Thursday, January 26, 2006
Review: 'Bubble'
Worthy film uses untrained actors
CHUCK GRAHAM
Tucson Citizen
If you love anticipating those weekly fiction pieces in the New Yorker, you are exactly the sort who will most appreciate the low-budget blue-collar tension in Steven Soderbergh's new film "Bubble."
Appreciation will require an audience willing to bring a little something of itself to the theater. For one thing, this experimental digital video project seems to last longer than its meager 73 minutes because everything moves so slooowwwwly.
Indecision plays very big in the lives of these working-class people - self-confessed high school drop-outs only now beginning to realize how terminally suffocating their lives are sure to become. Glamorous killers with hyperdrive lifestyles they are definitely not.
Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) is a lethargic grandmother in her mid-40s who looks it. She is gracelessly overweight, her short hair always frizzy, her wardrobe limited to what's on sale. But she is also one of those salt-of-the-earth people who will be at work on time all week and early to arrive at church every Sunday. Being reliable is what she does best.
Only gradually do we come to realize how keenly aware she is of the many subtle ways her friends take advantage of this willing nature.
Kyle (Dustin James Ashley) is a severely repressed smoker in his early 20s. High school became such a pressure-packed situation for him, there was just no going on with it. Crowds and confrontation still make him nervous. So he works two dead-end menial jobs in nearly-empty factories. Life among losers is all he has ever known.
Martha and Kyle live in a nameless, faceless industrial town in southern Ohio on the state line with West Virginia. It's one of those rainy burgs so boring even the successful people want to move out. These two aren't anywhere close to being successful. They work on a regimented assembly line in a place that manufactures rubber doll faces with amazingly real-looking skin. But there is no happiness to be found in assembling these delightful baby dolls and adding a pink blush to their cheeks.
Pleasure comes to Martha and Kyle in such meager doses, they are content just to share their lunch hours together making small talk. He also bums rides back and forth from work with her every day because . . . well . . . because he doesn't have a car.
This inertia gets tumbled when the factory hires Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins) to help with an exceptionally large order. She is plain-looking, but she is also young. And she used to have a job air-brushing designs on T-shirts at the mall. She smokes, too, and later confides to Kyle that she ran away from home once when she was 15.
"It was exciting," she adds with absolutely no regret.
Not long after running away, she also stopped going to high school. Not long after that, she gave birth to a baby girl. Now she supports her infant daughter by working two jobs, just like Kyle.
"Bubble" moves at such a deliberate pace, most of the movie has been used up just getting us this far into the story. The twist at the end, though, is a really good one - worthy of sticking with these three through their stumbling, awkward and reluctant conversations. Thoughtful viewers will be taken in by the naturalness Soderbergh achieves with his actors, who are untrained people who just happened to live in the area where Soderbergh decided to make his film.
Nor was there a script. Only an outline of events was prepared in advance. All the dialogue was made up on the spot.
Truthfully, Soderbergh makes it work. There is never a sense this technique is just a gimmick.
The much bigger gimmick is that Soderbergh has contracted to turn out six of these experimental digital video movies for risk-loving billionaire entrepreneurs Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, who will in turn broadcast the movies on cable television the same day they open in theaters. The video rentals will begin just a few days later.
As an experiment in cinema marketing, all of Hollywood is watching. Whether or not such a low-key picture as "Bubble" will provide the definitive answer is questionable. This is not a movie that demands to be seen. But the budget was only $1.6 million, and Soderbergh has five more pictures to go. Even if you don't want to take a chance on seeing this movie, it will be interesting to follow the box office reports.
'Bubble'
Graham's grade: B
Rating: R (no nudity, no violence, some language)
Length: 73 minutes
