The Fantabulous Time Machine of Mr. Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh has been able to take a number of people by surprise with his unique directorial style and penchant for shooting his films himself, but perhaps his greatest accomplishment was creating a time machine and disguising it as a movie. I am, of course, talking about The Limey – a film that makes Terrence Stamp’s performance as Zod seem agreeable enough for a guest appearance on Yo Gabba Gabba. Terrence Stamp plays Wilson, a visiting Briton in Los Angeles, hunting for answers in the death of his estranged daughter, and coming up against a few minor players in the world of organized crime. In it, Steven makes use of several different tools to play with time and take us on a journey beyond the reach of Father Time’s frosty fingers.

The first and most readily apparent tool at Soderbergh’s disposal is his use of footage from an older Terrence Stamp movie, one that implies Wilson’s criminal past, old friendships and ultimately the betrayal that sent him to prison. The movie is Poor Cow, directed by Ken Loach, and what is interesting is that while the plot of Poor Cow shares little in common with how it is used, it still fits effectively out of its original context. The footage as used, attempts to convey what the salad days with his wife were like, their bohemian lifestyle with their friends, leading all the way up to a heist that goes wrong and lands Stamp (playing Tommy, but reconstituted as Wilson) in court  and ultimately in prison. The material isn’t used all at once, it’s parsed out in bits and pieces – but the accents help inflate the backstory which successfully tethers the present-day story to the past.

The second and arguably more powerful tool at Soderbergh’s disposal is editing. Editor Sarah Flack runs a clinic on time-compression editing in this film – jumbling several timelines together in such a way that you can’t be sure that you’ve seen the entire picture as it really is until the final frame. Not only is the entire film told in a segmented, overlapping style, with individual scenes fold back on themselves, giving each of Wilson’s encounters a bizarre déja-vu feeling, but also managing to extending our impression of the length of their acquaintance so that despite the fact that we’ve only seen them exchange a few words of dialogue, we get the impression that they’ve been talking for quite a bit longer between the carefully chosen edits. The editing both accelerates and extends the passage of time on screen to facilitate familiarity between characters and guide our attention through the process. It’s been argued that this fragmented narrative is supposed to reflect Wilson’s own fragmented memories, but there’s never a reference o any troubles with remembering things - he even boasts that he “remembered every time” he saw his daughter. No these fragments are indicators of time slipping off its axis as Steven drags us anywhere from back to the 60′s to 5 minutes from now.

The third and slightly more subversive tool at use in The Limey is the choice of actors for the lead roles. I can’t speak too much to Stamp’s place in UK cinema, but you would be hard pressed to find an American actor more synonymous with the 60′s than Peter Fonda. In casting Fonda, Soderbergh accomplishes several tasks in one swoop: he establishes Fonda’s Terry Valentine character as someone who has the 60′s to thank for his success, he also manages to evoke a sense of history with parts of the audience that are familiar with Fonda’s past work (I’m sure that this was same effect he was hoping for by casting Terrence Stamp as well, as well as supporting players Joe Dallessandro, Barry Newman and Lesley Ann Warren). By choosing Fonda, Soderbergh conserves time that would otherwise be spent teasing out the backstory for the villain, and also manages to transport audiences on a sentimental journey back to the 60′s.

All this and The Limey is a great movie in its own right – regardless of its time-bending abilities. Since 1999, Soderbergh has taken a more subtle approach to temporal exploration, merely skimming the surface in films like the Ocean series, Che and sort-of-period-piece Erin Brockovich. I think he was able to take all of the chronotons he salvaged from each of those films and combine them to make Bubble.