'Out of Sight' makes the implausible seem believable

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Out of Sight provides one of the most unforgettable locations in movie history for two characters to meet for the first time and fall in love: the trunk of a car. How can anything be more romantic than that?

The circumstances under which the film's two protagonists, bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Cisco (Jennifer Lopez), have their first encounter is even more unusual: he is trying to break out of a Florida penitentiary and she just happens to be in the neighborhood. Karen fails to thwart the prison escape and is taken hostage by Jack and his accomplice, Buddy Bragg (Ving Rhames). As she is being held down by the hiding convict in the trunk of a car Buddy drives, sparks fly.

This particular scene is significant in establishing what kind of a movie Out of Sight is: it's funny, it's smart, and it can make absurd, almost-implausible conditions believable. Jack and Karen connect through a discussion of Faye Dunaway films, and Scott Frank's screenplay even takes a jab at itself when the fast-attracted Jack and Karen criticize how Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway get close to each other too quick in Three Days of the Condor.

You may sneer at how all that can come about in a cramped space of a luggage compartment, but you have to see it to believe it. Director Steven Soderbergh and the two actors reportedly went through 44 takes to get this one scene right, and it clearly paid off. They managed to deliver an effective, highly amusing scene that sets the movie in motion.

When Karen successfully breaks free and assumes her duty as a federal agent to pursue the escaped criminals, the movie becomes The Fugitive meets When Harry Met Sally as the audience finds out how conflicted her mission is. We can clearly see that Karen does not even know if she is really chasing a felon or the guy of her dreams.

Meanwhile, Jack himself is so overwhelmed with thoughts of Karen that he even risks revealing his whereabouts by calling her home. The two, professionals in their respective fields, become love fools that incite concern among their colleagues. Jack's swooning over Karen comes under the glare of his pal Buddy, while Karen's conduct is being questioned by FBI agent Daniel Burdon (Wendell B. Harris Jr.), who inquires why she did not shoot Jack when she had the weapon and the chance to do so.

Frank made a commendable adaptation from Elmore Leonard's entertaining novel. The 72-year-old author's books have been made into movies for the past four decades with varying degrees of success. Some examples are The Big Bounce (1969), The Moonshine Wars (1970) and Mr. Majestyk (1974).

And thanks to the commercially and critically acclaimed Get Shorty (1995), there has been a recent Elmore Leonard resurgence in the United States. Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-nominated Jackie Brown (1997) follows up this current trend, and now Out of Sight helps establish it even more. Frank also adapted Get Shorty, and with Out of Sight he proves his dexterity in translating Leonard's quirky, clever story and style to the screen. He skillfully intersperses Jack and Karen's love story with an entertaining subplot about a bungled heist executed by bumbling amateurs.

Director Soderbergh is even more responsible for the stately outcome of this masterpiece. With a nonlinear narrative, he boggles our mind by presenting the story in an unchronological order, resulting in an array of sequences that never confuses and instead keeps us on our toes.

This device doesn't make the movie a shameless imitator of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or Robert Altman's Kansas City. In Out of Sight it becomes a distinctive feature that gives the film its dynamism and edge. With the help of Anne V. Coates' masterly editing, and the occasional freeze-frames that supply the film with proper accentuations, Soderbergh comes up with a picture he can be proud of.

Out of Sight makes him a household name once again after he became a sensation nine years ago when winning the Palme d'Or at age 26 for his debut Sex, Lies and Videotape. It was this film that many U.S. critics believe revolutionized perceptions of the bankability of small-budget, independently produced films. Since then, he has made only four low-budget, offbeat films: Kafka, King of the Hill, The Underneath and Schizopolis; modest pictures that drew critical raves but were rarely screened. With the studio-backed Out of Sight he has come up to the surface again.

"One of the things that attracted me to Out of Sight," Soderbergh said in a U.S. magazine interview, "is that Leonard has such a nonreductive view of his characters. Nobody is sitting around talking about why they are the way they are, and nobody has a hollow epiphany in order to provide the audience with some climax. Everybody collides at the end because they can't change."

Which says so much about the film's well-drawn characters. They all come out through the perfect interpretation of a perfect cast. Clooney is believable as the charming and sly robber who nicely asks, "Have you ever been robbed before?" to the trembling bank teller he is holding up.

Lopez, fresh from playing the slain singer Selena, tackles another law-enforcer role after Money Train. Her Karen Cisco is gutsy, intelligent, yet transmits subtle vulnerability, mainly through her eyes. And yet she loses every time she tells Jack, "You win, Jack."

Clooney and Lopez are bolstered by a solid group of actors. Rhames is ever the gentle giant who functions as the amiable Jiminy Cricket to Clooney's Pinocchio. Dennis Farina takes a rest from playing heavies and is effectively endearing as Karen's loving father. Don Cheadle (Devil in a Blue Dress) is spectacularly menacing as the sadistic crime boss Maurice "Snoopy" Miller. And Steve Zahn (That Thing You Do!) provides comic relief with his Zonker Harris (from the comic strip Doonesbury) interpretation of the incompetent, stoned accomplice Glenn Michaels. Add in cameos by the unrecognizable Albert Brooks and as Karen's lover, Michael Keaton (that makes two actors who've played Batman pining for Lopez's character), and you have an irresistible band of performers.

Out of Sight is a great caper movie and it's a great date movie and it's simply a great movie. And it brings us to a conclusion: who needs Tarantino when we've got Soderbergh?