The Limey (1999)

The Limey
Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Artisan Entertainment, 1999. Rating: R

Director Steven Soderbergh (1963- )

            Like Jim Jarmusch, Soderbergh enjoyed early success, winning the 1989 Cannes Film Festival prize for best new director at age 26 for his “indie” production of sex, lies, and videotape (Andrew 6). This artistically mature film about sexual infidelity and marital crisis consistently runs counter to expectations, surprising viewers with the intimate camera practically turned back in our faces to examine our own weaknesses, desires, and voyeuristic impulses.

            After this stunning success, most critics received Kafka (1991) with a barely suppressed yawn. This film suffers from ambitions that cannot be satisfied within a limited screenplay the “fantasy” world that seem to invoke confusion from the commercial industry (like Terry Gilliam’s 1985 sci-fi nightmare Brazil). Although Soderbergh brings forth strong performances from his cast, the most memorable scenes are the expressionistic images of Prague (6).

            A moving, evocative period piece that deserves wide re-distribution, King of the Hill (1993) tells a depression-era story of a “vulnerable but determined young hero,” separated from his family when his mother is confined in a TB asylum and his father hits the highway to hustle for sales work. “Funny and poignant,” the film conveys the challenges of innocence and experience (6) in a period when everyone was hard pressed just to survive. And then we remember, “But this is only a boy.” He goes hungry, and we regret that it could have been helped, if only this or that adult cared enough. However, typical of his generosity with his characters, Soderbergh neither judges nor condemns.

            The Underneath (1995) adds to Soderbergh’s credentials as a neo-noir enthusiast. Based on the same Don Tracy novel as Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), this version is less a “remake” than a new take on the theme of “desire, deception and delusion” (6). Much more ambiguous than the former film, Soderbergh fragments the narrative and muddles the motives of his homme fatal hero, creating a darker, moodier, more contemporary crime thriller.

            Like other Spalding Gray monologues (Swimming to Cambodia [1987], Monster in a Box [1991]), Gray’s Anatomy (1996) centers on the rambling associations of the story-teller, though Soderbergh adds compelling cinematic variations through camera movement, dramatic lighting, and effective intercutting of interviews with other characters (7).

            Totally off-the-wall and nearly incomprehensible, Schizopolis (1996) is an experimental pastiche of topics as unlikely as “New Age evangelism and the American obsession with dental hygiene” (7). A frankly experimental film for which the director also wrote the screenplay, operated the camera, acted, and edited, this ultra-budget comedy at least provided further experience in subverting traditional linear plotting of the narrative (4).

Back in the mainstream with Out of Sight (1998), Soderbergh takes advantage of the chemistry between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez to animate an unlikely plot of periodic romance between a tougher-than-thou female cop and a charming con in a comic caper film. This Elmore Leonard adaptation captures his “seedy, South Floridian love of small-time hoods and big-time losers” (Savlov), but the director still plays with narrative conventions, creating freeze-frames and flashbacks-within-flashbacks so that a logical timeline disappears.

            In all these cinematic experiments, notwithstanding audience size or studio distribution, Soderbergh has become consistently more sophisticated in his thematic variation of narrative structures, always “ill at ease with the storytelling cliches and easy moralising of most Hollywood film-making” (Andrew 5).

The Film

The British Film Institute review recommends “The Limey” as “a wonderfully inventive, witty, warm-hearted study of vengeful obsession and redemption” (44). What is warm-hearted about vengeance, I wonder? Familiar with the BFI’s enthusiastic support for almost all cinematic experiments, I take this review with a large pinch of salt thrown liberally over the left shoulder. “Inventive” I do grant the film for its innovative editing. “Witty,” though not to be taken as “light,” is clearly a matter of taste, but I grant this for the verbal assaults and deft parries of both Wilson (Terence Stamp) and Valentine (Peter Fonda). I believe the warmth of the film consists in the humanistic regard Soderbergh has for his major characters: a British ex-con and a megamillionaire “creepy record producer” (Baumgarten).

Personally, I find The Limey a disturbing but entertaining single-minded revenge plot unimpeded by interfering representatives of the law. Alternating between tough-edged realism and light sentimentality toward a seldom-seen but recently murdered daughter, Jenny, the film stars Terence Stamp as a ruthless minor crook searching “not so much for the truth about Jenny as for a way out of the darkness” (Baumgarten). We care about Wilson’s quest, even though we cannot quite understand his disgust at nonchalant amateur criminals who do not know the depth of his vengeance and violence. The crusty Limey, though he suffers a culture gap in assessing his Yank competition, proves the superior bad guy. And therefore, he is the good guy, at least for us. We sympathize with his confusion and his pain.

