Chapter Two: Ocean's 12
By Brett Beach
December 16, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Author's note: I don't actually get to Ocean's 12 until late in the game in this column. Apologies in advance. If you need to know now, I like it the best in the series, definitely more than 13 and a little more than 11. Commence verbal attacks at will.
Strictly speaking, I don't do guilty pleasures. I think we would all be a lot better off if we enjoyed what we enjoyed and quit apologizing for it. Perhaps it's a strain of this country's Puritan origins and schizoid/bi-polar modern history that so much of what we like we feel compelled to cordon off with tape as if it were a body at a crime scene. Regular readers of this column know that I take pride in (or simply am majorly OCD about) knowing why I like what I like and attempting to communicate that in words. Some may view that as strictly in the realm of the critic but I think it's good for everyone to understand their cultural appetites.
I am certainly man enough to own up to my lowbrow as well as my highbrow tastes and I refuse to feel guilty for either one. I grew up in a pop-culture vacuum and had to fend for myself in carving out my tastes. It was a trial and error process in the pre-Internets days and help - in the form of a friend's advice, the sage words of a respected critic or even opting to buy one cassette over another because there were 24 tracks on Cassette A versus 12 tracks on Cassette B making it a much better deal for my hard-earned $9.99 - was always appreciated. In the days when the world seemed a little smaller, it was also a little less headache-y. I wouldn't know where to begin or how to cope if I attempted to become acquainted with even a fraction of the unsigned musical artists posting tracks on MySpace. Walking into a revered Portland rental shop/landmark like Movie Madness with its tens of thousands of hard to find videos and DVDs both foreign and domestic, big screen and small screen, legitimate and bootleg, can be similarly overwhelming. I have to decide in advance what I am looking for and how to quickly grab it, lest a search party be commissioned to track me down hours hence.
Back on topic: when people bring up their "guilty pleasures" - which seems to happen as regularly as feigning ironic disinterest to show how cool you are to not care about something - my bullshit detector goes off. My simple, but untested, theory is that if you really want to know someone, catch him or her when they off-handedly bring up their guilty pleasure. It needs to come from their lips to your ears and not as the result of a query on your part. This is a more honest approximation of where their tastes lie. The guilty pleasure doesn't necessarily need to fall on the lowbrow end of the spectrum either. Someone could just as easily feel guilt about enjoying some esoteric tome that almost no one on the planet has actually waded through. There's that equal strain of suspicion of the over-academic-ized as well, as if there is that one too many book, play, movie, or album that will mark you as a (sniff sniff) cultural snob.
And now to put myself and my varied tastes out there for inspection (once again). After a few false starts I read Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in all its seven volume, six thousand-plus page glory in the fall of 2002. I list that as one of my major accomplishments of the decade. Last summer, I got almost through David Foster Wallace's thousand-ish page Infinite Jest, throwing in the towel with about 90 pages to go. This same decade, in 2004, I got hooked on Fearless, a 38 book series about a girl born without the fear gene. I was perusing the young adult section at Barnes and Noble looking for any Buffy novelizations of interest (oh, to be recently divorced and with too much time on one's hand) when I saw several of the Fearless installments and read the back cover descriptions. It struck a familiar chord with the synopsis of a television show I had heard about but that had never actually aired. The pilot featured Rachael Leigh Cook as Gaia Moore, an FBI agent without fear. I wondered if this might have been the inspiration for said unaired show. As it turns out, I was correct and upon reading, was soon ensnared.
Aside from the hook of an ass-kicking heroine trying to balance a "normal" life of high school and romance with quite outlandish clandestine spy stuff, there was the fact that it was set in Lower Manhattan, near NYU, where I had recently graduated/moved back from and the same Starbucks the heroine frequents is the one I would go to on my break from classes. Truth told, after a particularly nail-biting resolution to several plot lines in Book 24, Fearless would become even more byzantinely ridiculous and less engaging before sputtering to a few anti-climaxes. Several years after the fact, a Fearless FBI series was launched (to succeed perhaps where the television medium had failed) and it only lasted four, not-very-good installments. The postscript to it all: imagine my...surprise when I discovered that series creator Francine Pascal is best known for unleashing Sweet Valley High on the world.
