Bubble

Steven Soderbergh made this between two Ocean’s films, and it is hard to think of a sharper change of scale. Seventy-three minutes in a doll factory in a town nobody would visit on purpose, acted by people who had never acted before, shot and cut by the director himself on digital video. The tagline calls it “Another Steven Soderbergh Experience”, which is about the right level of self-mockery. Bubble is a careful, cool, exactly cast small film that we admired for an hour and then watched run out of things to do.

Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) is large, kind and unhurried. She lives with her father (Omar Cowan), makes his meals and drives Kyle (Dustin James Ashley), a thin young man who barely speaks, to the factory each morning. They eat lunch together on a bench. Coleman Hough’s script gives them conversations so ordinary that at first we wondered whether the sound was on. Then Rose (Misty Wilkins) is hired, with a small daughter and a quicker way of talking than anyone else in the building, and Martha offers to babysit.

The factory is where Soderbergh’s camera is happiest. He holds it still and keeps everything in focus, so the vinyl heads on their racks and the workers pressing eyes into sockets are equally sharp, equally lit, equally unremarkable. Nobody plays music over the work; we hear the compressors and the small thump of a head going into a mould. He cuts each scene off a beat early, to black, so the day is a run of short rooms with nothing between them. It is a plain way to shoot and it is the right one for these lives.

Doebereiner is the film. Her face does almost nothing, and the film has been built so that almost nothing reads. There is a moment in the break room, early, when Kyle laughs at something Rose has said and Martha watches from a table away, and we felt a small, exact ache that we had not braced for. Nothing has happened. A woman has noticed that a boy she gives lifts to is happy, and that she is not the cause. Ashley mumbles and looks at the floor, which is right for Kyle, and Wilkins gives Rose an edge of impatience that the town has not managed to sand off.

Robert Pollard and Todd Tobias supply the music, short acoustic guitar figures that arrive between scenes rather than under them, so the film is never told what to feel by its own soundtrack. It is a modest choice and it holds. The non-professional cast mostly holds too, though not always: some pauses are a character thinking and some are a person waiting for the next line, and we could tell which.

The second half takes a turn we will not describe. Decker Moody arrives late, patient and unshowy, and his scenes are shot the same way as the lunches, which is the point. But the point is made quickly, and after that the film’s interest in these people narrows to a single question. The hour of watching Martha at the sink and the line has been traded for talk in a room. Some critics have read the film’s coolness as contempt for its characters. We do not think it is contempt. We think it is distance, and at 73 minutes distance can feel like leaving before the end of the visit.

Soderbergh has been here before in spirit. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) trusted small rooms and long looks and had more to say when it was done. Full Frontal (2002), also written by Hough, was the same kind of experiment with a cast that knew it was one. Bubble is the more honest of the two and the thinner.

Watch it at home, on a weeknight, with nothing planned afterwards. It asks for close attention and gives back a few faces you will remember and one afternoon in a break room that we have not shaken. It does not give back much more than that, and it knows it does not, which is either admirable or a little bit of a shrug. It runs 73 minutes.