Friday's Old Fashioned: Out of Sight (1998)

In discussing “Jenny From the Block” for his 60 Songs explaining the 2000s podcast, host Rob Harvilla mentioned Jennifer Lopez’s, shall we say, less than forceful voice and its myriad detractors, including her diva rival, Mariah Carey. And the thing is, they’re both right, Harvilla and Mariah. After the episode, I listened to my personal favorite JLo track “Ain’t It Funny” and it’s true, Lopez’s voice is thin, holding up its end of the bargain and not much more. Ah, but voices are strange, fickle things, aren’t they, and where, say, a voice might shoot the lights out on a song like “Emotions” that same voice might barely rise to the occasion in a movie like “Glitter,” or like “The Christmas Melody,” God help us, just as a voice that might get swept away by a gust of wind on “Ain’t It Funny” can turn around and be so kinetic in something like “Out of Sight.”

Lopez is Karen Sisco, a U.S. Federal Marshal, who winds up locked in the trunk of her own car at Glades Correctional Institution in south Florida with bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) after he escapes with the help of his friend, the aptly named Buddy (Ving Rhames). It’s a meet cute by trunk light, and one shrewdly designed to put Karen and Jack in as close physical proximity as possible before moving them apart, tantalizing us as much as they tantalize each other, occasionally giving us glimpses of their chemistry, like him waving at her from across a hotel lobby, just for a second, so you can practically feel the static electricity in the air. Scott Frank’s screenplay, adapted from Elmore Leonard’s 1996 novel of the same name, might have a jigsaw design, but interestingly, it’s not trying to gin up surprise. Instead, it uses its mismatched time frames to illuminate backstory without having to resort to exposition while also enhancing the romantic tension to nigh unbelievable levels.

Yet, even if “Out of Sight” effectively maximizes its stars, it just as effectively builds out the world around them with a gallery of well-crafted and well-played supporting characters. As the chief heavy, Don Cheadle nimbly plays both halves of his alternating nicknames, Mad Dog and Snoopy, to be feared and not as big as his britches, while Steve Zahn as bungling thief Glenn Michaels invites improbable empathy while demonstrating so much comic haplessness in concocting the climactic heist of a wealthy tycoon (Albert Brooks) in Detroit. And though Lopez and Clooney share magnificent chemistry, they each have equally magnificent chemistry with, respectively, Dennis Farina as Karen’s dad and Rhames as Buddy, both actors help illuminating so much backstory and texture in just their airs. (Rhames has a fantastic bit of body language in the way he just munches on pieces a candy bar, delighting in the small pleasures of the incarcerated.)

Still, for all the fine supporting turns, “Out of Sight” remains the Lopez and Clooney show, building to a showstopping scene in a Detroit hotel bar where they finally meet again. Building off a jokey observation from the trunk, Jack wondering what might happen if they met under different circumstances and he offered to buy her a drink, this scene feels like fantasy. A fantasy to them, yes, but also to us, illustrating the silver screen’s ability to let us indulge the fantastical. The snow falling outside the window virtually literalizes the snow globe effect, the two embracing their chaotic “relationship,” and when they return to her room, Soderbergh briefly trades out the chillier hues of his Motor City scenes re-infuses the images with the warm colors of the Florida scenes. It doesn’t last, though, as “Out of Sight” punctures the fantasy in a conclusion that emotionally counts. 

Maybe because of how Soderbergh emerged through Sundance, we tend to think of him as an independent filmmaker, outside the mainstream, but in “Out of Sight” he also tapped his unlikely gift as a movie star whisperer. He helped Clooney ditch his head down-eyes up acting style, and the hair and makeup people helped him go away from the Caesar cut, unlocking his inner-movie star in a way the previous summer’s “Batman and Robin” could not. From the marvelously crafted opening scene, a gentlemanly bank robbery, he belongs on the big screen in a way he theretofore had not. In fact, Joe Chrest and Wayne Pere, playing ad guys who haplessly hit on Karen in the hotel bar before Jack appears, become a useful juxtaposition between posers and real thing, between showing off and self-confidence.

Retroactive 1998 Costume Design / Hairstyling of the Year: bangs, turtleneck, and popped black leather jacket collar that frame Jennifer Lopez’s face like the Movie Star she is.

Clooney’s self-confidence manifests as relaxation, presaging his roles in the “Ocean’s” movies, but Lopez’s onscreen self-confidence manifests as a rock-solid physical presence in scenes where her character is in peril and in others, as a quiet inner strength. Even when it’s clear that Karen is smitten with this handsome bank robber, Lopez never tamps down those traits. Both Lopez and the movie are conscious, after all, that Karen is a woman in a man’s world, managing an overprotective father, suffering a condescending superior, fending off so many blowhards, like those ad guys. Another movie might have had Jack tell them off, but Karen handles them herself, first politely, then with no uncertain exasperation. “Beat it, Andy,” she says, finally, and emphatically, though without Lopez raising her voice, her breathiness like a bass drum, a line reading as cutting as it is comical. Mariah couldn’t have said it that way.