The closest I have come to being a follower of something I would almost be embarrassed to admit to liking is (it's a tossup): when I watched Guiding Light for a solid year at college with my friend Angie, who was a lifelong fan of it; or when I watched the first two seasons of The Hills. For brevity's sake, I'll focus on the latter. I never thought I could get into a show like The Hills because I didn't know what I would focus my brain on. My girlfriend was into it (and had been also into Laguna Beach) and when I would actively pay attention to it, I felt like I was being x-ray scanned for 22 minutes (plus commercial breaks). The show would just pass right through me, supposedly doing no damage, and I was amazed to find that it was entertaining, like staring at very colorful wallpaper capable of bantering.
But then I made the mistake of actually becoming invested in one of the "characters": Lo. My god, it was like the resurrection of Dorothy Parker with some of her earlier appearances. She would come on, cut through the crap with a well-placed line, comment or insult, and then be gone, like that favorite aunt or uncle, you always hoped would visit more. Except you didn't really want them around all the time. They were there to spice things up on occasion and you needed to look forward to that. When Lo became a regular featured player and then moved in with Lauren and had to figure deeply into the plots somehow, it was like killing the goose that squawked the golden bon mots. I was done.
So was all this lead-up necessary? Am I going to confess Ocean's 12 as a guilty pleasure out of spite? I wish it were as easy as that. Having seen Ocean's 11 and 12 three times each now, I wish I was closer to a working definition of what I prefer about one over the other. Perhaps this column can help with that. I can with assurance state that I like Ocean's 13 the least of the three, to the extent it would be fair to characterize my reaction as dislike. The humor and tone of the third movie had an air of mean-spiritedness almost entirely absent from the first two. I am thinking foremost here of the characters played by Ellen Barkin and David Paymer and the indignities forced upon them by the screenplay in the spirit of laughs. Even if Paymer's final vindication brings a smile, it's too little, too late. Perhaps the key to my preference of 12 over 11 can be encapsulated in something as simple as the "and" portion of the closing credits. Or the manner in which Topher Grace "plays" himself in the respective films. Perhaps...
Closing credit from Ocean's 11: "And introducing Julia Roberts as Tess."
I caught Ocean's 11 on video the first time about a year after it was in the theaters and though I knew to take it in the form of pleasant, glossy piffle, it felt to me like it was working too hard to maintain its breezy, inconsequential tone. I appreciate the fact that for an "origin story" the film wastes almost no time in getting everyone assembled and on board to do the heist. It was a laid-back lark and fun and I certainly don't turn it down if it's offered as the evening's entertainment. The fault I find stems from its eagerness to be liked, like a puppy dog at the local animal shelter store who knows when potential owners have it in their line of sight. It has an over-earnest quality that detracts from the level of cool that the film should effortlessly peddle. This is most noticeable in the relationship between Danny and Tess. I never became convinced that they were believable as a couple, that he should or did need her back and that she should or would want him back.
The script by Ted Griffin dovetails the heist's success with Danny's success in winning Tess back and that sort of emotional investment simply isn't merited. I realize it's an odd contradiction for me, a champion of characters and emotions to make this criticism, but every film is different and needs to be true to itself. The two tonally perfect scenes are Elliot Gould's countdown of the three greatest near-heists in Vegas history (a sequence that foreshadows the stylishness on display in Ocean's 12) and the poker table sequence with Topher Grace, Shane West and other Hollywood young'uns. The poker-faced self-mockery of themselves while in the company of BRAD PITT and GEORGE CLOONEY is priceless. But the film for all its charms feels like the skilled work of an anonymous director for hire. In short, it doesn't play nearly enough like a Steven Soderbergh film. Ocean's 11, did play like gangbusters with the masses over the 2001 holiday season becoming Soderbergh's highest-grossing film at the time (it remains so today) with just over $180 million grossed domestic against an $85 million budget.
