Journey by Frame

I might be underrating Haywire a tad, but I was far more interested in the ideas that swirled in its atmosphere than in the actual film itself. This is by no means a slight. On the one hand, I think the film is fascinating on a purely auteurist level, but on the other hand, I was quite impressed with Soderbergh’s use of Gina Carano as the lead. Her physicality brought something really refreshing to the film, something that seemed to promise ways in the future that Soderbergh could play with realism.

You can read my review (for Spectrum Culture) here. Here’s an excerpt:

An uncharacteristically sorrowful revenge flick, Haywire never really allows protagonist Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) the full satisfaction typically expected in such films. Unlike more conventional directors, Steven Soderbergh takes the chaos of everyday perception as a given, so that resolution is always partial at best. The actual details of the betrayal that drives the film’s plot are unimportant, not to mention largely uninteresting, and we’re hardly satisfied when we eventually learn that it was motivated purely by money. Mallory’s betrayers are really just the tip of an iceberg that cannot be grasped in its entirety, and the betrayal itself doubles as a symbol for the postmodernism implicit in Soderbergh’s directorial sensibility: his films describe a world of loss, one existing in a fallen state where nothing can be taken for granted except for the fragmentation of our experience. Because resolution is beside the point in this world, each minor victory, the apprehension of some important truth or the temporary assertion of one’s autonomy and independence, is only ever provisional. A recurring thematic motif in Soderbergh’s work is the inevitability of an individual’s loss of sovereignty to the faceless, impersonal system. Rendered in spatial terms: the protagonist stands in the middle of a whirlwind of information, besieged on all sides by forces beyond her control or by the always self-conscious presence of the camera. In this state of constant flux, all certainties are conditional.