The Limey

365 Films

Entry #112

The Limey (1999)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

When The Limey was released in autumn of ’99, it continued what would become one of the defining characteristics of Steven Soderbergh’s career: confounding expectations.  Following Out Of Sight, his second critical break-through (although not commercially so) The Limey at first appearances seems like another trip down the hip crime wormhole by way of Elmore Leonard.  It is entirely possible that its initial conception was closer to that, The Limey commentary track is one for the ages because Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs spend the entire length of the movie bickering with each other about the radical changes made to the screenplay.  What The Limey, the movie wound up as is something far more radical and existential than the revenge detective scenario would have you believe.  There are flash backs, flash forwards, and words will begin as dialogue in one scene and wind up as voice over for another entirely different sequence of images.  And certainly one of the most brilliantly staged scenes of Soderbergh’s career has to be Wilson’s one mad raid on the Valentine warehouse, staged entirely in one unbroken shot but with all the violence occurring off screen.  But The Limey is far more than just a b-movie plot jazzed up with a lot of high-falutin’ stylistics.  Contrary to the commentary track, I feel that techniques only strengthen the thematic ideas inherent in the film.  The key to all of this is Soderbergh’s utilization of clips from Ken Loach’s 1967 film Poor Cow featuring a young Terrence Stamp (who plays Wilson).  These sequences serve as flashbacks to Wilson’s hell-raising days of youth and aside from providing us with actual footage of what the younger Stamp looked like, they also serve as Soderbergh’s attempt to communicate with a different cinematic generation.  Why else would he cast Easy Rider icon Peter Fonda as the megalomaniacal record producer, a man who seems to live willingly at the expense of the outlaw reputation he once had.  As his character remarks midway through the film:

Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before? A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half remembered when you wake up. When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. *That* was the sixties. [pause] No. It wasn't that either. It was just '66 and early '67. That's all there was.

Generational disillusionment haunts The Limey in every single frame and it’s a theme Soderbergh has continued to explore in his quietly subversive way ever since.  It’s a vision of this country that presents the American way of life as having three distinct variations: the one that lives in our minds, that one that lives in our movies, and the one that actually is.