Lone Star Cinema: The Underneath
Steven Soderbergh has been a prolific filmmaker, cranking out a movie every year or two (and sometimes twice a year) since Sex, Lies, and Videotape propelled him to fame in 1989. Always willing to venture into new genres, Soderbergh tried his hand at film noir with his fourth feature, The Underneath.
Released in 1995 and shot in Austin, The Underneath (also known as Underneath) is a remake of Criss Cross, a 1949 thriller based on Don Tracy's 1934 novel of the same title. The story is classic (some would say clichéd) noir, a grim tale of how addiction, lust, jealousy and greed can inspire evil acts, compelling desperate people to take desperate measures.
The film centers on gambling addict Michael Chambers (Peter Gallagher), who returns home to Austin for his mother's wedding. Michael had left town abruptly years earlier to escape his gambling debts, leaving his wife, Rachel (Alison Elliott), to deal with the mess her husband created. Vowing that he's changed his ways, Michael tries to patch up his relationships with his mother and brother, moves in with Mom and takes a job working with his new father-in-law, Ed Dutton (Paul Dooley), as an armored car driver.
Michael also tries to win back Rachel -- now his ex-wife, for every imaginable reason -- but there's one minor complication: She's hooked up with bar owner and two-bit hoodlum Tommy Dundee (William Fichtner), an irritable sociopath with a hair-trigger jealous streak.
In perhaps the worst decision in a story awash in bad choices, Rachel marries Tommy. When he catches her being a less-than-faithful wife with Michael, Tommy's in a predictably murderous mood -- but quick-thinking Michael saves himself by offering Tommy half the proceeds of a major heist Michael is planning. (That is, he's planning it now that he needs a way to stop Tommy from killing him.) In noir tradition, greed trumps jealousy -- and so much for Michael's pursuit of a straight and narrow life.
The rest of the story is somewhat predictable, although with enough mildly clever twists and red herrings to keep things interesting. The film's noir vibe is also spot-on; everything is darkly polished and properly atmospheric, enveloped in smoke, swimming in cocktails and wallowing in despair. The Underneath is a perfectly watchable crime story, albeit one that focuses on its characters' passions and motivations rather than plot. Soderbergh calls it "a relationship movie with a crime in the middle."
I'm mostly a fan of The Underneath; my major criticism is that the story intertwines four different time frames, which is sometimes confusing. But Soderbergh isn't a fan at all; he considers the film one of the low points in his career, a movie he never got excited about because it wasn't very ambitious or challenging to make. Like the two Soderbergh films before it (Kafka and King of the Hill), The Underneath also was a box-office flop.
Which is a shame; audiences missed an engaging film with solid noir bona fides and equally solid acting. (Fichtner -- one of my favorite cinematic bad guys -- is deliciously dead-eyed psycho as Tommy.) Soderbergh may not care that most of his fans overlooked The Underneath, but I agree with many critics that it deserved better.
While The Underneath was filmed in Austin, it doesn't look much like a uniquely Austin film. Oddly, the production notes say that Soderbergh chose Austin for its "almost characterless quality," and producer John Hardy said it "could be Anywhere, USA." Most of the cinematography is too intimate to spot any background landmarks, but Austinites will spot a few Austin locales such as Lady Bird Lake, Fifth Street, the Ember club and Fonda San Miguel on North Loop Boulevard. There also are glimpses of mid-1990s Austin life -- an Oscar Snowden's appliance store truck, a copy of the Austin American-Statesman from the paper's better days, and local bands Cowboy Mouth, Gal's Panic and Herman the German & Das Cowboy.
The Underneath is available on a DVD nearly as old as the film itself. Released in 1998, the disc includes some curious extras that point to its relatively ancient release date. In addition to a chapter list, English captions, French and Spanish subtitles, the theatrical trailer, production notes and bios of Soderbergh and the cast, the DVD also features a video demonstrating the virtues of letterboxing. (Remember life before widescreen TVs?)
Other extras appear to be transferred from a laserdisc, including an explanation of the film's Panavision anamorphic framing and a feature called Bars and Tones Forever for adjusting a monitor. There is also Swelltone, with technical information about the six-track sound mix, along with an alignment signal feature for testing the sound channels. Another quaint feature is a link to Universal Studios Home Video website, with an explantion that the link is accessible if your computer has DVD drive. Yes, this is an old DVD.
Austin/Texas Connections: The Underneath was filmed mostly in Austin. Nearly a dozen Texan actors appear in minor roles, including Joe Don Baker, Shelley Duvall, Anjanette Comer and Austin native Dennis Hill. (Look carefully during one of the scenes in the Ember and you'll notice the doorman is Richard Linklater.)