Full of confusion

Full Frontal is director Steven Soderbergh’s venture into Robert Altman territory—a free-form, multi-character parade of apparently semi-improvised incidents centering on an event that may or may not come off as planned. Altman plowed this ground in movies like Nashville and A Wedding, and Soderbergh spices it with the playful postmodernism of an A-list director who has the confidence to try anything once.

The event at the center of Full Frontal is a birthday party for a Hollywood producer named Gus. Among the guests are Calvin (Blair Underwood) and Francesca (Julia Roberts), the stars of Gus’ latest movie, Rendezvous, which was written by Carl (David Hyde Pierce) and Arty (Enrico Colantoni). Arty isn’t invited to Gus’ party, but Carl and his wife Lee (Catherine Keener) are, as is Lee’s massage-therapist sister Linda (Mary McCormack).

Instead of the party, Arty will be spending the evening at the opening of a play he’s written and directed, The Sound and the Fuhrer, a reimagining of Adolf Hitler as only a wanna-be-trendy L.A. playwright can reimagine him: a Type-A personality with “control issues.” Arty also spends the day grappling with his prima donna star (Nicky Katt) and sneaking online chats with the masseuse Linda, who thinks he’s a 22-year-old artist from Tucson.

That’s the basic complement of characters. There are a few others, but most of them only serve to add to the movie’s mischievous confusion. And Soderbergh confuses us every chance he gets. The movie opens with a pre-title sequence introducing each of the main characters and giving some tidbit of information about them (“Carl, age 41; magazine writer/screenwriter; fears his wife finds him dull”—which, by the way, she does). But then when the credits begin, they aren’t the credits for Full Frontal; they’re those for Rendezvous, the movie Calvin and Francesca are making for Gus (the director of Rendezvous, one Constantine Alexander, is played in a cameo by David Fincher). Having been introduced to Calvin and Francesca, we see them for most of the rest of the movie only as “Nicholas” and “Catherine,” their characters in the film. Got it?

On top of that, Nicholas is an actor, and we see him shooting a film with Brad Pitt (playing himself). When the director calls “cut,” Catherine yanks off her wig and becomes (possibly) Francesca again, and she and Nicholas/Calvin stand shooting the breeze with the director—who, his face artfully covered by a floating black box, is none other than Steven Soderbergh himself. So OK, now, who are we watching? We understand they’re not Nicholas and Catherine, but who are they now? Calvin and Francesca, talking about the movie-within-the-movie? Or are they Blair and Julia, just talking about the movie?

Those are the kinds of games Soderbergh plays, and in Full Frontal (a title that makes about as much sense as the movie’s earlier working titles, The Art of Negotiating a Turn and How to Survive a Hotel Room Fire) the games take precedence over any considerations of plot or character.

Soderbergh is always drawing back, or calling “cut,” or doing something to remind us that this is only a movie, even when it’s supposed to be reality. He gives us layers of movie-ness; the cinematography (by Soderbergh himself) goes from Hollywood-slick to digital-video rough to spy-camera blurry at the drop of a hat, always reminding us that we’re seeing something through a lens of some kind.

Full Frontal’s writer is Coleman Hough, but she seems to be almost beside the point. The movie’s Web site doesn’t ignore her, exactly—it just doesn’t tell us much about her; a photograph she took on the set of her own painted toenails is the only evidence we have that she is, in fact, a woman. The Internet Movie Database gives no other credits of any kind for her. But Full Frontal hardly seems a writer’s movie in any case. It’s an exercise by Steven Soderbergh—in both his capacities, as director and as cinematographer. It feels like something less than an experiment, something more than a prank.