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The Underneath: A film noir updated

By David Walsh
3 July 1995

Steven Soderbergh's The Underneath is based on a novel entitled Criss Cross. The book was previously made into a film in 1948 by German emigre director Robert Siodmak. In its own way, The Underneath attempts to deal with some of the same territory which Terry Zwigoff in Crumb either set out to treat or stumbled upon: destructive family relationships, the sordid side of middle class American life, the moral failure of a society.

Michael Chambers (Peter Gallagher) returns to Austin, Texas for his mother's wedding. We learn that he left the city, and ran out on his girl friend Rachel (Alison Elliott), after building up substantial gambling debts. He tries to take up again with Rachel, who is by now attached to a violent thug.

Through his new stepfather, Michael obtains a job as an armored car driver. His efforts to win Rachel back are thwarted in part by his disapproving brother, a police officer. The denouement of the film involves an armed robbery, organized by Michael, Rachel and her now husband, with the inevitable crossing and double-crossing which follow it.

There are some very good things in the film. Michael's character is well-drawn: lazy, self-absorbed, addicted to the least line of resistance. The relationship between him and his brother, a ramrod-stiff cop barely able to repress his bottled-up emotions, is an interesting one. Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape, Kafka), only 32, is perceptive when it comes to the banality and self-deception of petty-bourgeois existence.

American (and foreign) filmmakers return time and again to the Hollywood films of the late 1940s, the so-called film noir (dark film), with generally negative results. Partly, this propensity for remakes is due to a lack of ideas. If it were prevented by law from recycling old films and television programs, the movie industry would simply close up shop.

There are writers and directors, however, who are attracted to the films of the 1940s because of certain qualities -- bleakness, unsentimentality, even nihilism -- which must seem to them genuinely applicable to the present situation. But even in these cases, it is a very rare filmmaker who does anything more than attempt to imitate the surface of those earlier films.

Soderbergh makes a serious effort to fill the form with a modern content, to recast it in the light of the experiences of the 1980s and 1990s, but, in the end, he falls short. More than anything else, his script proves his downfall.

The film's final section retains a version of the original ending: the protagonist participates in a dangerous crime which he hopes will provide him the cash and the opportunity to make a getaway with his former love. This strikes one as false.

The characters (and the actors who portrayed them) in the 1948 film had emerged from the intense events of the Depression and the Second World War. Under those circumstances, it was dramatically believable for even a small-time hoodlum to take death-defying risks for the sake of a great passion.

An armed robbery requires a certain kind of courage or at least desperation. There is nothing about Michael or about his relationship with Rachel which suggests that he would hazard everything in this fashion. It would have been far more convincing if Michael had become embroiled in the operation of a savings and loan or in some wretched real estate speculation.

Its weaknesses notwithstanding, The Underneath is worth seeing. It's one of the few contemporary American films which shows signs of thought having gone into it. In the last few minutes of the film Soderbergh, with whatever degree of consciousness, makes a telling point. In the process of double-crossing Michael, Rachel tells him that she has learned from his previous behavior the value of walking away and 'being absent.' With that, she takes off. But we immediately discover that the big shot, who has manipulated everything behind the scenes, is in a position -- after Michael, Rachel and her husband have finished mindlessly betraying one another -- to reap all the benefits. Not a bad ending, and one worth pondering.