Sex, Lies, and Videotape **** (1989, James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher, Laura San Giacomo) – Classic Movie Review 2137

Writer/director Steven Soderbergh’s celebrated 1989 indie drama is his highly promising film debut that set him off on a brilliant career. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making the then-26-year-old Soderbergh the youngest director to win the festival’s top award. It also won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, with star James Spader getting the Best Actor Award.

Spurred by its brilliant, teasing title, it became a worldwide box-office success and Roger Ebert called Soderbergh the ‘poster boy of the Sundance generation’. It won an Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and Soderbergh was nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe for his screenplay.

For thriller fans, however, this may be a bit of a disappointment. What a great thriller this could have been! Also mainstream movie-goers might find that it is full of intrigue and promise, but just doesn’t quite deliver because there’s too much chat and too little action.

Nevertheless, that chat is very classy in the intelligent, witty, clever screenplay by Soderbergh. And the acting is highly commendable, intriguingly quirky and eye-catching. The young James Spader is excellent as Graham Dalton, a middle-class drifter and sexual cripple who is only happy when watching videotapes he’s made on his camcorder of women talking about their sex lives.

On a visit to a one-time college buddy John Mullany (Peter Gallagher), Graham initiates his lawyer friend’s troubled frigid wife Ann (Andie MacDowell) and her younger sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo) into the pleasures of his hobby. John is having an affair with Cynthia.

Both MacDowell and San Giacomo were nominated for Golden Globes for their sterling performances. MacDowell’s role was written for Elizabeth McGovern, but her agent so disliked the script that it wasn’t shown to McGovern. Gallagher took over from Timothy Daly after delays in completing the financing for the film.

Soderbergh’s detractors will say that he has made an American art movie that’s slow-moving, dialogue-bound and gets nowhere in particular. His fans will say it is an exquisitely made and acted, nuanced, mature film about neurosis and human sexuality. Just maybe it is both things.

Also in the cast are Steven Brill as the barfly and Ron Vawter as the therapist who is treating Ann.

The critical and unprecedented international commercial success of this low-budget film was influential in revolutionising the independent film movement and instrumental in sparking the indie movie boom in the early 1990s. It was the breakout film for the decade-old Miramax independent film studio, the one most closely associated with quality independent film-making.

Soderbergh wrote the script in eight days on a yellow legal pad during a cross country trip, though he had been thinking about it for a year. Principal photography took 30 days in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the film is set.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2137

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