Ocean's Week: I have a question. Say we get into the cage, through the security doors there, and down the elevator we can't move, and past the guards with the guns, and into the vault we can't open...

OCEAN'S ELEVEN

2001

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written by Ted Griffin

Spoilers: moderate

We spoke previously of how it couldn't have been inevitable that somebody would remake the 1960 Rat Pack heist film Ocean's 11—though somebody did try in the 1980s, and it didn't go anywhere—but what I really meant is that it absolutely couldn't have been inevitable that when it did get remade it would be by Steven Soderbergh in 2001, then in a career revival but not fully confirmed as a mainstay of the industry until Erin Brokovich only a year before.  I'm not sure Soderbergh had even recommended himself for the job, despite having the extremely relevant resume entry of 1998's Out of Sight, his first heist film with romantic elements starring George Clooney (and, for that matter, Don Cheadle), which is a terrific romance with no interest in having a good heist, though maybe that was even the challenge he was taking on.  So it was surely not inevitable that it would be, as the saying goes (whether you agree it's a "saying" probably depends on how memorable you find Topher Grace in Soderbergh's immediately-prior film, Traffic), an unbeatable market force; or, at least, a remunerative investment for its studio, Warner Bros.

But Soderbergh's star-studded, blockbusterized rendition of Ocean's Eleven—the remake's title being transcribed with letters rather than with numerals—did turn out to be pretty difficult to beat.  (We'll unpack this later, but there's an argument that the film has been a bad influence, and one of the ways is that it serves as towering proof of the idea that half-forgotten and seemingly-worthless IPs can and should be endlessly revived.)  But it managed to make in the ballpark of a half billion dollars at the worldwide box office, back in an era where that was an inordinately impressive feat.  The other thing I previously said couldn't have been inevitable, however, was a skosh more inflammatory than any declaration that the original Ocean's 11 was kind of bad.  This was that its remake generated the best set of three related films in a row of this millennium, something we shall happily describe as a "trilogy" by virtue of it having the same principal author, even if it scarcely tells anything resembling a single unified story, and there was obviously no specific plan for such a thing to exist when Soderbergh and screenwriter Ted Griffin made the first one.  Now, I'm sure you could offer some alternative latterday trilogies, but: are they better?  Are they more consistent?  Are they really?*  And the fundamental question: are they cooler?  Because you know they're not cooler.

Above, I parenthetically suggested that Ocean's Eleven might have done its part for opening the door to the era of desperate IPsploitation, but such things have always been a feature of Hollywood, and this remake, anyway, is what you wish remakes usually were: one that looks back to the past, finds source material with a great premise but bad execution, steals that premise, and then executes it incredibly well.  It is, in fact, slightly dizzying to screen it and its predecessor in tandem.  It underlines what a damned wonky screenplay Ocean's 11 had inflicted upon it thanks its need to be a Rat Pack hang-out comedy.  What takes an hour in Ocean's 11 takes half that in Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's Eleven has the decency to be entertaining from the moment it starts, managing a central cast of eleven that feels like a cast of eleven, rather than a cast of, at best, five.  That's on top of doing an infinitely better job with the five characters it's decided are most interesting.  Beyond that, there's not even any value in comparing the two films.  Besides the premise—"the coolest guys you've ever seen rob Las Vegas casinos," which is already begging the question with the original film, anyway—there aren't actually that many points where either Soderbergh or Griffin, in their respective capacities, are "remaking Ocean's 11" in any strict sense.  Despite the obligatory credits given to Ocean's 11's writers, if it were called anything else and changed one single character's name, I don't think you'd win the lawsuit.  The points where it is remaking it, for the record, include a visual quotation from the final shot of Ocean's 11, that takes a somewhat similar position in Ocean's Eleven; a scene transition that homages the balloon-mediated cuts that open up the Ocean's 11 heist, but presented much earlier here, and which Soderbergh almost didn't remember to do because he only had the inspiration on the day of shooting for the first part of it; the quite thin similarity of characters, in that both Ocean's Danny Oceans have an estranged wife, which Ocean's Eleven does so much more with that our Dannies don't feel remotely alike; the necessity of a Vegas-wide blackout, which is probably the closest-feeling detail; and, finally, the most actually substantial echo is that Soderbergh and Griffin are playing their sickly character against your possible awareness of Ocean's 11's sickly character, more as a cherry on top than as strictly required background knowledge.  (It says something that one of the shooting locations had a mural of Frank Sinatra.  Soderbergh scrupulously keeps it offscreen.)

