Steven Soderbergh's Joyously Bonkers 1996 Experimental Comedy Schizopolis Marked an Audacious Creative Rebirth for Its Writer/Director/Star
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If the seminal 1989 comedy-drama Sex, Lies and Videotape marked the birth of writer-director Steven Soderbergh as a major voice in independent film then 1996’s Schizopolis marked his rebirth.
The prolific screenwriter, director, cinematographer, editor and onetime lead actor’s career and life had famously reached a crossroads. After the big bang of his iconic debut he stumbled commercially with 1991’s Kafka, 1993’s King of the Hill and the 1995 Neo-noir The Underneath.
Soderbergh was particularly disappointed with the underrated The Underneath and his work on it. He was feeling stuck and uninspired, in the midst of a personal and professional midlife crisis. It was around this time that Soderbergh got divorced from his actress wife Betsy Brantley.
The future Academy Award winner had to do something at once big and small to get the creative juices flowing again and reignite his floundering passion for filmmaking.
With nothing to lose and a shocking amount to gain Soderbergh decided to eschew the compromises and corruption of studio filmmaking and make a film for himself.
Soderbergh took it back to basics and shot 1996’s Schizopolis with a tiny crew on a microscopic budget over a period of nine months in his home town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana with himself in a dual lead role for the first and last time and no screenplay.
He was taking huge chances but the stakes were so low financially and professionally that he could experiment as extensively as he pleased without having to worry about a fat-fingered corporate vulgarian breathing down his neck.
Soderbergh discovered that you can do EXACTLY what you want to do if you’re willing to do it for an exceedingly modest sum of money and a small audience. I have discovered that as well. The trade-off is worth it, particularly if the movie where he did exactly what he wanted led to the big mainstream comeback of 1998 Out of Sight and then a dazzling series of films of every conceivable stripe.
In that sense Schizopolis feels like a movie that Soderbergh had to make. It’s a semi-secretly deeply sad labor of love/meditation on divorce that Soderbergh had to get out of his system so that he could make big, commercial movies for mainstream audiences like Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven and Magic Mike.
Schizopolis marked the glorious birth of Soderbergh the experimenter, the avant-garde troublemaker forever toying with form and process, a pragmatist as well as an artist who alternates between crowd-pleasing entertainment and micro-budgeted independent fare designed to satisfy his perpetually wandering muse more than mom and dad.
If I might give Soderbergh a very strange compliment, even though he was only in his early thirties when he made Schizopolis and played a challenging dual lead role he seemed very old.
The auteur exudes the exhaustion and world-weariness of someone much older as depressed, onanistic office drone Fletcher Munson. That’s not just because he has a vibe and look not dissimilar from those of What We Do in the Shadows’ resident energy vampire Colin Robinson.
Fletcher toils joylessly at a company that makes self-help materials based on the teachings of an L. Ron Hubbard-like guru/fraud and of course produces human misery for its employees.
When a colleague dies Fletcher gets the unwelcome job of writing a big speech and begins to suspect, correctly as it turns out, that his bored and dissatisfied wife is having an affair.
Exterminator Elmo Oxygen (David Jensen), meanwhile, gallivants about town servicing lonely wives while speaking in a nonsense language that uses English words but in a manner that renders them incoherent and nonsensical. He’s an unlikely fuck machine who is snapped up by other creators deep into the movie. I would describe that as a fourth wall-breaking gag but Schizopolis never acknowledges that fourth wall it’s so relentlessly, playfully and inveterately post-modern and self-referential.
Mrs. Munson, Fletcher’s wife, is played by Soderbergh’s own real-life ex-wife Betsy Brantley, which lends a voyeuristic quality to the proceedings.
Soderbergh didn’t just make a movie that’s fundamentally about a failing marriage beyond repair like the one he recently exited. He cast, as the unhappy married couple, the actual participants in his divorce.
That description makes Schizopolis seem much more straight-forward and conventional than it actually is when nothing in Soderbergh’s trippy mind-fuck of a movie is straightforward.
Schizopolis is obsessed with communication but it’s even more fixated on barriers to communication, conversation and understanding. Couples locked in the same empty, fruitless conversation literally speak different languages. At other times the film’s small, sad characters drily describe what they’re doing rather than engage in actual conversation. It’s as if they’re so dispirited that they’re robotically reciting life’s stage directions even though they mean nothing, to themselves or anyone else.
It turns out that the man that Mrs. Munson is cheating on him with is Dr. Jeffrey Korchek, a cornball dentist enamored of such transcendently stupid dad jokes as “I may vote Republican but I’m a true Democrat when it comes to GUM control” and “be true to your teeth or they’ll be false to you.”
The daffy dentist is also portrayed by Soberbergh, The adventurous filmmaker would never play another significant onscreen role in film and apparently only acted in the film because he thought it would be unfair to ask someone else to be available at any time for shooting for nearly a year in exchange for no money.
Soderbergh may be a renaissance man and a genius but he makes for a surprisingly relatable everyman, a figure of aching sadness defeated by a world and a job that does not seem to make any goddamn sense at all.
Schizopolis gave its writer-director-star the chance to indulge in infinite varieties of humor, from absurdism and surrealism to observational humor and headlines that wouldn’t feel out of place in The Onion or “Weekend Update.”
A gleefully absurd group conversation about who in Fletcher’s office is a mole and who is a spy and whether or not the spy and the mole are, in fact, two different people, has the wickedly warped wordplay of a classic Monty Python sketch.
For all of its underlying sadness Schizopolis is powered by an infectious sense of joy and adventure. In making it Soderbergh cast off the compromise and calculation of studio filmmaking and reconnected with the joy of playing a camera for the very first time.
Schizopolis is animated by a child-like sense of excitement over the infinite possibilities of film as a medium and an art-form. Watching it you can feel its creator getting his groove back creatively.
It’s tempting to say that Soderbergh found himself creatively with Schizopolis but the truth is that he was never anywhere near as lost as he imagined.
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