After abandoning his life due to gambling debts, Michael Chambers (Peter Gallagher) has come back home for his mothers’ marriage.
He is also back to reconnect with his ex-wife Rachel (Allison Elliott), whom he abandoned.
Making their reunion even more complicated is Rachel’s new boyfriend, a criminal named Dundee (William Fichtner).
But Michael has a new gamble - and he thinks the odds are in his favour…
The key text for me with Steven Soderbergh is an Interview collection edited by Anthony Kaufman.
One of the key hinges of Soderbergh’s career - and one of the main focuses of those interviews - was the crisis of confidence he experienced in the mid-nineties while making this film.
After The Underneath, Soderbergh said he had thrown out the approach he had developed since Sex, Lies and Videotape.
He critiqued his early mindset as too focused and exacting - he had drained any sense of joy or improvisation out of the creative process.
If The Underneath is about containment, his subsequent film, 1996’s Schizopolis, was an explosion.
I had watched pieces of Schizopolis, and a decent chunk of his post-Schizopolis work (Out of Sight, The Oceans trilogy, The Informant!), but watching The Underneath reminded me that I had not seen any of Soderbergh’s work pre-epiphany.
A remake of the noir Criss Cross, The Underneath is stylistically ambitious. From the beginning, it drops the viewer into the middle of the story, using cross-cutting between different timelines to slowly build context for its characters.
Yet one detects a strange inertness to the project.
Cutting between a robbery gone wrong and the events leading up to it, what stands out about The Underneath is how measured it is - slow and pensive, it is a story about people caught in the undertow of choices they made a long time ago.
Even within the diegesis, the characters of The Underneath are obsessed with time.
Chambers is a man tortured and imprisoned by his past. Despite running away from his problems, the guilt has never left him - and on his return home - he appears to be drained. He is no longer the cocky, super confident gambler of his past.
He is older, and still capable of being charming - but there is no centre to him. That spark and confidence are gone.
Peter Gallagher is effective in the role - he has the gravitas, and physically he makes sense for the role of someone who could get by on their looks - those big eyes and lips feel like context by themselves. This quality is enhanced by the way most of the characters who meet him for the first time take his open face and good looks as a sign of decency and competence.
As his ex-wife, Allison Elliott is fine - maybe I need to watch the movie again, but when I try to focus on the other characters, the film’s style starts to work against it.
While she is (and looks) younger than Gallagher, Elliott has a gravitas in the present day sections that makes their dynamic more even-handed. And in the flashbacks, she sells the romance. There is a youth and naïveté to her past self, but Elliott never oversells this to the point of coming across as stupid.
It is a more subtle distinction, although I am not sure if it works for the film’s twist ending.
It is a noir so a tragic ending for the protagonist is not a surprise, but something about it never comes off.
There is something in the idea that the character’s last gamble destroys him, and it made sense that his wife would want to flip roles and use him to make her own escape. But it does not have much dramatic payoff.
Maybe it is because I had watched it recently, but I was amazed by how similar the central motivations and dynamics were between Chambers and his ex-wife, to Danny Ocean’s in Ocean’s Eleven. The film is like a smaller, more sombre take on a crime story based around a personal relationship.
The Underneath is not a bad film. But at the end of the running time, it felt like an interesting technical expression of a theme, but a bit inert as a drama.
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