Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood

4. Critical Reception and the Soderbergh Imprint

109 To better understand the many voices involved in the manufacture of film authorship, this chapter interrogates a sample of critical reception of Soderbergh’s directorial efforts, focusing on four features released from 2006 to 2009 that bridge numerous production, textual, and exhibition categories. While film studies has identified the role of discursive formations in constructing film authorship and textual meaning, the tools and goals of mainstream film criticism have received limited scrutiny. Critical discourse plays key roles in the circulation of authorialpersonas,shapingsubsequentreceptiondiscoursessurrounding authorship and textual meaning. Critical reception of popular cinema responds to prevailing taste hierarchies while contributing to the maintenance and longevity of those hierarchies. Film journalism in particular encourages the manufacture of auteurs to legitimate journalistic discourse as art-critical practice rather than entertainment commentary, to construct narratives of artistic production, and to grant readers access to production environments. For much of the 2000s, reviews of Soderbergh-directed features have repeatedly highlighted Soderbergh’s formal experimentation on expensive studio productions as well as low-budget independent efforts, a motif that simultaneously invokes the filmmaker’s festival-cinema origins and his diverse filmography. Critical discourses have granted Soderbergh the status of individual most directly responsible for the textual features and meanings of the films on which he is credited as director. In line with auteurist models persistent since the 1960s, critical commentary on Soderbergh’s films has tended to proceed from the premise that directors should be seen as the key creative force in film productions, with the corollary Chapter 4 Critical Reception and the Soderbergh Imprint 110 Authoring and Authorization that the totality of a film’s artistry should be attributed to the named director. Soderbergh’s work across film genres (comedy, social-problem film, political thriller, crime film, and others), modes (blockbuster, star vehicle, experimental film, and television series), and media (film, television, and digital video) might be expected to complicate critical efforts to discern a specific artistic signature. Soderbergh himself has celebrated this apparent lack of artistic identity, telling one interviewer that “[t]he fact that I’m not an identifiable brand is very freeing. . . . I’ve never had a desire to be out in front of anything.”1 Schooled in auteurist reasoning, though, critics have persisted in attempts to attribute a distinct personal vision to Soderbergh’s work, particularly in narrative and thematic terms. Even J. Hoberman’s contrary view, cited in Chapter 2, that “Steven Soderbergh has no particular stylistic signature and one of the most uneven oeuvres imaginable”2 imposes an auteurist model on a body of films made in collaboration with hundreds of creative professionals with wide-ranging artistic sensibilities. Some other commentators on Soderbergh’s work have, thoughtfully or reflexively, found it to exhibit compelling thematic continuity, often selectively periodizing the work to establish such a view. For example, Ryan Stewart asserts in a 2009 interview with Soderbergh that “[m]oney is one of your pet subjects —even Erin Brockovich was explicitly about money.” Soderbergh obligingly agrees, not mentioning his many features—from sex, lies, and videotape and Kafka to Solaris and Che—that do not substantively take up questions of economics. Recall, too, that many years previously (as noted in Chapter 1), Soderbergh had offered interviewers the easily apprehensible construct of “main characters that are out of sync with their environment”3 as an interpretive frame. This claim, made in 1993, fit well for the romantic leads of sex, lies, and videotape, the alienated writer of Kafka, and the socially awkward preadolescent of King of the Hill. Interviews with Soderbergh in the 2000s do not highlight such a figure, even in the many cases where one might be discerned. Soderbergh’s subsequent assertions of interests in money (presented in numerous interviews surrounding 2009’s The Girlfriend Experience), social class, politics, and other subjects occur alongside his own many references to production collaborators including actors, screenwriters, editors, and more. Even as Soderbergh repeatedly name-checks his collaborators and foregrounds their contributions, many commentators, reviewers in particular, reframe this collaborative output as the artistic work of Soderbergh exclusively. This chapter unpacks the critical production of a Soderbergh aesthetic and accounts for its presence in a collaborative, industrial system. Critical Reception and the Soderbergh Imprint 111 Though critical assessments of films under Soderbergh’s direction have varied substantially, few offer any challenges to his putative ownership of the films, with reviews at most noting the collaborative work of screenwriters...