Having survived a recent screening of Full Frontal, I can safely say I never want to see another movie about Hollywood’s inner workings again – at least until Spike Jonze’s Adaptation comes out later this year. There’s something so mercilessly (and mirthlessly) "inside" about Soderbergh’s pretentious, grainy, hand-held tribute to the movie biz that you need one of those Hollywood maps to even hold your interest past the opening credits. A movie that asks us to care about a bigshot movie producer never glimpsed onscreen until halfway through the film is asking for trouble. (And then it turns out to be David Duchovny with a plastic bag over his head.)
Why does Hollywood think that we care about producers anyway? No big box-office smash was ever made about movie producers sitting around doing lunch and taking meetings. Gangsters, maybe. Not producers. And here’s another interesting question: When is Hollywood going to remove its head from its own ass and take a look around at the world outside of Hollywood for a change?
Granted, movies about movies can, on occasion, be interesting. Get Shorty, Bowfinger and Ed Wood stand out as more recent efforts that manage to peek inside Hollywood without leaving the viewer feeling totally soiled. Perhaps it’s the low-key charm of these films, or the fact that they focus on underdogs, that makes them preferable to the cold, calculated satire of, say, Robert Altman’s The Player. (Clearly, Altman has something to do with the crabby, bitter tone permeating most films about Hollywood these days. Being a Hollywood outsider has shaped him that way.)
On the sunnier side, looking back through history, there’s the plucky Singin’ In The Rain (1952), a movie about the silent-film era that’s as relentlessly cheery as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is dark and jaded. After rewatching Sunset recently, it struck me that the material hadn’t aged a bit; the pecking order of Hollywood – from the happy-go-lucky studio employees to the out-of-work hack writers to the faded Silent Screen legends in dilapidated mansions – is still very much in place, and Wilder’s script has lost none of its zing. It’s one of the most cynical of Wilder’s scripts, but somehow, it’s nowhere near as cynical and boring as Soderbergh’s half-assed attempt at turning the camera around on Hollywood.
With Full Frontal, Soderbergh clearly demonstrates that he is not the brilliant indie director people always said he was, but a talented, cold-blooded chameleon who rarely connects on an emotional level with his material (Sex, Lies and Videotape, King of the Hill and Traffic being rare exceptions). The movie is shot half on grainy video (or rather, film processed to look like video) while the other half focuses on a fictional big-budget movie called Rendezvous, starring Julia Roberts and Blair Underwood. We are invited to ponder the self-involved, tyrannical nature of actors (one character plays Hitler in an off-Hollywood play). We are invited to wonder if the grainy scenes of Julia Roberts whining to her assistant in her trailer are supposed to represent the "real" Julia Roberts, or if the cameo by Harvey Weinstein represents some hip inside joke. We are also invited to compare the grainy video lives of the characters in Full Frontal to the slick, professional sheen of the movie-within-the-movie, Rendezvous. Except the dialogue and story in the grainy video part ends up being as trite and fake as the ending in the big-budget Hollywood movie, with David Hyde Pierce’s character renewing his vows of love to Catherine Keener’s character, even though she’s acted thoroughly repellent and unattractive and unlovable up to the very end. Hooray for Hollywood!
Soderbergh was shellacked by critics for this attempt to go "indie" again, and for once, they’re right. Full Frontal is a mess, a groaning collection of inside jokes and half-baked insights, "theses" posing as scenes, and the kind of pretentious direction usually reserved for film student screenings. I was hard-pressed to say which arty, pretentious film I disliked more: this one, or Mike Figgis’s media-saturated Timecode (or, as those who’ve seen it like to call it: Timecrud). Well, Soderbergh won by a nostril hair, but only because I was foolish enough to stick around until the end of Full Frontal.
There have been other recent forays "behind the scenes" of Hollywood. Dustin Hoffman’s overconfident producer in Wag The Dog was an inspired sketch of Hollywood power, though as usual the actor buries any real emotion in his Methodology. Neil LaBute’s Nurse Betty took us backstage on a famous TV soap opera, and played around dangerously with the levels of reality and fantasy found there. With its band of guerrilla filmmakers, John Waters’ Cecile B. Demented tried to throw acid in the face of conventional Hollywood movies, but ended up succumbing to the same clichés. And David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive – well, nobody has really figured out what that movie was trying to say about Hollywood.
On the other, crappier, end of the spectrum, Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro play two cops enlisted for a TV cop show in Showtime, a movie that tries so hard to work in its winking references to other movies and the media that it ends up leaving you embarrassed, reaching for old video copies of Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run. Worst of all, it tags the end credits with a gag reel of "outtakes," which has to be the most heinous trend in movies these days. It’s as if the makers of Showtime knew they had a turkey on their hands, and felt obliged to include the flubbed lines and bad takes to show that the actors really had a good time making the movie. The "outtakes" phenomenon has a curious history, starting, I believe, with Peter Sellers’ extra bit of goofing at the end of Being There (1979). Of course, the reason that outtake was included was because Sellers played Chance the Gardener so straight during the movie that the audience needed some kind of a release. Nowadays, gag reels are tacked onto every film imaginable – including big-budget cartoons. But the cardinal rule should always be that the flubs and goofs included are actually funny. Otherwise, this unsolicited peek behind the scenes of Hollywood is just wasting everybody’s time.
Come to think of it, Full Frontal would have made a good gag reel. The whole movie is a badly-flubbed exercise that should have never been let out of the can.