The following was originally published in my dad's church newsletter.
One of the things I get asked the most as a film critic is what I look for in a good movie. Inevitably people ask me what I mean when I say that a film’s plot is generally low on the list. In fact, I’d argue that nine times out of ten the plot is the least important or interesting part of any given movie. Perhaps this is partly because after seeing literally thousands of movies I can guess how the stories of most movies will go. But there’s a deeper reason: as you watch more and more movies, you become more interested with what a movie’s trying to SAY rather than what it’s ABOUT. I’ve seen hundreds of cheesy action movies. But the best ones—the ones I find myself returning to again and again--are those that are trying to communicate something. James Cameron’s TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991) may have Arnold Schwarzenegger gunning down shapeshifting murder robots, but at its core is a message that we as human beings have the capacity to change our own fates and earn better futures. George Miller’s MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) may literally be a 2-hour chase scene featuring leather clad mutants and scantily clad women in the desert, but the film’s a devastating indictment of misogyny and ultimately a supreme celebration of female empowerment. Again, this is what these films are trying to SAY.
Figuring out this nuance can be tricky for some people used to viewing movies as disposable entertainment. But it’s not impossible. To get started, I would recommend watching Steven Soderbergh’s LOGAN LUCKY. On the surface, the film is a heist comedy set in hills of West Virginia and North Carolina. After being unfairly fired from his construction job at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) convinces his one-armed Iraq war veteran brother Clyde (Adam Driver) to help him rob it during a race using his knowledge of the complex’s pneumatic tube system used for transferring the vendors’ petty cash to the main vault. Much like Soderbergh’s earlier heist comedy masterpiece OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001), the film spends much of its first half introducing us to the various members of the heist’s team of “professionals” and meticulously detailing how the theft will go. We’re introduced to several eccentric personalities, none more eccentric than the high-strung yet charming Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), a safecracking genius they alternatively need to break out of jail and then break back INTO jail without the prison guards noticing. Predictably, things don’t go according to plan, Jimmy and his gang scramble to get away with it, and just barely flummox the cops and investigators who try and figure out what happened.
The film is wildly funny and entertaining and even touching, especially with the subplot involving Jimmy’s relationship with his daughter Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie). But LOGAN LUCKY is more than all this. It is, at heart, an exercise in cinematic empathy. Most movies try to make us like their characters, but Soderbergh seeks to make us LOVE them, and not just for their personalities and motivations. Soderbergh makes us want to care for these people as PEOPLE—ordinary human beings with wants and hopes and dreams and fears. What’s more, he wants us to care for folks our society usually dismisses as rednecks and racists. The characters are all working class Southerners from West Virginia, a demographic either ignored entirely by Hollywood or crassly stereotyped as bigoted, ignorant rednecks. My friend and colleague David Shreve—himself a native West Virginian--wrote extensively about how surprising it was to see a film about impoverished Southerners that asks its audience to see it characters as actual people and not stereotypes:
“There’s an almost disorienting sense of apolitical joy and benevolence in Soderbergh’s newest heist film, a politically unexamined affection for its characters. For this native and proud West Virginian, it’s strange to see the heavy affectation of the Boone County accent on screen…without seeing the residents of the area reduced to novelty humor, examined for cultural motivation, or subjected to cinematic essay.
There isn’t a single joke in Logan Lucky that positions its down-and-out characters down-and-out-ness as a punchline.”
So, let’s review. LOGAN LUCKY might be about a heist. But what is it trying to SAY? That a traditionally maligned population are human. That great love and kindness can exist amid desperate poverty. That being a law-breaker doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s an inherently bad person. Because of all this, LOGAN LUCKY is one of the most astonishingly heartfelt films of 2017. And hopefully it can help you begin to look beyond what merely happens in movies and see what’s truly bubbling beneath their surfaces.
To read the rest of David’s incredible analysis of LOGAN LUCKY, it can be found on the site AudiencesEverywhere.com under the title “Logan Lucky, Patti Cake$, And The Apolitical Politics of Desperate Poverty."
7/10
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