DVD Review: Full Frontal (D)

Full Frontal (2002)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Starring Blair Underwood, Julia Roberts, Catherine Keener, David Hyde Pierce and David Duchovny
MPAA: R
Grade: D

Review by Scott Standish

Director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean's Eleven) takes a huge risk with Full Frontal, attempting to shoot a film within a film, on digital cameras (for the most part), with enough characters to fill a 3 hour Robert Altman epic.

Francesca (Julia Roberts) is interviewing the actor Calvin (Blair Underwood), but we later see that this is part of a movie and the two characters are quite different than the ones they portray on screen. Catherine Keener plays a VP of HR that is slowly cracking under the pressure of her failing marriage to magazine journalist David Hyde Pierce. Her sister (Mary McCormick) is a masseuse that finds her values twisted by the man that is eventually the center of the film, movie producer Gus (David Duchovny).

The process of film making is constantly addressed in Full Frontal, as several scenes play out but end with the camera pulling back to show the film crew doing their job. Do all of these structural tricks work? Yes and no. It works in that the complexity of the structure initially draws the viewer in. How are all of these diverse characters going to intersect? Is this part of the movie, or does this section relate to the movie within the movie? Where it fails is that it simply does not deliver on the intersections soon enough to settle the film down. By the time the cross stories get sorted out, the frustration level has just taken too much of a hold.

This might seem petty, but I have to remark about this one thing: the movie within the movie has one of the most annoying shots I have ever seen. Julia Roberts and Blair Underwood make eyes at each other, go cheek to cheek and then smile at the camera. I know that's supposed to be funny, but I found it flat out stupid, and completely out of left field for a professional director of Steven Soderbergh's stature.

Lastly, Catherine Keener does a great job as the crumbling HR VP Lee Bright. Her demeanor shifts from normal to bizarre, to helpless, to angry and finally, to humbled. A tough role indeed, but Keener pulls it off quite admirably, and proves to be a shining star in Full Frontal, what can be best described as a surprisingly unfocused film.

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