"The Limey": typical Soderbergh technique?

Steven Soderbergh is on the radar screen right now, after the flap about “Moneyball” (July 2 entry), so I watched one of his “typical” small films, “The Limey”, dating back to 1999, from Artisan Entertainment (now absorbed by Lionsgate).

Soderbergh likes character-driven “mysteries”, spanning time, situations, different places, and mixes of people from different cultures coming into confrontation. In this film, he uses a lot of flashback and flash-forwards, to convey the idea that one’s life crosses space-time as if time were just another dimension. Of course, time (for mortal humans) isn’t reversible, and that gets in the way. Sometimes, Soderbergh will unscramble out-of-sequence material from other directors, such as his revision of Lodge Kerrigan’s “Keane”.

One question with a concept like this is, will the “protagonist” keep us interested in who he is, if he is as flawed and grizzled as is the ex-con “limey” (that is, Brit) Wilson, played by Terrence Stamp. He comes to LA to investigate the mystery of his daughter’s (Melissa George) “accidental” death. He will enter a web of complexity, testing is acculturation and making him face his daughter’s nature and his capability as a father. The other characters enter the neo-noir atmosphere with a brashness that almost makes you think of Andy Warhol, as Joe Dellasandro plays Uncle John, and Peter Fonda, a 60s icon, plays possible culprit (and lover of his daughter) Valentine.

When you make a film and go back into an earlier mystery, there are two or three ways things can go. You can stay in the past and “solve” a mystery if there is some great social or moral lesson. You can link up to evidence of some calamity that is going to happen soon to a lot of other people. Or you can create confrontations with today’s characters in today’s time and place, which Soderbergh (and writer Lem Dobbs) do beautifully. The action scenes, while Spartan, are well done, from the rollover car wreck (40s style) in the Hollywood hills, to a kneecapping shootout at the guest house – again a bit of 40s noir, with a degree of abstraction that softens the brutality of the injuries and the obvious suffering.

The original music score (Cliff Martinez) contains some out-of-tune or quarter-tone piano music that reminds one of Ligeti’s music in “Eyes Wide Shut”. There is a bit of a Kubrick quality to the piano music. In other places, it reminds one of the "gymnopedic" or "phonometric" or just plain minimalist music of Erik Satie.