Out of Sight

Elmore Leonard wrote about criminals who talk well and are in no hurry, and for years the films made from his books kept the crime and lost the talk. Get Shorty and Jackie Brown found it again. Out of Sight, from Scott Frank’s script, goes a step further: it is a love story in which the robbery is what the two people do when they are not thinking about each other. Steven Soderbergh, who had spent the decade after sex, lies, and videotape making films that were clever and a little cold, relaxes here. It is a fine film, and one of the few crime comedies we would put on again tonight without needing to be persuaded.

The scene everyone remembers comes early, so we can describe it. Jack Foley (George Clooney) has just climbed out of a Florida prison, and Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), a federal marshal, happens to be in the car park. His partner Buddy (Ving Rhames) puts them both in the boot of her car and drives. What follows is several minutes of two people lying in the dark, pressed together, talking about old films as if they had met at a party. We expected a joke and got a courtship, and we wanted the drive to last longer than it does. Nobody plays it for laughs, and it is the funniest stretch in the film.

Clooney had been charming on screen before this. Here the charm looks like something the character is choosing rather than something the actor cannot help, and Foley, a man good at exactly one thing, is allowed to wonder whether it is enough. Lopez plays Karen as competent and bored by men who underestimate her, and when Foley turns up she does not soften so much as start paying attention. Dennis Farina, as her father, gives her a gun for her birthday and then worries about her, in that order.

Elliot Davis shoots Florida in a hard yellow light that makes everyone sweat and Detroit in a flat grey-blue that makes everyone look cold and slightly guilty. Anne V. Coates, who cut Lawrence of Arabia, edits like someone with nothing left to prove: she freezes frames mid-gesture, jumps forward without warning, and in the hotel bar scene lays a conversation over the night that follows it so the two run together. David Holmes writes loose bass-and-organ funk that sounds as if it was recorded in the next room. Betsy Heimann puts Karen in a long leather coat she wears like a uniform and dresses Foley a size sharper than his circumstances. Gary Frutkoff gives Richard Ripley (Albert Brooks) a Detroit mansion full of things nobody uses, which tells you what kind of rich man he is before he speaks.

The cast is deep enough that the film can afford to waste some of it. Rhames’ Buddy, a large man who telephones his sister to confess after every job, is the gentlest thing in it. Don Cheadle plays Maurice Miller, called Snoopy, as a man who has decided he is frightening and needs everyone else to agree. Steve Zahn’s Glenn Michaels is permanently stoned and permanently out of his depth. Catherine Keener has one good scene as Adele, and Viola Davis and Isaiah Washington make small parts stick.

The Detroit half is busier and slightly less itself. Frank has to move a robbery, two crews and a romance through the same house on the same night, and the tone tightens as the violence arrives. When it does arrive it is sudden and nasty, which is the point, but it sits awkwardly beside a film that has spent an hour persuading us that nobody in it much wants to hurt anyone. Zahn gets more room than the story needs, and one or two flashbacks explain what we had already worked out. At 123 minutes it is not long, but the last half hour feels more managed than the first. The one dissenting review we read calls the plot daft and the romance weak. The plot is daft, as Leonard plots are. The romance is the reason to watch.

Against Soderbergh’s own work, this is the film where he found out he could be warm without going soft. The 15 certificate covers the shootings and the language; the sex is mostly conversation. Watch it with someone you would happily be locked in a boot with. Failing that, watch it anyway, and you will at least know what to look for.