Any movie that ends with fireworks gets big points for -- at the very least -- ending with fireworks. If the film itself hasn't succeeded in eliciting oohs and ahhhs, you at least get to look at something pretty. You can also take them as an unspoken acknowledgment by the filmmaker that yes, I’ve failed you, but here are some fireworks.
Fireworks cannot be said to be boring, or original, or surprising. Fireworks are fireworks. They happen every year. “Ocean’s Thirteen” is fireworks. Two solid hours of non-boring, unsurprising fun that doesn't bear close analysis. But here I go anyway.
“Ocean’s Thirteen” is either the most cynical, tongue-in-cheek sendup of Hollywood feel-goodery ever, or it is an actual, factual Robin Hood-in- Vegas-as-Sherwood Forest parable about greed vs. loyalty, rich vs. poor, and bad vs. not-so-bad-after-all. The number 13 speaks, very loosely, to the number of protagonists, each played by a genuine brand-name celebrity, not counting bad guys and Ellen Barkin. It is also roughly the number of Steven Soderbergh/George Clooney match-ups. Clooney, once the mega-hunk at the center of these “Ocean’s” outings, is all but ignored in the endless series of long tracking and zoom shots that comprise this one. While his self-effacing quality shows good breeding, I think Clooney needs all the help he can get in being remembered from scene to scene. This movie, while slightly less impossible to follow than “Syriana,” does its utmost to make over-the-top Vegas ostentatiousness forgettable. And it succeeds.
Since my theories sometimes tend to be more than a bit crack-brained, it's only fair to comment a little on the filmmakers’ unquestionable successes in “Ocean’s Thirteen.” Like the first two “Ocean’s” installments, and like “Syriana,” “Traffic,” and other Soderbergh movies, “Ocean’s Thirteen” is actually made by a collective consciousness in a collective effort. Since Clooney's own (excellent) directorial efforts have yielded Soderberghian results using Soderberghian strategies, you might say that he and Soderbergh have created a School of Soderbergh, characterized by a high-speed film style of documentary-like photography that makes audiences feel jacked-in to the real-world-themed fantasies of crime and greed at the hearts of Big Oil, transhemispheric drug trafficking, and casino heists--anything visually dominated by vast tracts of emptiness, be they oil wells, deserts, or casino lobbies.
I suspect Clooney's influence is what steers the Soderbergh School guns toward smaller targets, if McCarthyism and mass media can be called smaller targets. Maybe “less-complicated” would be a better term, but again it hardly applies. At any rate, while considered and thoughtful storytelling-- often of a very personal nature--is an important and major component of the Soderbergh collective's standard MO, if anything intimate avoids getting steamrolled by the sheer scale of the story it’s likely to be crushed beneath the weight of the star-power fueling the effort.
The ostensible themes of “Ocean’s Thirteen” are loyalty and filial obligation. Reuben, played by Elliot Gould, is (we are to believe) upon his deathbed. A bit player in the previous films, Reuben is here a well-loved Fagan; Brad Pitt and the rest are memory-repressed Oliver Twists bent on avenging the nonfatal and, as it turns out, only somewhat inconvenient cardiac incident suffered by their beloved mentor. To that end, the band of merry men descend on Vegas where they explain their plan of action to Eddie Izzard. It seems their only object is to serve Banks his comeuppance; they don't even want the diamonds (yes, there are diamonds). No effort or expense is to be spared. At this point in the film, Ocean’s Thirteen is a family of dedicated pros, criminals dropping everything to rush to the aid of one of their own. You know the bit: code of thieves, honor, yada yada yada.
Now remember the sandy days of the Vegas strip, owned financially by the Jersey mob, but owned in a more glamorous way by the movie stars who lived the highlife there and ruled like kings -- Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and of course pack master Frank Sinatra. Unfortunately, living and ruling like a king wasn't satisfactory for the likes of the original Danny Ocean, not when the Jersey mob was living like the Pope on dope. On screen for all to see, and also in the annals of our collective memory, Sinatra devolved from perhaps the most lovable and arguably the most gifted entertainer ever into a goon. Making movies about glamorous criminal shenanigans while surrounded by, emulating, and aspiring to be a criminal must have made it pretty easy for Old Blue Eyes and company to slide from Tinsel-Town ritziness into graceless mob posturing. In a town where you're nobody if you're not somebody according to everybody, the A-list of "puh-layers" must have been very short, very incestuous, and very insulating. It didn't take long for America's love-affair with gangsters strong-arming cocktail waitresses to fizzle, but not until it had permanently sullied the names, reps, and livers of the Rat Pack.
Today our most gifted entertainers--from Elliot Gould and Casey Affleck to Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and Don Cheadle--are out in the desert every year making movies about noble crooks doin’ what’s right. Should we worry? No. Because we are watching Oprah. In the movie Danny is caught stifling a sob as he watches Oprah work miracles for hard-working poor folk. This sob is an old movie chestnut designed to indicate sincerity and moral decency to even the lowest loser, the least savory of criminals. Usually mere shorthand, a narrative device, it signals that we are to give our sympathy away on good faith, knowing we'll be more than repaid in the end. In “Ocean’s Thirteen,” however, it is not shorthand. It is the tip of the iceberg. By the end of the film, the 13 are not just crooks with hearts of gold, they are apostles of Oprah, finding--in a hilarious, knowing, self-mocking way--good deeds to balance out every criminal one at a ratio akin to house odds on roulette. Once they learn that stealing from the rich can be made even better by giving to the poor, the floodgates are open and it's like Christmas on ecstasy.
The joke, of course, is that Danny and the rest could have just given the dough they put into this Rube Goldberg robbery to needy orphans in the first place and bypassed the threats of failure, jail, violent reprisal, and death. But what fun would that be? In theory, Mssrs. Soderbergh, Clooney, Pitt, Damon, Pacino, Jemison, Cheadle, Qin, Affleck, Caan, Mac, Garcia, Gould, and Reiner could have stayed at home and sorted out their Tivos; but when you have what it takes to get yourself and all those megastars to Vegas, then off you go. What’s the point of not making an “Ocean’s” increment every year, at least until something more fun comes along?
If the topical message in this movie from political filmmakers Soderbergh and Clooney is that “life is good, spread the love,” it's not clear how we should take the idea. It’s telling if it reflects an actual trend among the Gateseses and their billionaire ilk of giving their money away hand over fist. Yet it’s embarrassing if “Ocean’s Thirteen” actually effects greater change through toe-tapping frivolity than “Traffic” and “Syriana,” in all their stultifying morality, managed to do. In any case, it’s a perverse thrill to know that once a summer you can grab your partner and head to the movies on a Saturday night for high-rolling fun like “Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen…” and counting.
– Jeremy Sterritt
(Jeremy Sterritt is proprietor and film critic of RadioOpticon / am1020 whdd robinhoodradio.com – archived shows are available at http://podcasts.am1020whdd.com/search/sterritt.aspx)
