It’s old hat by now to point out that heist films tend to secretly act as metaphors for the process of making movies, but High Flying Bird, available on Netflix Instant, does one trick better. It’s a sports movie that secretly acts as a heist movie that secretly acts as a metaphor for the process of making movies. For his latest experiment in form and filmmaking, the prolific Steven Soderbergh has turned up with a low-budget, chatty bit of inside baseball (metaphorically speaking) that’s paced like a bullet and proves to be every bit a crowd-pleasing triumph as his Ocean’s 11 trilogy. The result is the first truly great film of 2019.
I’ll admit to running hot and cold on Soderbergh as a director, sometimes finding his movies more interesting as Five Obstructions-style challenges than as complete cinematic experience. More than once he’s gone out with a script that is straight-up not ready (or maybe just not worthy) to be put before cameras and ended up with something that’s technically impressive due to the expediency of his craft and elasticity of his style but otherwise inert (or outright repulsive, in the case of the sleazy, borderline-homophobic Side Effects).
This time out, Soderbergh’s working from a script by Tarell Alvin McCraney, a playwright whose last foray into features was the Best Picture winning Moonlight. High Flying Bird unfolds in a series of conversations and confrontations, and McCraney’s dialogue sizzles and pops as it comes volleying out of the mouths of the terrific ensemble assembled here. But what seems at first to be an agreeable lark from two heavyweight talents gathers weight and depth as it goes along, and by the time the final moments turn over their last trick, you might just realize it was you who got played all along.
High Flying Bird takes place entirely over the course of a long holiday weekend in the world of Ray Burke (Andre Holland, so terrific in Moonlight and a Soderbergh veteran from The Knick), a sports agent cut from Jerry Maguire’s conscientious cloth. Ray’s clients and agency are in a state of freefall as an NBA lockout stretches into its sixth month thanks to a group of owners led by David Seton (Kyle MacLachlan, so oily he leaves a trail) who have decided to starve out their athletes rather than part with a few more percentage points.
Burke, for motives the film teases and obfuscates for much of its 90-minute runtime, finally has enough and initiates a plan to jump-start the faltering talks with moves that are half reckless abandon, half five-dimensional chess genius. It’s not always clear which moves are which, and the canny brilliance of Holland’s starring turn is that it’s not always clear if Ray knows either. If there was ever any doubt as to whether or not Holland has presence enough to carry a film, let High Flying Bird perish all such thoughts. Holland threads maybe the skinniest needle an actor can face, in that he’s fascinating to watch even when he’s not doing much. Watching Ray think, panic, adjust, or coolly hold his position never once gets old as he navigates his way through the tangles of his industry.
High Flying Bird plays out largely as a series of conversations, at times recalling McCraney’s origins on the stage. Each conversation Ray enters into is a negotiation of some kind, a game within a wider game, and it’s a credit to McCraney’s script, Soderbergh’s direction, and the ensemble’s talents that you never lose track of how positions are changing over the course of conversation even at those times when the film is purposefully keeping you in the dark about the larger picture.
Among the people Ray squares off against besides Seton are rookie hotshot Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), players’ union representative Myra (Sonja Sohn), agency superior David Starr (Zachary Quinto), and a rival rookie’s intimidating momager Emera Umber (Jeryl Prescott). On Ray’s side, at least in theory, are former assistant Sam (Zazie Beetz), and local gym owner and friend Spencer (the great Bill Duke).
Everyone shows up to play (metaphorically speaking. This is a basketball movie with maybe three seconds of actual basketball played), sinking their teeth into the meaty scenes McCraney’s script provides. Gregg proves that his terrific work in season 2 of American Vandal was no fluke, while Quinto uses his own brief turn to paint in several memorable tones of douchebag.
