“Logan Lucky” and “Marjorie Prime”
Adam Driver and Channing Tatum star in Steven Soderbergh’s heist movie.
The good
news about the new Steven Soderbergh film, “Logan Lucky,” is that, although
it’s about a heist, it contains not a single person named Ocean. George Clooney
in a well-pressed suit, his bons mots tumbling like dice, is never going to be
an eyesore, but even the proudest Las Vegan will have tired of the spectacle by
now. That explains why Soderbergh, who directed “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001) and its
two sequels, begins the latest movie with so sweaty a statement of intent:
Channing Tatum, busy with his tools, under the hood of a truck. Sitting nearby
is his young daughter, Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie), who passes him the wrenches
that he needs. Caesars Palace seems a long way off.
Tatum plays Jimmy Logan, who lives in Boone County, West Virginia,
and drives an excavator at the mine. As befits a lover of country music, he has
an ex-wife named Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes), who wears a fringed white top and
rhinestone-studded jeans, and a sister, Mellie (Riley Keough), who works as a
hairdresser. Stopping by Mellie’s salon, Jimmy admits to one of her clients
that he doesn’t like cell phones. “You one of those Unabomber types?” she asks.
Jimmy also has a brother, Clyde (Adam Driver), who lost half an arm in Iraq.
Despite being, in physical terms, the least plausible siblings since Danny
DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger, in “Twins” (1988), Jimmy and Clyde are
conjoined in mental sloth. In the words of one onlooker, “You Logans must be as
simpleminded as people say.”
Yet the movie doesn’t always bear out that verdict. For one thing,
the brothers show a casual proficiency that borders on cool. Clyde pours
drinks, with a conjurer’s grace, at a local bar; Jimmy takes off his hard hat
and skims it backhanded into a storage locker, yards away, like 007 tossing his
trilby onto a hat stand. Then there’s the plan. In Jimmy’s kitchen is what
Clyde describes as “a robbery to-do list,” the idea being to steal a cornucopia
of cash from the Charlotte Motor Speedway, in Concord, North Carolina—or, more
precisely, to suck the cash from a vault beneath the track, through a network
of tubes. The boys enlist the aid of a safe-blower named Joe Bang (Daniel
Craig), the only hitch being that he’s in jail. No problem. Clyde gets himself
arrested, by driving briskly through the window of a store, and thrown into the
same prison. He and Joe must break out for the day, hook up with Jimmy, pull
off the theft, and break back in without being missed. All of which sounds
wacky enough, but is it simpleminded?
That question meanders through “Logan Lucky.” What we have here is
a filmmaker of proven liberal credentials (a few years ago, he made a two-part,
four-and-a-half-hour bio-pic of Che Guevara) addressing himself to a patch of
America where those credentials don’t mean jack. Such is the merriment of the
new movie, and so spirited is its pace, that you barely notice the wavering of
the tone. On the one hand, Soderbergh and his screenwriter, Rebecca Blunt, set
up various characters as ninepins—folks like Joe’s brothers, Fish and Sam,
played so broadly by Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson, and with such raw
redneckery, that they’re begging to be knocked down. Roll up, the movie cries,
watch the hicks toss toilet seats instead of horseshoes! Listen to them mangle
the lingo of the modern age! (“All the Twitters, I know ’em.” “I looked it upon the Google.”) Soderbergh reinforces this overkill with leering closeups;
we’re crotch-side with Joe as he does pushups in his cell, and Clyde slides a
cocktail so near to the lens that he might as well be offering the cameraman a
swig.
On the other hand, check out race day—which, wouldn’t you know it,
happens to be heist day, too. Some of the speedway footage was shot live during
the Coca-Cola 600, one of the premier Nascar events of the year, and Soderbergh
doesn’t just give us the hullabaloo that surrounds it. He gives it to us
straight. As LeAnn Rimes sings “America the Beautiful” and fighter jets fly in
formation above, all the spectators (barring Joe Bang, who needs to stayincognito) bare their heads, and you can feel the film following suit, as you
can when Sadie, shimmering with hairspray and fake tan, carols a John Denver
song at a beauty pageant, with her audience crooning along. What Soderbergh
implies at such moments is that for countless Americans this is the life, and
that you mock it at your peril. And yet, elsewhere, the movie points and
snorts. When historians come to tell the tale of the Trumpian epoch, and of
confused cultural attitudes toward the heartland, “Logan Lucky” will be part of
the evidence.
