There’s something extraordinarily jazzy about “Logan Lucky,” Steven Soderbergh’s new film—his return to the feature-film arena, the first that he has directed since “Side Effects” (2013).* It’s based on an old, familiar, even hackneyed theme—it’s a heist movie, one in which the meticulous execution of a complex criminal scheme is the center of the action—and it’s one to which Soderbergh brings great energy that reflects his temperament, technique, inventiveness, and pleasure. Its script, by Rebecca Blunt, is taut and intricate, with a mosaic-like intercutting between characters and places, brashly interjected narrative parentheticals, and an explanatory circling-back that’s pulled off with a mercurial sleight of hand. It’s also tangy with felicitously folksy found verbal objects that blend an elbows-out brusqueness with the warm, sometimes overheated intimacy of lifelong bonds.
“Logan Lucky” is a country story, rooted in a small town in West Virginia, where the Logan family is from. Jimmy (Channing Tatum), a former local football star, is now a construction worker who drives to work two states away, at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. His younger brother, Clyde (Adam Driver), an Iraq War veteran who lost his left hand in a roadside bombing, works as a bartender at a local pub, the Duck Tape. His younger sister, Mellie (Riley Keough), is a hairdresser at a local salon. His ex-wife, Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes), has full custody of their young daughter, Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie), who’s busy rehearsing for a local children’s pageant. Bobbie Jo is remarried, to a prosperous auto-dealership owner, Moody (David Denman), with unctuous, glad-handing golf-course manners.
But when Jimmy loses his job because of a corporate paperwork finesse involving insurance, he decides to cash in—using the knowledge that he has gained at work—by robbing the speedway while a race is in progress. To do so, he needs help—first from Mellie and Clyde, but also from the one explosives expert he knows, a local man named, all too aptly, Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), who, inconveniently, is currently being housed in the county jail. So Jimmy and Clyde concoct a scheme to dis-incarcerate Joe just long enough for him to do the job with them—but Joe won’t do the job without the help and support of his own younger brothers, Fish (Jack Quaid) and Sam (Brian Gleeson), who seem like blithering yokels but have the know-how to help get the job done.
Soderbergh approaches the story with authentic warmth. He starts the film with a bluff and hearty scene between Jimmy and Sadie, and their relationship is the movie’s emotional anchor—a somewhat manipulative one, as most movies with sweet and cheerful children are, but nonetheless one that rings with sincere parental tenderness. Yet the movie’s emotional engine is class resentment, fuelled by a long list of legitimate grievances. Jimmy endures cavalier treatment both from invisible corporate overlords and from the fulsome Moody. Clyde is left wounded by a war that was ordered and mismanaged by the rich and fought by the poor. Jimmy, who can’t afford a lawyer, is too poor to contest his case in a family-court system that’s tilted toward wealth. And subplots in the film involve budget cuts that have thinned out police protection, gutted environmental laws that leave local water polluted, national policies that leave many local residents without adequate health care, a prison system run for the benefit of administrators whose abuses of inmates go utterly unredressed, and corporate connections with law enforcement that leave justice in the hands of those who profit from injustice.
Jimmy and Clyde don’t get mad (well, not often—and when they do, it’s a wicked joy to behold), but they plan to do more than get even. They intend to come out far ahead, and they do so with cool heads and boldly far-sighted strategies that are concealed beneath unassumingly bumptious manners. Soderbergh is the master of process, a supreme cinematic rationalist whose sharply intelligent work is, above all, an exaltation of intelligence. The characters’ smarts are never in question; their incisive mental acuity isn’t a matter of book learning (though Clyde, it’s revealed, is something of a reader); their cultural life may be half-folk and half-pop, but their inner life is sharpened and focussed by hands-on experience.
