| Overall Grade: |
A |
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| Story: |
A |
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| Acting: |
A |
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| Direction: |
A+ |
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| Visuals: |
A- |
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Get Enclosed Into Bubble
by Eric (movies profile)
Sep 7, 2007
3
of
4 people found this review helpful
Anyone who has ever lived in a small town can relate to the title. Events outside of your small patch of existence is happening on a distant planet. That the only things that matter are what happens in day-to-day routines of life. It seems that Steven Soderbergh also knows that truth as well when he made Bubble, a film that encloses us with three very lonely people and makes us look them in the eye.
Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) and Kyle (Dustin Ashley) have been working at a doll factory in a small West Virginia town for a while that she considers him her friend. He might agree if asked, but it's more by default. She picks him up, they eat, and they work, and do everything over and over again. For Martha, this isn't much, but it's livable. For Kyle, this is a pit stop that's becoming more a full-time operation. When Rose (Misty Wilkins) comes to work, she immediately takes an interest in Kyle. First comes a smile that Martha is first to notice, then comes cigarette breaks. Martha is pulled between curiousness of the younger Rose and a disgust that she's slowing changing the configuration she was comfortable with. When Rose and Kyle do go out, Martha is lulled into babysitting for Rose and feels hurt that she was the last to know about this. The date isn't very promising after Rose does something when brought back to Kyle's mother's place. The last act has a murder that really doesn't classify as a whodunnit, but it's really just a means to end the story. Characters are revealed in subtle ways and we leave with the message that every small town knows well; nothing really changes in the end.
It's hard to make real life interesting. Even harder still is to realize the saddening isolation of being an outsider in a small society. Martha and Kyle are outsiders by nature, Rose is an outsider by choice. Murder perhaps is the only thing that can wake them out of their slumber, and still it might take more. Coleman Hough and Sodenbergh understand this with neuance and precision with their screenplay. That the very last scene and the very first are identical perhaps says more than the rest of the film combined.
That the people portraying these charcters are not trained actors is already well-known. That Debbie Doebereiner was a manager for a local KFC before taking on the role shouldn't fool you into thinking she wasn't able to give Martha a soul of her own. Martha plays almost entirely behind the eyes. She's sincere and helpful. She might love Kyle not in a physical way, but in a spiritual manner that makes it hard for her to understand his attraction to Rose. Misty Wilkins speaks in tones of monotones that doesn't ring as either hammy or melodramtic, even when she has a fight with her daughter's father in front of Martha. Dustin Ashley's performance is just a tad too insulated considering that he's at the core of these two women and not really by choice.
For Soderbergh, this film is another landmark in an amazing career. He's proven that you don't need big-budget actors to provide sincere emotional impacts, that sometimes, in the right films, that allowing people to be who they are creates more drama than the staged type. He makes his actors look good without the saturation of hyped-up production value. Can that be said about any other filmmaker?
All in all, Bubble is a sight to behold. A small-town tale told by those who know it and directed by a man whose fearless enough to try. Blow on that for a while. |
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