So: what we have, in Ocean's Eleven, is our charming thief, Danny Ocean (Clooney), who's recently been released from prison, and who's used his sentence to think about two things.  The first becomes crystal clear once he jumps parole to reunite with his closest friend, Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt), in Hollywood: Danny has hatched a plan to rob three Vegas casinos that all use the same underground vault to store their cash, intending to strike on an exceptionally busy night so that, as Nevada gaming regulations demand (they demand no such thing as you'd realize if you thought about it for so much as two seconds), those casinos will have to have upwards of $150 million cash in their vaults in order to cover every last dime being gambled on above.  The second thing Danny's been thinking about these long years only becomes apparent much later, in a turn that's simultaneously the thing that everybody knows that Ocean's Eleven is "about," but is, to all its principals' credit, played very much as a "reveal" in the film itself: Danny's real goal, or at least his primary goal, is to get his ex-wife Tess Ocean (Julia Roberts) back, so the entire thing with robbing these particular casinos has a lot more to do with the fact that she's dating their dismal, cruel owner, Steve Wynn, I mean Terry Benedict (Andy García), and Danny would like to show her what a loveless monster she's shacked up with.  In the end, what Ocean's Eleven amounts to is a movie about ten dudes all doing their part to help their bro get his chick back, with all its pleasures founded upon a distractible, somewhat truncated, very old-fashioned, and not entirely plausible—but nonetheless surprisingly sincere—comedy of remarriage.

But Danny needs all of those bros, or at least the title Ocean's Eleven needs them, so Danny and Rusty go recruiting.  They pick up another nine fellows to fill out a cast that, besides the aforementioned Cheadle, includes Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Eddie Jemison, Qin Shaobo, Carl Reiner, and Matt Damon.  Each member of the team brings his specific skillset and, more importantly, his specific personality, and each one gets at least one moment (usually several moments) to shine.  (But let's not forget the aforementioned Grace, either, providing Soderbergh a very generous cameo as a borderline mentally-challenged version of himself, deployed to symbolize the bottomless ennui of Rusty's attempt to play his life safe.)  Everybody who's ever seen Ocean's Eleven has their own special favorite; each of them is, undoubtedly, somebody's special favorite, even Jemison, who as the group's tech guy probably gets shortest shrift of all of them, but even he gets a really fun prefatory caper of his own, amidst some interesting, counter-realist production design; and his sweaty anxiety is still a source of joy even if otherwise it's all reactions to stuff on computer monitors.

My special favorite, anyhow, is Cheadle's explosives expert, Basher Tarr, a Briton with a such a mutated Cockney dialect that I don't think I'd believe you if you told me any of the slang terms Cheadle utters have ever been used by a real human being (and Cheadle seems to be having a grand time, despite a mysterious behind-the-scenes beef that saw him going uncredited but didn't stop him from reprising the role twice more).  Or maybe my special favorite is Qin, as the Amazing Yen, who is very amazing indeed, pretty much objectively the most unique member of the Ocean's Eleven cast by virtue of being the only one who could've possibly fit into a cash box; and he's really great, his performance surprisingly engaged, despite speaking almost only Chinese, and only Pitt even pretending to understand him, which is, itself, funny.  Soderbergh's favorite is, rather clearly, Reiner's aged disguise artist, Saul Bloom, given that all the film's most wistful moments wind up attaching to Saul's one last job.  We probably all have our least favorites, too: mine's Mac's blackjack dealer/inside man, Frank Catton, less because of Mac himself than because his two major showcases are, in the first instance, distractingly strange, revolving around hand lotion and hitting a tenor somewhere between gay panic and the actual threat of sex murder—but at least that is strange, since, in the second instance, he receives the most placeholdery-feeling bit in the film, as he and Damon's pickpocket, Linus Caldwell, bamboozle Benedict.  But to be clear: my least favorite "secondary" character still boasts a more enjoyable performance than many movies ever get at all.  Hell, even García hits the goals the movie gives him, as an evil mobster presented by way of a comically-unvarying sourpuss; it's obviously on purpose, amounting to the point of his performance, to make it this unclear why Tess would ever want to be with Benedict.

But that is the secondary cast, and while some of those guys are stars, too, Ocean's Eleven is doing some very archetypically Soderberghian things with the idea of "the movie star," along with embodying all the conventional strengths of just getting "movie stars" to star in your movie.  It's not that rare an opinion, I perceive, that Roberts is giving the best performance here, despite being such an objectively small part of it.  I still think that's bunk: the best performance is blatantly Pitt, which would be true solely by virtue of the 8,000 calories of trash food he's required to eat in every scene he's in, as a form of increasingly-funny actorly business (which has the added benefit, however, of being a sort of nervous tic, the only allowable demonstration that ice-cold Rusty could get nerves).  But it'd be true anyway thanks to the low-key hilarious cast that his supervision of the plan takes on, which is parental, and almost maternal (it's "Ocean's Eleven" but he is, at a minimum, Danny's co-parent, and thanks to Danny's real motives he can feel like the only adult authority the group's got).  It'd be true just thanks to his nearly-telepathic rapport with Clooney, second best here, and the quippy, shorthand rhythms of their dialogue.  (So to circle back to that offhand, "great movie that was potentially bad for the movies, generally" remark, Ocean's Eleven can feel a tiny little bit like ground zero for the dominance of the "underreact to Goddamn everything, make quip" writing styles of the future; but as this specific movie's ambition is to be the coolest cool heist movie ever made, this is of course the only thing you would want from it.)  Roberts does do the most with the least—making a character out of practically a single-digit number of shots, and shots where she's required to underplay her feelings—bringing enough lived-in chemistry with Clooney to imply everything we need to know about their exciting (but checkered) past.  Without her it might be just the cool heist, rather than something close enough to a masterpiece to count.  (She allows, anyway, the other heart of the movie, Reiner, to be afforded the most feather light touch.)  But the main thing is, still, always the cool: the vicarious thrill of watching people better than you pretend to be better than anybody, inviting you in as co-conspirators in their scheme.  That's the conventional movie star part, then.  The Soderberghian part arrives through Damon's pickpocket, presented, to a startling degree, as a referendum on his own nascent movie stardom, with seeming veto power on that question handed to Clooney and Pitt, to the extent the movie practically breaks its own story for them to play a character-building prank on him in the midst of their own super-crime.