Sohn and Prescott are both actresses who have been in the business for a while, rarely (if ever) getting roles commensurate with their talents. Here, they are given the opportunity to create two strikingly powerful, but vastly different, women, and there’s an almost palpable sense of relief coming from both actresses as they flex major muscles. Prescott in particular takes a character that could have been a stock ‘showbiz mom’ heavy and spins a creation that is specific and singular.
Beetz is rapidly establishing herself as one of the most exciting talents in her age group, and she comes hungry into every scene. Holland has to work overtime to keep her from stealing every scene out from under him, and the energy between the two creates very real sparks in what’s thankfully kept platonic. Duke and MacLachlan are themselves no strangers to stealing any scene that isn’t nailed down, and both make a huge impression here. MacLachlan perfectly inhabits the skin of the kind of casual monster who will burn an entire industry to the ground just to win a point for his own ego, while Duke is fantastic as the polar opposite, a guy who has quietly dedicated his life to helping others and asks for no thanks but in turn brooks no fools.
(Sidenote: Between this and Mandy, I hope we’re in the midst of a Bill Duke renaissance. He’s got that wonderful face and those haunted eyes, and age has only made him all the more compelling a screen presence. High Flying Bird, if nothing else, is a stark reminder of what a heavy-hitter he can be. Fingers cross other filmmakers recognize.)
The big catchy experiment for Soderbergh this time out is the use of an iPhone (modified with a widescreen lens) rather than a traditional camera. Tangerine proved you could shoot a professional film on an iPhone and end up with a professional-looking film back in 2015, and honestly the biggest surprise is that it took Soderbergh, revered for his stripped-down, at-times bordering on improvisational approach to filmmaking this long to take up this most economical approach.
This is actually Soderbergh’s second iPhone film, after last year’s Unsane. Some folks dug that movie, but I will be honest with you: I found watching the trailers for it at the movies so unpleasant that I never even considered catching it on the big screen.
There are individual moments and scenes where High Flying Bird looks, well, like something that you shot on your iPhone, but otherwise the film is bristling with style, color, and energy. As I said, this is a talky piece, and much of what’s being discussed is high-end business dealings. It could play like watching folks read the phonebook, but McCraney’s exchanges play out with almost musical rhythm, and Soderbergh’s camera is a dance partner with the cast as they make that music sing.
But the iPhone thing proves to be more than just a gimmick. While High Flying Bird avoids a too-heavy hand with its subject matter, it’s also not subtle about the idea that the main characters are black men and women who spend their days hustling, scrabbling, struggling, working, all within an industry unquestioningly controlled by powerful white men who barely deign to lift a finger to resolve the problems they create. In one particularly maddening sequence, MacLachlan’s character trails Sohn’s into an elevator following a fraught meeting and continues to quietly but deliberately impose his presence upon her, reminding her with his every breath which of them has true power and which of them has power only when allowed/recognized by others.
“There’s a reason why the NBA started integrating as the Harlem Globetrotters exhibitions started going international,” Duke opines at one point. “Control. They wanted control of a game that we play, that we play better. They invented a game on top of a game. The question is, what you gone do?”
Many of Soderbergh’s experiments and challenges, especially of late, have been concerned with the democratization of cinema. He’s not made for systems and organizations, not in a “I THREW IT ON THE GROUND!” kinda way, but in the sense that he’s too restless and open-minded creatively to accept the narrow restrictions of any one kind of approach.
With High Flying Bird, shot on an iPhone, released to the entire globe in one go on Netflix, Soderbergh has made a film about seizing the means of production that also serves as an instruction manual as to how to seize the means of production. Ray sets out to prove that basketball can exist without the NBA, and he does so in a movie that proves you can make dynamite cinema and you don’t need any of the infrastructure that normally surrounds a movie’s production and release. The final moments of the film are almost ludicrously rewarding, not only for the usual heist movie exaltation as a plan comes into focus and snaps into place, but because the closing moments serve as a galvanizing call to arms.
Use their tools. Play their game. And then steal it, right out from under their nose.