There was a time, a few years ago, where Steven Soderbergh retired from filmmaking. That was a real loss to the movie world: even Soderbergh’s mediocre efforts are still interesting. When he’s on? You get amazing films like Ocean’s Eleven, Out of Sight, or Traffic. High Flying Bird sees Soderbergh back in experimentation mode, including for the genre of movie he’s making and how he shot it.
There’s an NBA lockout going on. Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), a money desperate rookie waiting for his contract to kick in, seeks help from his agent Ray Burke (Andre Holland) to get out of a sticky situation he’s in. Burke does what he can during the lockout, but even his boss David (Zachary Quinto) can’t keep paying him until the lockout ends. Desperate himself, Ray uses all his political clout to try to act as mediator between owner rep David Seton (Kyle MacLachlan) and player rep Myra (Sonja Sohn), while his protege Sam (Zazie Beetz) tries to keep Erick out of trouble until the lockout ends, and hopefully soon.
As good as Steven Soderbergh’s film resume is, the film industry might remember him more for all the technical experimentation and advancement he’s brought to the industry. High Flying Bird’s innovation is that the film was entirely shot on iPhone cameras. It’s clear early on that something is different when you’re watching, sometimes good, sometimes bad. The size of the iPhone makes it MUCH more flexible to shoot from angles previously unseen, like close quarters, which talented Directors like Soderbergh use to their advantage to capture new vantage points. The camera itself though takes some getting used to when watching High Flying Bird. A majority of the time you feel like you’re spying into a conversation that you shouldn’t be accessing, which at times feels uncomfortable, because you’re spying in on some private moments of people. This is simultaneously a testament to Soderbergh pulling off the feelings he’s going for, and a chance for young filmmakers who can only afford iPhones to shoot on: see if you can eliminate the fisheye view from the camera unless you want to use it. Regardless of the mixed success of the iPhone experiment, Soderbergh’s altruism to make filmmaking more accessible for directors who don’t have the money richer directors do will make High Flying Bird stand out over time in Hollywood.
But who cares, if the movie isn’t good right? Thankfully, this is another Soderbergh talent: whatever genre he’s working in, he finds the story for how a part of the business of that genre works. In Contagion, he went into how a pandemic would affect infrastructure across an entire country. In Traffic, he analyzed how wide the net of people can affect the drug trade. In High Flying Bird, Soderbergh takes a sports movie, and makes it about the business part of the industry: as in what agents, owners, and players do when a lockout is going on. We follow Ray, our linchpin, through what’s happening behind these closed doors, and how much petty people management the guy has to maneuver around to get them to drop their high horses and engage in conversation. Soderbergh’s dialogue is rich with specificity and carries the power of a great sports moment, especially when surprising characters land the equivalent of a verbal dunk on another character in the scene. Soderbergh’s script, like all his good ones, has tendrils that go off in various directions, so while you’re on one timeline of events, there might be another one around the bend, making the movie feel more like a thriller than a sports movie.
It’s good to see Steven Soderbergh back behind the camera, even if the camera has gotten smaller and can create Instagram stories. High Flying Bird is an engaging fun experiment, which I hope Netflix will keep giving the talented director opportunities to play around. Sooner or later, Soderbergh will strike gold for them.