“Above all, Soderbergh is a master of narrative economy, stripping down images and information to their essential components” (Baumgarten). It is a demanding film to watch, and it is only possible for a very contemporary viewer to follow its contrapuntal rhythms. In the last twenty years, due to our experience with MTV-style jump-cut editing in contemporary advertising, we can begin to re-assemble continuity from fragmentation. What is technically so disturbing and so neo-noir about this film is the temporal and acoustic disjunctions. Settings jump between scenes with no transitions, and while it is clear the scenes are often in another time period, it is unclear until the end of the film which are flashbacks and which flashforwards. In classic noir, these pieces would be patched together with a voice-over narrative carrying the viewer back into the past, when the hero made a first fatal error or even an apparently random decision that led inevitably toward murder, self-destruction, and the almost nostalgic view from a present viewpoint of self-realization. But in The Limey, we see a voice-over conversation played over a scene of staring characters that are just about to speak or have just finished. Their faces are locked in time, just looking and trying to understand because the words that seem to come directly from behind their eyes are poor approximations for what the characters might like to say, but cannot. This is a blackness of total personal isolation.

Works Cited

Andrew, Geoff. “A Restless Talent: The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh.” National Film

Theatre [British Film Institute program notes], October/November 1999, 4-7.

Baumgarten, Marjorie. “The Limey.” The Austin Chronicle, 22 October 1999. Available

http://www.auschron.com/film/pages/movies/8672.html. Access date 14 November 2000.

“Review.” NFT [British Film Institute program notes], March 2000, 44.

Savlov, Marc. “Out of Sight.” The Austin Chronicle, 26 June 1998. Available http://www.

auschron.com/film/pages/movies/175/html. Access date 14 November 2000.

Upcoming Features in the "Off Beat Cinema" Film Series, Fall 2000.

Oct. 6      Stranger than Paradise, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1985, with John Lurie, Eszler Balint, & Richard Edson

Oct. 13    Mystery Train, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1989, with Masatoshi Nagase & Youki Kudoh

Oct. 20    Down by Law, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1986, with Tom Waits, John Lurie, Roberto Benigni, & Ellen Barkin

Oct. 27    Last Days of Chez Nous, dir. Gillian Armstrong, 1992, with Lisa Harrow, Bruno Ganz, & Kerry Fox

Nov. 3    Oscar and Lucinda, dir. Gillian Armstrong, 1997, with Ralph Fiennes & Cate Blanchett

Nov. 17   The Limey, dir. Steven Soderbergh, 1999, with Terrence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren, & Peter Fonda

Handout prepared by Greg Lyons
for the Fall 2000 Off Beat Cinema Series,
organized by Greg Lyons, with the support of
COCC Humanities Dept. & Westside Video (Bend, OR)

Related links:

All-Movie Guide. All Media Guide, AEC One Stop Group, Inc., 1992-2002.
Search by Title, Person, or Keyword: http://allmovie.com/
...The Limey
...Steven Soderbergh, Director, Screenwriter
URL: http://allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=B112040

The Limey (1999). Internet Movie Database - IMDb.com, 1990-2002.
URL: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0165854
...External Reviews of The Limey (1999).
URL: http://us.imdb.com/TUrls?COM+0165854
...Steven Soderbergh.
URL: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Soderbergh,+Steven

Available online handouts for films shown in Fall 2000 "Offbeat Cinema" Series:

Days of Heaven (1978). Dir. Terrence Malick.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/daysofheaven.htm
Down by Law (1986). Dir. Jim Jarmusch.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/downbylaw.htm
Last Days of Chez Nous (1992). Dir. Gillian Armstrong.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/lastdaysofcheznous.htm
Oscar and Lucinda (1997). Dir. Gillian Armstrong.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/oscarlucinda.htm
The Limey (1999). Dir. Steven Soderbergh.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/thelimey.htm

See also Popular Culture Video List (2000).
Detective | Science fiction | Travel | Film noir | Spy thriller | Western
Greg Lyons, comp. COCC Library & Humanities Dept. video holdings, 2000.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/courses/film/popculture.html

Return to Film Studies - Index of Online Resources
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/index.htm

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Last updated: 26 May 2003
Cora Agatucci ~ E-Mail: cagatucci@cocc.edu
Copyright © 2002-2003, Greg Lyons,
Humanities Department, Central Oregon Community College