Bubble

Steven Soderbergh is taking his filmmaking show on the road. While not shooting big budget studio fare, he's touring America with a six-film project for HDNet, the world's first high-definition national television network. The plan is to set an original story in a different American town for each film in the series, by combining an original screenplay with the real lives of the cast, locals with no acting experience. Bubble, the first of these films, rolled into theatres on January 27th with the DVD released five days later on January 31st. Industry insiders concerned about messing with existing theatrical and DVD marketing formats are holding their collective breath, but the real question for moviegoers is, has Soderbergh made a good film?

The answer is both yes and no. Bubble is a fantastically entertaining, beautifully shot, and highly imaginative piece of storytelling, but it's also an insulting piece of classist garbage, in which a Hollywood big shot looks deep into the asshole of Buttfuck America, concluding that only witless dullards could ever come out of it. Soderbergh claims his inspiration for making Bubble was trying to imagine how someone could work day in and day out at a monotonous, dead end, minimum wage factory job, which is really code for, "I can't imagine being surrounded by people this stupid and boring, but I'll try."

Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) and Kyle (Dustin Ashley) work together at a doll factory where Martha air brushes details onto dolls' faces, while Kyle moulds hot plastic into dolls' bodies, heads, and limbs. Martha is about twenty years older than Kyle, but she's convinced that the two are best friends. Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins), an attractive single mother, joins the factory as a second air brusher and immediately takes a liking to Kyle, which causes the middle-aged, overweight Martha to become jealous. The story evolves subtly as a tale of non-verbal resentment, fear, and anger with Rose increasingly taking advantage of Martha's passivity, while simultaneously putting the moves on Kyle.

It's during Bubble's resolution, however, that Soderbergh's true colors fly. Fearing that the setting and people who drew him to make a film in Ohio/West Virginia in the first place would ultimately prove too tedious for audiences, Soderbergh and screenwriter Coleman Hough place a murder mystery template over their small town Americana tale.

Abandoning the stories of quiet desperation which make up these characters' lives in lunch rooms, donut shops, and motor homes for the first two-thirds of the film, Soderbergh and Hough's resolution becomes the biggest insult of all. Their gated-community, Hollywood outlook fearfully concludes that "Middle Americans" can function in only one of two gears: as emotionally numb and outwardly dead half-wits or as full blown, cold-blooded murderers.

Soderbergh has expressed a gift for articulating leftist ideals in films such as Traffic and Erin Brockovich, but with Bubble, he was given the unique opportunity to face his own prejudices regarding how lower class, Middle America is truly viewed by privileged, rich Hollywood liberals. Why travel into the great wide open of Red State America if the conclusion is going to be as pedestrian as "factory workers eat a lot of fast food and hate their lives" and "people in a dead end existence eventually snap?"

Soderbergh's conclusions are true at the level of basic human nature, but someone with Soderbergh's skills and ambition should be going deeper into the specific contexts, subtexts, and geographies being explored with this six-film experiment. Then again, maybe he's just getting warmed up.

The extras on this DVD focus on Bubble's three protagonists, including mini-featurettes on all three actors, as well as their original screen tests and an audio commentary in which the actors share the experience of making a feature film for the first time. Soderbergh provides an illuminating commentary track with Mark Romanek and also gives a 10-minute interview to the television show Higher Definition, in which he discusses plans for the remainder of the series and what got him interested in shooting a film in an Ohio doll factory in the first place.

A fascinating alternate ending rounds out the noteworthy extras. If this alternate ending had been chosen by Soderbergh, it would have changed the entire meaning of the film, while potentially diminishing Bubble's overall narrative punch. Essentially, the alternate ending provides a medical rationale for an otherwise cold-blooded, emotion-fueled murder.

For all my complaints, I can't stress enough how strong Bubble is on a purely narrative level. If the general consensus is that Soderbergh isn't condescending to his characters and that Hough's murderous third act is simply an imaginative way to wrap up the film's narrative then Bubble may well become an understated classic in the Soderbergh canon. At the moment, I feel torn by Bubble. On the one hand, I stand by the assessment laid out in this review. On the other hand, I haven't felt this entertained or engrossed by a film in some time. It's appropriate, then, that Bubble was released on DVD from the get go, as multiple viewings will have to bear out my true feelings about this film. -- Jason Woloski