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High Flying Bird
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Skin in the Game
In many life situations, I recall a particular,
sardonic lyric penned by Bob Dylan for his 2001 song “Po’ Boy”: “The game is
the same, it’s just on a different level”. In his smart script for Steven
Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird, Tarell
Alvin McCraney (who contributed the story for Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight [2016]) invents a new version
of this nugget of wisdom: there’s the sports game, played on its chosen arena,
but there’s also what the veteran Spence (Bill Duke) calls “a game on top of a
game”. This is the political game: wheeling and dealing, managing and
negotiating, bluffing and faking out.
The central celebrity in this story, young Erick
(Melvin Gregg), just wants to get on a court and do what he does best: play
basketball. But, since there’s a lockout being enforced by the National
Basketball Association (NBA), no professional player can make any move of that
kind. It’s the behind-the-scenes players who come swiftly to the fore during
this impasse: agents, lawyers, NBA officials.
The film’s narrative is poised at the brink of a long
weekend, where the problem facing the characters is not only one of time, but also
of money – quite literally in the form of immediate cash flow for Erick’s
agent, Ray (André Holland from Soderbergh’s outstanding TV series The Knick [2014-2015]), who finds that even his credit card
has been cancelled by an anxious boss, Starr (Zachary Quinto).
The game of politics is a power game – this is a
familiar theme from much of Soderbergh’s film and TV work. The maintenance of a
system – whether in sport, crime or medicine – is always a precarious balancing
act. High Flying Bird shows us many
people operating within a complex, interconnected network and, no matter how
major or minor their apparent positions in the hierarchy, as Ray observes: “The
smallest shift in the system, everything gets fucked up”.
That is a recipe for constant crisis, but not
necessarily for apocalyptic catastrophe – indeed, one of the pleasures of
Soderbergh’s film is in the decisive wriggle-room it gives to figures
(especially women) who would normally count for little in American sports
movies, such as Sam (Zazie Beetz), Ray’s former assistant, and Emera (Jeryl
Prescott), mother and manager to Erick’s rival, Jamero (Justin Hurtt-Dunkley).
I will not pretend that, as someone with scant
knowledge of American basketball and its complicated off-the-court organisation,
I understood every gesture, allusion and switcheroo that goes down in High Flying Bird. But the drama still
works, even for the relatively uninitiated. Much is familiar, beyond its
immediate context: the world portrayed is one in which social media – and even
Netflix itself! – find a place in the shifting power game.
Soderbergh loves to keep yanking us from penthouse to
pavement and back again: even the sticky scene in a sauna between Ray and team
owner David (Kyle MacLachlan) becomes a tense arena for business manoeuvring.
This is also a milieu defined wholly by what people
like to nowadays call intersectionality: factors of race (much is made of NBA’s
integration of black players), gender, sexual orientation, the place where one
lives (business-district New York is contrasted with suburban Philadelphia),
even the type of dwelling one owns or rents – all these details intermesh to
provisionally fix each character in their place on the far-from-level playing
field. That is, until they grab (or miss) their opportunity to make a move.
Yo have probably read somewhere that Soderbergh shot High Flying Bird on an iphone 8
smartphone. Many spectators (myself included) would have a hard time spotting
that, if they didn’t happen to know it beforehand. Soderbergh’s previous iphone
feature, the scrappy paranoia-thriller Unsane (2018), went for a deliberately rough-and-ready, B-movie look; High Flying Bird has a much slicker
sheen.
But the impressive variety of camera angles and crisp
editing in most scenes cannot entirely hide the fact that, in essence, this is
a very talky movie. The project is almost, at this level, a nostalgic homage to
the late 1980s ascent of American indie production in its Miramax phase. Like
the films of Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Whit Stillman – plus, of
course, Soderbergh’s own debut, Sex,
Lies, and Videotape (1989) – most of High
Flying Bird is comprised of extended dialogue scenes: usually some kind of
confrontation, psych-out or subtle manipulation.
As the characters sit, stand or sprawl (sometimes in
very ungainly pictorial configurations) across the wide screen and gab away
from one showdown to the next, a certain monotony sets in. Soderbergh tries to
break this sameness by inserting black-and-white interview footage of real-life
players including Reggie Jackson and Donovan Mitchell, dispensing life-lessons whilst
being framed against a bare wall. But that’s just more talk!
Commentators often try to distinguish between
Soderbergh’s big, commercial movies and his small, personal projects, but
that’s not where the fault-line of his career really sits. The significant
division is between the films that are stuffed with physical action (like Haywire, 2011), and those that are all
spoken words (like Full Frontal, 2002). I
know which half of his filmography I prefer.
MORE Soderbergh: King of the Hill, The Limey, Ocean's Eleven, Solaris, Fallen Angels, The Underneath, Traffic, Erin Brockovich © Adrian Martin February 2019 |