The actors, especially Driver and Tatum, infuse the laconic folk poetry of the dialogue with a quasi-musical behind-the-beat diction, and Keough endows her lines with a hard-bitten sharpness. Quaid and Gleeson deliver some chewy cornball malapropisms (“the job changed dramastically”; “this is a vagrant flyolation”) with a sly delight—because for all their hee-haw habits, they know what they’re doing, even if not exactly why they’re doing it. (Soderbergh further reinforces the film’s skeptical rationalism with a delicious satire on these two marginal criminals’ born-again religiosity.) To unfold the workings of the speedway as Jimmy has observed them, Soderbergh offers a little documentary that includes Jimmy’s talk with Clyde as its voice-over. When the action moves to the explosive core of the plot, Joe Bang gives a little chemistry lecture, illustrated in chalk on cinderblock walls, complete with formulas, and when Jimmy’s a little imprecise with his instructions, he reminds him, “We’re dealing with science here.”
There’s some more actual science in the action, when Jimmy encounters a former high-school friend, Sylvia Harrison (Katherine Waterston), a doctor who works with a mobile medical unit that depends on donations to compensate for the inadequacy of local health care. Their brief scenes together have a raw, abraded tension in which old pain surges to the fore, but which are anchored nonetheless in the solidity and clarity of medical practice. There’s also the mighty forensic intellect of an F.B.I. agent (played with a fierce, heated focus by Hilary Swank), which comes into play when the robbery is history—and which Soderbergh takes care to contrast with the political and corporate abuses that such intellect endures and struggles against. (It’s exemplary of Soderbergh’s rationalistic vision that he resolves relations between white and black inmates of the county jail not with politics but with the universal and abstract solvent: money.)
The dialogue and the whimsy of “Logan Lucky” remind me somewhat of films by the Coen brothers—this may be the most Coen-esque of Soderbergh’s films, in its combination of giddy narrative panache and a delight in regional and local idiosyncrasies. Yet Soderbergh avoids the cartoonishness and caricature that occasionally marks the Coens’ films. Rather, he subjects a handful of characters to full-blown mockery—those of the charmless bourgeoisie, including Moody; an image-conscious and ass-covering warden (Dwight Yoakam); a racetrack executive (Brandon Ray Olive); and, above all, a sports-drink hustler, played by Seth MacFarlane, who could be a stand-in for every moneyed fool whom Soderbergh has had to jolly in the course of a filmmaking career.
Soderbergh films the movie with swing, relishing the overlapping and intertwining strands of the complex plot, the brightly lit personalities of the characters it involves, and the magnificently conceived, essential tiny details that go into the realization of a grand and risky enterprise. (Some of those details involve hand-painted cockroaches, a sip of dirty water, a bag of gummy bears, two pencil leads, some subtle automotive derring-do, and the fine print of phone bills.) What’s more, the film’s warm-hearted and good-humored ending delivers a devastatingly ironic sting with a delicate touch. Yet, for all its delights and ingenuities, “Logan Lucky” feels like a retread, a calculated effort to succeed by revisiting a formula that, for all the artistic power with which Soderbergh invests it, still feels formulaic—even if, in part, it’s his own formula. The inventiveness, the scintillating cleverness, the sheer cinematic verve of Soderbergh’s best inspirations are tempered by the manners of the public forum—behavioral manners that keep his characters from extremes of experience, and cinematic manners to match. Even the formidable best of “Logan Lucky” feels as if it’s made for show, as if its behind-the-camera pleasures stayed within the responsible, the respectable, the avowable, and the recognizable.
Unlike Soderbergh, the Coens shoot vectors into the realm of speculations, philosophical and historical, and tether their stories and characters to grandly intriguing ideas. They show us the life of the mind. If Soderbergh offered as explicit, expansive, and archeological a view of Southernness in “Logan Lucky” as the Coens offer of suburban Jewishness in “A Serious Man,” the film would be much the better for it. In “Logan Lucky,” Soderbergh, for all his felicitous exertions, falls back on a certain artistic facility. This doesn’t mean that the film was easy to make; it means that Soderbergh relies on what he knows rather than wandering off into what he doesn’t. He knows a lot, and it shows; his pleasure in sharing it is substantial. But he never quite manages to scare himself or viewers with what he doesn’t know. And though it seems churlish to pick away at a movie that offers so many and such conspicuous delights, it’s something of a frustration that it doesn’t push toward hidden mysteries.
Correction: A previous version of this post misstated Soderbergh’s most recent feature film prior to “Logan Lucky.”
