Steven Soderbergh’s newest film, High Flying Birds debuted in select theaters as well as on Netflix on February 12th, which means everyone can watch it now just as it’s getting reviewed – and it’s good, flawed but good, and likely of interest to most of you here since you’re probably a sports fan of some sort if you’re reading this in the first place. It’s also notable because for at least the second time Soderbergh has filmed a feature entirely on iPhones, which is sort of a mixed bag for the viewing experience. The movie really stands on two pedestals: the righteous indignation of its plot, with the screenplay by Tarell Alvin McCraney (who wrote the play that became the film Moonlight) and a standout performance from the always-compelling Andre Holland.
Holland plays Ray, an agent who represents multiple NBA players, including recent #1 draft pick Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg). The NBA is in a lockout as the movie opens, right before what I presume is Labor Day, which means players aren’t getting paid, which means Ray isn’t getting paid, which means his agency is crying poverty (with Zachary Quinto playing his one-dimensional boss). So Ray, with the help of his former assistant Sam (Zazie Beets), concocts a scheme, on the fly, to try to force owners to improve their offer to the players’ union, involving Erick and his teammate, the arrogant star Jamero Umber, playing an ‘impromptu’ pickup game at a charity event run by Ray’s friend and mentor Spencer (Bill Duke).
With MLB potentially heading for a work stoppage, and players taking to social media every day to talk about the deteriorating situation – revenues are rising, but player compensation isn’t, and obviously the best free agents are still unsigned – High Flying Bird feels incredibly timely even though it’s about another sport and incorporates a racial theme not as present in MLB. Slavery is mentioned multiple times – and its mere mention is worked into a successful running gag – while it’s no accident that the owners who appear on screen are all white, while every player, agent, or other representative is African-American. The script carefully avoids any discussion of dollars, focusing instead, as it should, on the distribution of the spoils; once you start bringing dollar amounts into any discussion of the salaries of professional athletes, you provoke the emotional bias that makes people say “$10 million to play a game?” and then I have to reach for the rum again.
There are many facets of Soderbergh’s direction and McCraney’s script that don’t work. Foremost among them is Soderbergh’s inclusion of snippets from interviews he conducted with three current NBA players – Karl-Anthony Towns, Donovan Mitchell, and Reggie Jackson, which means I was today days old when I learned there was an NBA player named Reggie Jackson – discussing life in the NBA, especially as a rookie. At the beginning, the answers help provide some context for what’s about to happen, but Soderbergh interrupts the film twice with more snippets in the final 20 minutes, which wrecks the tension and the flow of the narrative as he’s trying to wrap up both the global storyline and the set of storylines for Erick, Sam, and Ray. Many characters who play important roles in the plot are utterly one-dimensional, including Kyle Maclachlan’s bespectacled NBA owner (complete with trophy wife who speaks to her dog in nauseating baby talk). Sonja Sohn is well-cast as the NBA Players Association’s main rep, but the side story of her trying to start a family with her wife/partner doesn’t fit anywhere in the rest of the story.
And then there’s the editing and cinematography, which ultimately knock this film down from great to good for me. The picture quality is excellent, and most of the time you’d never think anything was filmed on something other than high-end equipment, but Soderbergh chooses some very strange angles, often filming people from an angle a little too high or low and distorting the viewer’s perspective. (Insert film angle optimization joke here.) There are also some very abrupt edits where scenes seem to change before a character has finished a sentence, and while Ray and Spencer in particular work some long pauses into monologues, Soderbergh doesn’t let any moments at the ends of those soliloquies breathe.
Holland is always great – he had side roles in Moonlight and 42 – but this is the most substantial part I’ve seen him tackle, and he’s not just good but credible from the opening scene (which has Ray and Erick engage in some very clever banter, a pace I wish the film had tried to keep up in later scenes). Ray gets preachy with Erick a few times, which does give an ironic aspect to the sermon Jamero’s mother drops him, but Holland’s charisma and particularly his tight, highly modulated delivery makes him compelling where he might have been exhausting. Beets and Gregg are also solid in supporting roles, although I didn’t find the chemistry between them all that evident even though the two characters do get together. Duke is just a delight even though his character plays the same short melody over and over through the film.
High Flying Bird will leave you with zero doubt as to its take on the late-stage capitalism of professional sports: The athletes are still treated like chattel, by mostly white owners, and many fans don’t care or side with the owners because they think the players’ high salaries should be enough, rather than considering whether the players are getting their fair share of revenues, or, as the script points out, how many hands reach into a player’s paycheck before it reaches him. Meanwhile, MacLachlan and his wife are planning to jet to Australia for a long weekend on their private plane, and he manages to patronize the hell out of Sonja Sohn’s character (in a subtly homophobic way) and isn’t much better to Ray. There are clear good guys and bad guys here, and unlike most coverage of labor issues in American sports, McCraney’s take is at least directionally correct. It’s a film worth seeing and discussing, and if the book that Scott carries around all film in a sealed envelope, revealed at the very end, gets a little bump in sales as a result, so much the better.