Then again, many people will leave the cinema with nothing more
profound—or more enjoyable—than the image of Daniel Craig, adorned with a
garish blond buzz cut that makes his blue eyes madder than ever. In jail, he
wears a traditional inmate’s uniform, with black and white stripes. Asked by
Clyde and Jimmy how it’s going when they pay a visit, Joe replies, “I’m sitting on
the other side of the table wearing a onesie. How d’you think it’s going?” The
laugh that met this line when I saw the movie seemed to unlock its good cheer,
and so liberated does Craig appear, on a hollering vacation from his
stern-visaged duties as James Bond, that his mood exalts the whole enterprise.
“I’m about to get nekkid,” Joe says, sprawled on the rear seat of a Mustang
V-8, and he takes great joy in cooking up explosives from gummy bears and
bleach. Soderbergh refuses to get wonkish about the crime; he drops in a few
rum details—for what possible purpose, you wonder, is Mellie painting live
cockroaches with nail polish?—and stands back, as if to say, Let the games
begin.
Once they’re done, we get a late twist that I failed to
understand, plus some wary sleuthing from an F.B.I. agent (Hilary Swank).
Neither addition is necessary, but, then, “Logan Lucky” delights in
superfluities; it’s more about the trimmings than the meat. Not all of them
succeed. Seth MacFarlane isn’t much funnier or more believable as a British
racing driver than Don Cheadle was as a British thief in the “Ocean’s” saga;
whatever strange fixation Soderbergh has on Cockneys, or fake Cockneys, should
be laid to rest. But Katherine Waterston does wonders with a brief role as
Sylvia, a woman who went to high school with Jimmy and wound up as a medic. In
a few minutes, she gives you a hint of the startling ways in which lives can
peel apart and come together again, and she sets Jimmy thinking. He and Clyde
used to fear a Logan family curse, but their exploits here—not the plunder
alone but the patent elixir of hope, savvy, and silliness—break the spell.
If you
are feeling especially dumb, or hungover, steer clear of “Marjorie Prime.”
Michael Almereyda’s film is so subtly smart, and veiled in such layers of
suggestion, that you need to be on your toes from the beginning.
In a beautiful house by the sea, an elderly woman, Marjorie (Lois
Smith), talks to a more youthful man, named Walter (Jon Hamm). He sits erect on
the couch, unflappable and neatly groomed, like Don Draper crossed with a
robot; there’s something not quite right about him, and it’s only at the end of
the scene that the something becomes clear. As Marjorie brushes past him, she
walks through his shoes as if they weren’t there at all. And
they’re not. Walter is a Prime—a computer program, providing a 3-D facsimile of
a deceased person. In this case, the true Walter was Marjorie’s late husband,
and she has chosen to have him return as an earlier self, thus setting an
immediate moral test: if you could summon up those you have loved and lost, at
what stage would you capture them? In their heyday? Or as they were in yours?
Almereyda’s movie, adapted from a stage play by Jordan Harrison,
is technically science fiction, picking through the thorny issues of identity
that grew in “Blade Runner,” yet it looks only lightly futuristic. We never
find out how you order a Prime, or whether it’s just the well-to-do who can
afford one; will the poor continue to mourn as before? At one point, we gather
that Marjorie herself must have passed away, because it’s a reboot of her—not
younger, but more kempt—who chats with her daughter, the sorrowful Tess (GeenaDavis), politely asking for details of the departed Marjorie, so as to become a
more accurate copy. (“I’m vain?” “A little.” “That’s helpful.”) Then we have
Tess’s husband, Jon (Tim Robbins), fond of his Scotch; we wonder whether he, in
turn, will bring forth a substitute Tess, once she is no more, and whether, like
all the humans in the movie, he will be tempted to arrange for an improved or
happier model. “Marjorie Prime” could use a trim, as some of the exchanges
linger too long, but Mica Levi, who worked on “Under the Skin” (2013) and
“Jackie” (2016), contributes another searching score, and the film, with its
coastal haze and its fickle gusts of rain, is likely to lodge in your memory.
Or, as it will soon be called, your hard drive. ♦
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