To celebrate the opening day at the Sundance Film Fest: Another one of those movies that everyone else saw before I did. You can’t really pretend to know anything about late-20th-century film if you haven’t seen this. Okay, up until now, I was pretending. I was a sham. I’m not anymore. Shout it from the rooftops: I know something about late-20th-century film!
So why is SLV (directed by Steven Soderbergh) important? Well, it was the first “independent” film really worthy of the sobriquet that made a big splash outside of the festival circuit, and sort of swooshed Sundance-the-event and Miramax-the-company into prominence on its coattails. Made for about $1 million, it grossed about $25 million at the American box office, where it was seen by everyone who aspired to know anything about late-20th-century film, present company excluded.
I knew the premise: a half-nice, half-creepy guy (James Spader, big surprise) gets off on making videotapes of women talking about their sex lives, and it ruins Andie McDowall’s marriage to Peter Gallagher. Well, Peter Gallagher ruins his own marriage by affairing with Laura San Giacomo, who happens to be Andie’s sister.
It’s a pretty nice little film; lots of intensity from the four actors, without feeling play-y. This is what Closer should have been, was trying to be, and utterly failed at.
I was really fascinated by the success of Spader’s character’s sad-sack approach to intimacy with women, rather than trying to bed them, he just asked them to tell him and his camera their most deeply-held secrets. And they did. I wonder if this would have changed my approach to romance in the ’90s if I had seen this movie way back then. It probably would have, and it’s kind of scary to contemplate.
I have always maintained that Andie MacDowall is a terrible actress who happens to show up in some darn fine movies (c.f., Groundhog Day, Short Cuts, The Player, Four Weddings and a Funeral). She’s actually fairly genuine in this; I would venture to say that the role is close to her own persona, but that’s idle speculation meant to prop up my decades-old supposition. I gotta admit, she’s good here. Of course, on the down side, SLV lead directly to Green Card…
You will note that I have capitalized this film’s title, contradicting the “official” film title. You will need to sue me, mr. soderbergh.
