High Flying Bird

The first thing that happens in High Flying Bird is a card being declined. Ray Burke (André Holland), a sports agent, is buying lunch for his rookie client Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), and the corporate card comes back dead, because the league is in a lockout and the agency has stopped paying for lunches. Ray talks his way through it without raising his voice, which is the film in miniature. Steven Soderbergh directs, shoots and edits; Tarell Alvin McCraney writes; and for 90 minutes people in suits talk, quickly, about money and who gets to keep it. It is good. There is one game of basketball in it, and it is played in a gym.

McCraney’s script is the reason to watch. Ray moves between the owners, represented by David Seton (Kyle MacLachlan); the players’ association, in the shape of Myra (Sonja Sohn); his boss, David Starr (Zachary Quinto), who wants the lockout over; and Sam (Zazie Beetz), his former assistant, who has left for a better job and still takes his calls. Every conversation is a negotiation with a second one underneath it. Holland delivers the lines at the pace of a man who has thought three moves ahead and is bored waiting for you to catch up. The back half has the shape of a heist, except that the thing being stolen is leverage.

Soderbergh shot it on an iPhone, and it shows in every frame. The lens is wide, so the corners of rooms bend and a man at the far end of a table looks a long way off. Andy Eklund’s production design gives him glass, steel and grey carpet, offices where the city is always behind somebody’s head, and the phone flattens it all into a cold, even sheen. That suits a film about people always on the way to a meeting. Outdoors in daylight, though, the image goes thin and we wished for a proper camera. Marci Rodgers dresses Ray in narrow suits that fit better than anyone else’s, a joke about how much money he does not have. David Wilder Savage’s score is a small electronic pulse under the walking and stays out of the arguments.

The scenes that got to us are the ones away from the offices. Bill Duke plays Spence, an old coach who runs a gym for kids and has a rule that anyone who compares the league to slavery must say a set phrase of penance out loud. It is a laugh the first time and not the second. Duke sits still and says little, and a late conversation between him and Ray, two black men of different generations working out what the game has cost them, moved us more than anything said in a boardroom. Soderbergh also cuts in interviews with real young players talking plainly about being drafted, and those few minutes weigh more than some of the plotting around them.

The talk is the pleasure and also the problem. McCraney writes in jargon and does not slow down for us. We kept up, mostly, but there were stretches where we followed the mood of a scene and not what was agreed in it. A few speeches, Sohn’s in particular, are addressed to a room rather than a person and sound it. And the ending is softer than the build-up. Ray’s scheme is the engine of the film, and we will not describe where it lands, except that the last ten minutes are quieter than an hour of plotting had led us to expect. We were a little let down, and we suspect that is partly the point. It does not make those minutes land any harder.

Soderbergh has made lighter films about clever people robbing institutions; this is the one where the robbery is an idea and nobody has a good time. It is nearer his cheap, fast, talky pictures than to Ocean’s Eleven, and it shares their virtue, that 90 minutes is the right length, and their flaw, that they can feel like a well-run meeting.

Turn the subtitles on and put your phone face down. The film was shot on one, and that is enough phones for one evening.