Closing credit from Ocean's 12: "And introducing Tess as Julia Roberts."
From beginning to end, Ocean's 12 has the air of an inside joke. A $110-million dollar inside joke, to be precise. I hate inside jokes - loathe them would be more accurate and I briefly make a nod in the direction of Desperado as an example of both a film and Chapter Two that must be a lot more fun to contemplate if you are on the right side of the joke with Rodriguez, Tarantino et. al. And yes, I am prepared to back that up in full some day.
This makes my positive reaction to Ocean's 12 that much more bewildering to me. This is the conundrum I faced opening weekend in 2004 when I caught it and knew that it had provided more entertainment to me than had Ocean's 11. Five years later, I still scratch my head. Ocean's 12 is a heist film where the heist (or heists) are beside the point. They're throwaway moments. The "let's take the house" attitude of the first has been replaced with a more whimsical "oh what the hell" travelogue/stroll of Europe from Amsterdam to Italy and points in-between. The plot is as ridiculous as it is complex as it is inane as it is masterful. It doesn't so much pull twists on the audience as stage a disappearing act in plain sight. There's less action and suspense and gunplay in this film than there was in Ocean's 11. (I swear that Soderbergh has Rusty's car blown up early on to both fool the audience and so there was a hint of menace to provide for the trailer.) Topher is back for a splendid three minutes in a trashed hotel room with an anguished ramble that name checks Frankie Muniz and Dennis Quaid. There are unexpected references to Miller's Crossing, guest star cameos up the wazoo and most of Danny Ocean's gang winds up in a local Rome jail before it's all over. When all is said and done, there's the realization that absolutely nothing was at stake. It is, truly, the apex of entertainment for entertainment's sake. For this it was raked over the coals (more so as time has gone by) and did not hold up as well over the holidays, dropping off quickly after an ever so slightly larger opening weekend than the first film, and finishing with $125 million domestic.
The screenplay by George Nolfi is really a riff on caper films and sequels, and keeps its tongue firmly planted in cheek at its own ridiculousness. Soderbergh and the cast approach it like professionals comfortable enough to improvise as needed (or perform the dialogue so perfectly off-handed it suggests improvisation) and replace the mugging one would normally expect tied to this material with exquisite underplaying. To see Danny and Rusty over-caffeinated, inebriated and unwillingly up late watching dubbed Happy Days reruns is funny, but the measured faces of Clooney and Pitt carry it over into deadpan delight.
Danny and Tess are kept separated on screen for most of the running time (a good call). The two major scenes they share together towards the end allow the audience to focus on the star quality of Clooney and Roberts rather than any feelings towards the characters. Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones step up to the plate as the lovers with a history this time around and their banter has the spark and chemistry and teasing finesse to keep us interested in whether they wind back up with one another. Matt Damon works his boyish charm for all its worth to play the most terminally insecure member of the group and listen for the precise way he sells a line like, "Not enough people. And we don't have the time to train a cat." The end sequence, with everyone reunited (characters or cast, we don't know) is in its own small way as immensely satisfying a close as a similar one David Lynch used to bring Inland Empire to its conclusion.
But I'd like to briefly draw attention back to the two closing credits above and how they encapsulate their films. The first is all straightforward joke and one-level. It's funny but not funny ha ha. The second contains at least one more layer and is both obvious and a stroke of comic profundity.
Perhaps the biggest crime Ocean's 12 committed - in many eyes - was that everyone seemed to be having too much damn fun. This may have been confused with laziness. It's not. I usually quote Ebert but here I turn to the late, great Siskel who would sometimes ask the rhetorical, "Is this film more enjoyable than watching a documentary of the actors eating lunch?" In the case of Ocean's 12, I would have to declare a draw. Big stars, on the big screen, selling big-budget entertainment isn't all that moviedom is about. Not by a long shot. But from what Hollywood routinely gives, the instances where it's successful need to be singled out and applauded. Here, here.
Next week: Let's close out the year with Nic Cage. And Val Kilmer. And some iguanas. Is it really a Chapter Two? I'll do my best to puzzle it all out.