All of this is to say, everybody matters, and Ocean's Eleven might feature the largest number of meaningfully moving parts in any heist movie up through 2001 (its sequels, of course, named Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen, have even more).  Like most caper films, it's functionally a magic trick, remarkably expertly-done for the important things, with the film's biggest twist hidden in plain sight so that you might slap your head for not figuring it out sooner, because they've so capably misdirected you into accepting their plausible-sounding bullshit.  Just as good is that the grand caper scaffolds out of dozens of little capers, too many to list, but nearly all of them amounting to precious little thrillers in and of themselves.  You can detect a few ground gears in the well-oiled machine, but most of them only if you try.  (The infamous one is that they didn't give a hoot about where those advertising fliers came from, though I've already mentioned the one that annoys me: I like the meta-game Soderbergh is playing with Damon, but he's banking on you not caring to a downright reckless degree, and it frankly irritates me that he's gambling correctly.)  But this is not a nitpick review, for surely Ocean's Eleven would deem nitpickery unhip.  Its point and purpose is to constantly entertain you, and it does that, with all the beautiful movie stars gliding through impossible challenges with smirks on their faces that you could ask for, its entire aesthetic principle revolving around various elegantly-presented concepts of entertainment, from cards to casinos to dog tracks to circuses to championship boxing to Tess's art museum and its priceless Picasso, nestled above the tastefully-gaudy gaming halls of the Bellagio.  There's just so much swell location shooting in this film, but more importantly, I perceive "a metaphor" there.

Soderbergh is certainly bringing art to it: at one point the line would have been that this was Soderbergh jobbing for the studio to earn brownie points for his "personal" projects, though I believe by this point his Ocean's films have been fully redeemed as auteur efforts, even if he probably didn't think of Ocean's Eleven that way at the time.  He's said something that I think is revealing, and I hope I don't mangle it, something like "it's not actually about anything, it's just supposed to be fun," but adding that, for him, it was a difficult, unenjoyable experience.  Maybe that is the hardest thing, though, because then it becomes a movie about itself, how it looks, moves, and feels; and so, if you have no hackishness in you, it becomes an exercise in perfecting style, which is way harder than just being "about" something.  Soderbergh succeeded, extravagantly, despite an appetite for pre-planning that I (were I a studio executive) would have found alarmingly deficient, so that a lot of the neatest things—even the most emotional things!—came about by accident (or director-driven reshoots), as small as the blocking of a group scene, as medium-sized as a match cut, or as big as the eleven's glorious epilogue at the Fountains of Bellagio (which, if I'm being honest, I wish were the movie's actual last scene).

What he accomplished, alongside editor Stephen Mirrione**, was a film that moves like quicksilver, with this constant flow between scenes so that everything between Danny leaving prison and the fountains epilogue it feels, almost, like one giant 117 minute scene, every piece connected to every other, which is a great thing for a heist film (or just an ensemble comedy) to do, with the smaller scenes that comprise it effected by an almost innumerable number of individual editing strategies, some cheesy but plied with such sincere belief that very few (mainly the image-flips) even threaten to feel that way, all adding up to the same sleek, smooth feel.  (And then there's the one piece of cutting that breaks that sensation, briefly, to privilege Roberts in a most essential way; and I can't believe I haven't described the awe-inspiringly good demolition scene, edging into something like actual surrealism, both entirely alien to the several languages the movie's already spoken to us in, and the fulcrum of its style and substance alike.)  The major touchstone is, naturally, the 1960s; somehow it comes off more 1960s than the 1960 film, trending towards the later, lankier part of the decade when crime movies had figured out how to be pop art.  This crime movie comes off sumptuous, thanks to cinematographer "Peter Andrews***," boasting a nice color style that doesn't quite rise to the level of color coding, but always fits the mood that each individual shot's going for, the succession of glowing locations itself building into a more abiding sense of wealth and class.  That is, after all, what we're here to appropriate for ourselves by way of our much hotter screen avatars.  It's a wonderful film—and it still might only be the least of the three.

Score: 10/10

*I am counting things that began in the 20th century, but the only one really in the running is the Before Trilogy. (Edit: as would, as Dan notes below, Toy Story, which I prefer to think I overlooked because of the large, decade-and-millennium-sized gap between 2 and 3.)

**Who, it's worth explicitly mentioning, is not Steven Soderbergh.

***Because that is Steven Soderbergh.

Reviews in this series:

Ocean's 11 (1960)

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

Ocean's Twelve (2004)

Ocean's Thirteen (2007)

Ocean's Eight (2018)