quite think the film works.
Backbeat
appeals to the person who wants to know everything and anything about the Beatles. But it’s boring. And …
The Wings of the Dove
seems to me a poignantly beautiful and heartbreaking film, and enough to sustain interest in this odd, fitful career for a Cambridge graduate.

That voice says: “You could always try the idea that Howard Hawks must have written
The Wings of the Dove—Only Doves Have Wings?”

Aleksandr Sokurov
, b. Podorvikha, Russia, 1951
1980:
Razzhalovannyi
. 1987:
Zhertva Vechernyaya; Terpenie, Trud; Skorbnoye Beschuvstivye; Odinokij Golos Cheloveka; Moskovskaya Elegiya; I Nichego Bolshe
. 1988:
Mariya; Dni Zatmeniya; Altovaya Sonata: Dmitri Shostakovich
. 1989:
Spasi i Sokhrani; Sovetskaya Elegiya; Sonata dlya Gitlera; Peterburgskaya Elegiya
. 1990:
Krug Vtoroj; Prostaya Elegiya; Leningradskaya Retrospektiva
. 1992:
Kamen’
. 1993:
Tikhiye Stranitsy/Whispering Pages
. 1995:
Dukhovnye Golosa/ Spiritual Voices
. 1996:
Vostochnaya Elegiya; Robert Schlastlivaya Zhizn
. 1997:
Mat
i
Syn/Mother and Son
. 1999:
Molokh; The Knot
. 2000:
Dolce
. 2002:
Russian Ark
. 2003:
Father and Son
. 2004:
The Sun
. 2007:
Alexandra
.

Sokurov was born in Siberia, and he attended the University of Gorky, where he read history, and then the Moscow Film Academy. He made many documentaries (especially films about cities) and ran into trouble with the old Soviet authorities. “I was always driven by visual aesthetics, aesthetics which connected to the spirituality of man, and set certain morals. The fact that I was involved in the visual side of art made the government suspicious. The nature of my films was different from others. They didn’t actually know what to punish me for—and that confusion caused them huge irritation.”

On the other hand, the feeling for nature and relationship is so intense in
Mother and Son
that I can understand Paul Schrader’s belief that Sokurov is a master worthy of a place in the transcendental tradition. He was a friend to Tarkovsky, but he regards Chekhov as his forming influence.
Mother and Son
is, on the one hand, minimalist: a 73-minute rhapsody on a mother’s last day of life. On the other, it is a film with that classically large Russian embrace of all of being, something we know from Dovzhenko and Tolstoy.

Then two films really revealed Sokurov as a new master
—Russian Ark
, an immense, single-shot exploration of a museum, and
The Sun
, a film about Hirohito and clearly one of the great achievements of the 2000s.

Todd Solondz
, b. Newark, New Jersey, 1960
1998:
Fear, Anxiety and Depression
. 1995:
Welcome to the Dollhouse
. 1998:
Happiness
. 2001:
Storytelling
. 2004:
Palindromes
. 2009:
Life During Wartime
.

A lot of people didn’t even want to talk about
Happiness
. It was precisely what they didn’t go to the movies for. Its deadpan title was like the ultimate poisoned stiletto slipped between the ribs of comfort and sentimentality. Not every charge against the film need be dismissed. The gruesomeness was a little posed or polished; and such perversions are not really found so often in a dumb slice of life. Still, there’s room in America for movies as well made as
Happiness
, and for anything that finds a poker-faced way of offering that title for inspection sitting over so many misfits and outcasts. Somehow the feel-good rhetoric we inflict on ourselves has to be frightened away. And Solondz might be an exemplary figure in a group of “nasty” filmmakers. (For, honestly, there’s nothing more contrived in finding fault, decay, and abscesses than in saying everyone is A-OK.) I’ve never seen the first film—but I suspect its title plays fair. The second film had an audience, in that it had a resolute, nerd heroine who was plucky in the face of everyday horror. That America is out there, many layers thick, and it is high time our popular culture faced it. In people like Solondz, LaBute, and Terry Zwigoff we have a generation (more or less) that simply won’t swallow the white lies anymore. It’s up to us, and the system, whether we subvert it by calling it black humor.

Barry Sonnenfeld
, b. New York, 1953
1991:
The Addams Family
. 1993:
For Love or Money; Addams Family Values
. 1995:
Get Shorty
. 1997:
Men in Black
. 1999:
The Wild Wild West
. 2002:
MIIB
.2006:
RV
.

Sonnenfeld makes hits, with all the new Hollywood’s easygoing disowning of substance, character, or drama.
For Love or Money
is the one project that hasn’t turned up trumps for everyone concerned. He established a pretty, poisonous lust for the Addams Family, and he kept kids happy with the Will Smith Picture. But
Get Shorty
is the only picture with real wit—and most of that comes from Elmore Leonard. If only Sonnenfeld could show some hints of the best pictures he photographed before turning to directing—
Miller’s Crossing
(90, Joel Coen), say, or
When Harry Met Sally…
(89, Rob Reiner). He was at NYU film school with Joel and Ethan Coen, and it was their patronage that got him his first work as a director of photography:
Blood Simple
(84, Joel Coen);
Compromising Positions
(85, Frank Perry);
Raising Arizona
(87, Coen);
Three O’Clock High
(87, Phil Joanou);
Throw Momma
from the Train
(87, Danny DeVito);
Big
(88, Penny Marshall);
Misery
(90, Reiner).