- For other uses see Out of Sight .
Out of Sight is a 1998
Academy Award-nominated movie
directed by
Steven Soderbergh and based on the novel
of the same name by
Elmore Leonard.
It was the first of several collaborations between Soderbergh and
star
George Clooney. The film was
released on June 26, 1998. It was nominated for two
Academy Awards (adapted
screenplay and
editing).
It won the
Edgar Allan Poe Award for
best
screenplay and the
National Society of Film
Critics awards for best film, screenplay, and director. It led
to a spinoff TV series,
Karen
Sisco.
Plot
The story revolves around the relationship between a career
bank robber, Jack Foley (
George Clooney), and a
U.S. Marshal, Karen
Sisco (
Jennifer Lopez). They are
forced to share her car trunk during Foley's escape from a Florida
prison.
After he completes his getaway, Sisco chases
Foley while he and his friends - his right-hand man, Buddy
(Ving Rhames) and Glenn (Steve Zahn) - work their way north to Bloomfield
Hills
, a wealthy northern suburb of Detroit
.
There they plan to pay a visit to shady businessman Ripley
(
Albert Brooks), who foolishly bragged
to them years before about a diamond stash at his mansion. But a
vicious criminal (
Don Cheadle) who also
spent time in jail with Jack and Ripley, is planning on hitting up
Ripley's mansion with his crew (consisting of
Keith Loneker and
Isaiah Washington) as well. The question
of whether Sisco is really pursuing Foley to arrest him or for love
adds to "the fun" Foley claims they are having.
Cast
Development
The source novel's origins lie in a picture Leonard saw in the
Detroit News of a beautiful
young female
federal
marshal standing in front of a Miami courthouse with a shotgun
resting on her hip. Producer
Danny
DeVito bought the rights to the book after his success with the
1995 film adaptation of Leonard's novel
Get Shorty. Steven Soderbergh had made two
films for
Universal Pictures when
executive Casey Silver offered him
Out of Sight with
George Clooney attached. However, the filmmaker was close to making
another project and hesitated to commit. Silver told him, "These
things aren't going to line up very often, you should pay
attention".
Casting
Sandra Bullock was originally
considered to play Karen Sisco opposite Clooney, however,
Soderbergh said, "What happened was I spent some time with [Clooney
and Bullock] - and they actually did have a great chemistry. But it
was for the wrong movie. They really should do a movie together,
but it was not Elmore Leonard energy".
Danny DeVito and
Garry Shandling were considered for the part
of Ripley before
Albert Brooks was
cast. The character of Foley appealed to Clooney, who as a boy had
chosen as heroes the bankrobbers in movies: "the
Cagneys and the
Bogarts,
Steve McQueen and all those guys, the
guys who were kind of bad and you still rooted for them. And when I
read this, I thought, This guy is robbing a bank but you really
want him to get away with it".
Soderbergh cites
Nicolas Roeg's 1972
film,
Don't Look Now as the
primary influence on how he approached the love scene between Foley
and Sisco: "What I wanted to create in our movie was the intimacy
of that, the juxtaposition of these two contrasting things ... We
had to mix it up and have you feel like you were more in their
heads."
Michael Keaton was cast in a cameo
role of Agent Ray Niccolette after portraying the same character in
Quentin Tarantino's
Jackie Brown, an adaptation of
Leonard's novel
Rum Punch.
Soundtrack
Disc jockey David Holmes was originally hired to write a
few sections of the film's theme music. Soderbergh liked what he
did so much that he had Holmes score the rest of the film. Holmes
spent six weeks working 12 to 17 hour days to finish the score in
time for the film's release. He drew upon several influences,
including
Lalo Schifrin,
Quincy Jones,
Dean
Martin,
Miles Davis,
Sun Ra, and
Willie
Bobo.
Reaction
Box office
Out of Sight was released on June 26, 1998, in 2,106
theaters and grossed
USD $12 million on its
opening weekend. It went on to gross $37.5 million domestically and
$40.2 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of
$77.7 million.
Reviews
Out of Sight received positive reviews from critics. It
has a 92% rating at
Rotten Tomatoes
and an 85 metascore at
Metacritic. Film
critic
Roger Ebert gave the film
three-and-a-half out of four stars and praised George Clooney's
performance: "Clooney has never been better. A lot of actors who
are handsome when young need to put on some miles before the full
flavor emerges ... Here Clooney at last looks like a big screen
star; the good-looking leading man from television is over with".
In her review for the
New York
Times,
Janet Maslin wrote,
"Ms. Lopez has her best movie role thus far, and she brings it both
seductiveness and grit; if it was hard to imagine a hard-working,
pistol-packing bombshell on the page, it couldn't be easier here".
Andrew Sarris, in his review for
The New York
Observer, wrote, "For once in a mainstream production, the
narrative machinery works on all cylinders without any wasted
motion or fatuous rhetoric. They don't make movies like this
anymore, in this overcalculated and overtested era". In his review
for the
Los Angeles
Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "As always with the best of
Leonard, it's the journey, not the destination, that counts, and
director Soderbergh has let it unfold with dry wit and great skill.
Making adroit use of complex flashbacks, freeze frames and other
stylistic flourishes, he's managed to put his personal stamp on the
film while staying faithful to the irreplaceable spirit of the
original".
Entertainment Weekly
gave the film a "B+" rating and
Owen
Gleiberman wrote, "This is Clooney’s wiliest, most complex star
turn yet. It helps that he’s lost the Beverly Hills Caesar cut
(he’s actually more handsome with his hair swept back), and his
performance is slyly two-tiered: Foley is all charming moxie on the
surface, a bit clueless underneath".
Richard Schickel, in his review for
Time, wrote, "What makes
this movie work is the kind of cool that made
Get Shorty go so nicely: an
understanding that life's little adventures rarely come in neat
three-act packages, the way most movies now do, and the unruffled
presentation of outrageously twisted dialogue, characters and
situations as if they were the most natural things in the world".
In her review for the
L.A.
Weekly,
Manohla Dargis wrote, "This isn't a profound
film, or even an important one, but then it isn't trying to be;
it's so diverting and so full of small, satisfying pleasures, you
don't realize how good it is until after it's over".
Awards and nominations
The
National Society of
Film Critics voted
Out of Sight the Best Film of 1998
as well as Soderbergh Best Director and Frank for Best Screenplay.
Entertainment Weekly
voted it as the sexiest film ever on their "50 Sexiest Movies Ever"
poll and ranked it #9 on their Top 25 Modern Romances list.
In later years, Soderbergh would see the film as "a very conscious
decision on my part to try and climb my way out of the arthouse
ghetto which can be as much of a trap as making blockbuster films".
He had just turned down directing
Human Nature, written by
Charlie Kaufman, to direct
Out of
Sight. "And I was very aware that at that point in my career,
half the business was off limits to me". Clooney said, "
Out of
Sight was the first time where I had a say, and it was the
first good screenplay that I'd read where I just went, 'That's it.'
And even though it didn't do really well box office-wise - we sort
of tanked again - it was a really good film".
References
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