Ocean's Eleven

Alright everyone, today it's time to start more famous "Ocean's Trilogy," directed by the great Steven Soderbergh. Let's get started with the first installment, the 2001 remake, "Ocean's Eleven."

Roger Ebert started out his review by saying, "Serious pianists sometimes pound out a little honky-tonk, just for fun." That's what it looks like Soderbergh was doing with this remake. This is a basic genre movie, a remake of the 1960 Frank Sinatra version, and Soderbergh, who mostly shoots bigger, does it as a kind of fun. It's polished, obviously: directors this good don't normally handle material this process. It has longing above its usual level, as if wishing to redeem itself and change into a very good movie.

The movie stars Hollywood's ladies man George Clooney, who can be amazingly emotionless better than just about anyone, as Danny Ocean, out of prison and dying for a new job. He's a slick operator who, his parole tells him, has a handful of investigations that he was charged with. He calls his old friend Rusty Ryan, played by Brad Pitt, with a plan to steal millions from three Las Vegas casinos. Amazingly, the movie tells and films in real casinos (the Mirage, MGM Grand and the Bellagio) and combines the destruction of the Desert Inn.

Running the job, Rusty sees the casino owner, played by the great Andy Garcia, with a woman he is familiar with: Tess Ocean, played by Julia Roberts, Danny's former wife. "Tell me it isn't about her," Rusty asks Danny. Obviously it is. Danny wants to get Tess away from her new boyfriend and get her back. They form a team, including Matt Damon, the late insult comedian Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan (James Caan's son), the great Carl Reiner, Elliot Gould, Eddie Jemison, and Shaobo Qin. Ebert noted, "I suppose there are 11 in all, although even during a long tracking shot I forgot to count."

The outlines of these types of movies are long and well established: the scary outer shot of the impervious targets, the inside information, the voice-over as we see the guards still attending to their work, and the plan with a limited timing. "Ocean's Eleven" even has a detailed full-scale mockery of the strong room used by the three casinos, leading to legitimate questions like:

1. Why does this need to be this detailed?
2. How much did this cost? and
3. Who contracted them it for them, or did they put it together themselves overnight?

The movie transcends in its delivery of the dialogue. Ebert said, "The screenplay by Ted Griffin is elegantly epigrammatic, with dialogue that sounds like a cross between Noel Coward and a 1940s noir thriller."

Tess: "You're a thief and a liar?
Danny: "I only lied about being a thief?"
Tess: "You don't do that anymore?"
Danny: "Steal?"
Tess: "Lie."

Ebert confessed, "They do this so well I was reminded of the classic exchanges between Bogart and Bacall." Notice the conversation between Danny, Tess and the Terry Benedict, the owner of the casino, when Terry finds Danny at Tess' table in the restaurant. The two men obviously loathe one another, but are so smooth and cool we see it only in the accuracy of their timing and word choices, getting up to a final moment where Danny, leaving the table, says "Terry" in a way that uses the first name with inappropriate freshness, and Terry responds "Danny" on exactly the same note.

Rusty has a nice dialogue passage as well, when he's instructing Linus Caldwell, played by Damon. The jargon is all about strategy and completely in modern words, but listen to the music instead of the words and you realize it's a situation on Hamlet's instructions to the actors.

Ebert ended his review by saying, "As movie capers go, the specifics in "Ocean's Eleven" are not necessarily state of the art. I can think of more ingeniously executed plans, most recently in "The Score," but then this is not a movie about suspense but about suavity. Clooney and Roberts deliberately evoke the elegance of stars like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, Garcia is as smooth, groomed, polished and tailored as George Raft, and the movie blessedly ends not with a shootout but with a complicated plot finesse. I enjoyed it. It didn't shake me up and I wasn't much involved, but I liked it as a five-finger exercise. Now it's time for Soderbergh to get back to work."

This is a fun movie, and you should check this one out. Look for next Monday for my review on "The Nutty Professor" remake.