Cannes: "Ocean's Thirteen"

It's impossible for me to be objective about this movie. The screenwriters, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, and I have been friends for a hair less than a decade now. They are not just media-professional friends; they're get-you-out-of-jail friends. (Long story. It didn't quite come to that. Also: I didn't do it. It was all a big misunderstanding. Really.) Come-to-your-wedding friends. That sort of thing. I say this not to name-drop but to tell you that if you don't wanna trust me if I say, for example, that the movie goes down like a caphirina, I won't hold it against you. But I also say this because if there's a common theme running through the movies Brian and David have had the biggest personal stakes in—Rounders, Knockaround Guys, this one—it's one about standing up for your friends, because if you don't then what kind of guy, or, um, person, are you. Thirteen is about Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and the gang getting payback from ruthless casino mogul Willie Bank (Al Pacino, deeply tan and underplaying; I could have used more of him in this, actually) after Bank does such a backstab number on Elliot Gould's Reuben that Reuben collapses and nearly dies on the spot. Pulling Rusty (Brad Pitt) away from a safe-cracking job (nice cell ringtone, dude), Danny reconvenes his boys and they concoct a very elaborate scheme to break the bank of Bank's new casino on its opening night. Every time the stakes are raised and the job becomes objectively impossible, they step back, consider, think of Nathan, and keep going.

Now of course this being the ultra-cool Ocean crew all this is done without any, or at least much, overt show of sentimentality. (Although the guys do reveal themselves as quite soft touches, in ways too delicious to give away.)

But enough of that. This is a very kitchen-sink heist movie, one in which, among other things, the heisters have to adapt to the digital age. This kinda makes sense, as it seems that everything that could be done in an analog-age heist movie has already been done. But it also means that the filmmakers have to make adapting to the digital age not boring.

There's a lot of exposition in the first half and director Stephen Soderbergh keeps the settings and the colors so pretty in these scenes that he runs the risk of zoning the more mise-en-scene oriented viewer out. "Hey, look how he's suffused that shot in Yves Klein blue!" "Man, that neon-lime green reminds me of a shot from Richard Lester's Cuba!" and so on. That's just me. But by the time the heist actually occurs, things chug along with both an energy and a meticulousness that makes whether you "got" the setup relatively immaterial.

The picture's also got a high goofball quotient. Koppelman and Levien and Soderbergh all love the language of the con, and the dialogue is replete with argot, some actual ('the big store" is the real name given to an elaborate con operation) and some I think they just made up ("the Brody," "the Gilroy," etcetera). And that's just the least of it. At times things get to a point of ridiculousness that you either go with or don't, as in Casey Affleck's Virgil fomenting labor unrest in a Mexican dice-manufacturing plant, or the "seduction" scene wherein Matt Damon, sporting a ludicrous fake nose, tries to distract Bank ameneusis and "cougar" ("It's not my term," Damon's Linus protests to the guys; "I read it in Maxim magazine") Ellen Barkin. I suppose if you come at this movie expecting to take it seriously in a certain way, it's not gonna work for you.

Comments

[Michael De Luca]

Levien and Koppelman aim to please. I remember listening to the commentary track on my "Knockaround Guys" dvd and thinking they were really on the level, particularly when they revealed they were hardcore Big Lebowski fans. And Vin Diesel's speech about the number of street fights required to be a "legitimate tough guy" was Walter Hill old school. The film was unfairly pegged as a Tarantino knock-off. Not true. It was a true-blue world-weary meditation on friendship betweeb young men in a world run by corrupt patriarchs, sort of a laconic version of "Wall Street".