[In the following positive review, Matthews praises Soderbergh's film adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel Out of Sight.]

It's commonly asserted that pulp fiction is more readily transmissible to the screen than literature. Almost by definition, a major work imposes its own way of seeing, and the adapter—forced to truncate and simplify—usually ends up with a prestige-laden stiff. The second-rate or downright trashy, by contrast, liberates the adapter to improvise freely on its themes and structure, without pangs of conscience that anything too sacred has been violated. But the case of crime novelist Elmore Leonard reminds us that the reverse can also be true: there are writers whose sensibility is so exquisitely minor that finding a screen equivalent is nearly impossible. Leonard ought to be a natural for the movies—his books, after all, consist of page after page of laconic, off-the-wall dialogue alternating with functional descriptions of narrative action. No attempt is made to plumb characters' deeper motives, and even a qualifying adjective seems too much of a compromise. “If it sounds like writing,” says Leonard, “I rewrite it.”

It's as if Leonard's thrillers are already movies, with the brevity of language and exteriority a screenwriter is supposed to aim for. But almost without exception the films based on his works (The Ambassador, 1984, Glitz, 1991, and the recent Touch) have been duds—including the three (Stick, 1985, 52 Pick-up, 1986, and Cat Chaser, 1989) he scripted himself. It may be that the streamlined ease of Leonard's tone is deceptive—a wealth of concentrated effort has gone into those weightless, zero-degree sentences. There's a true formal rigour in Leonard's approach: he whittles away at words until nothing remains but absolute deadpan—the expression of an attitude as much as a writing style. Leonard's heroes don't let on much, and neither does he. His books aspire to little more than a consummate cool: of style, conception and character. That probably accounts for their enormous cult reputation. Where a major author opens up our perceptions of the world, Leonard narrows it to the articulation of a precise, hip wavelength. For all their lowlife settings and apparent shagginess, Leonard's novels are as neatly self-contained and morally trivial as drawing-room comedies.

UNCORKING SODERBERGH'S ID

Perfect shallowness demands its own brand of discipline, and that's where the majority of Leonard's screen translators fail. It's not enough to reproduce the plot twists and zingy one-liners—for something of the spirit of the books to come through requires an exactly calibrated nonchalance in the whole treatment. The breezy, buoyant 1995 film version of Get Shorty almost caught it, but faltered ultimately under Barry Sonnenfeld's broad, impersonal direction. Now the screenwriter for that movie, Scott Frank, has teamed up with art-house specialist Steven Soderbergh for Out of Sight, based on Leonard's 1996 book and starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.

Out of Sight is just a trifle (though at ＄49 million, an expensive one), but it strikes me as one of the best formula pictures in years. In case that sounds like a back-handed compliment, it should be remembered that not a few of Hollywood's most memorable entertainments—films that still please audiences after decades—are, strictly speaking, production-line sausages. It's not that Out of Sight feels remotely retro: indeed, the looselimbed contemporary vernacular Soderbergh and Frank employ is one of the movie's singular felicities. But there's an underlying compactness and elegance that puts one in mind of classic Hollywood at its most exemplary. Studio craftsmen of former days—professionals merely doing their jobs—could take conventional genre subjects and turn them adroitly into vital popular art. It's this quality of self-effacing tact that keeps Bringing Up Baby or Casablanca fresh when more pretentious efforts have sunk without a trace. And Out of Sight is among the few current movies to suggest that honest commercial know-how isn't entirely dead.

Steven Soderbergh is just about the last person you would think of inviting to direct an Elmore Leonard thriller. His debut feature sex, lies, and videotape (1989) is commonly said to have put Miramax on the map and American indie films into the shopping mall. With an aggressive marketing campaign and that come-hither title, it could hardly miss—but the multiplex audiences who turned out hoping for something kinky may have been startled to find themselves confronting the work of a chilly formalist. His subsequent flops—Kafka (1991) and King of the Hill (1993)—were almost fanatically perfectionist in their look, as if the director had felt compelled to chew over the crystalline imagery frame by frame. By the time he made The Underneath (1995), a glacial meditation on film noir themes, one had the sense that Soderbergh was as stymied by art-consciousness as his hero was by torpor. Shock treatment was indicated, and it was apparently delivered in the self-financed Schizopolis (1996)—so far unseen in Britain, but described by L.A. Weekly reporter Paul Malcolm as a “screwball, stylistic freak-out … with [a] pointed disdain for narrative coherence and [an] emphasis on sheer momentum.” Given the title and Soderbergh's previous bottled-up style, it's tempting to read Schizopolis as the occasion on which the director finally uncorked his id. In Out of Sight he channels this manic high into a technique at once playful and scrupulously controlled.

The movie would appear to be a special case of synchronicity—of the countless things that could be expected to go wrong, going right. I'm not sure Soderbergh has the toughness to make a full career in the mainstream, but serving as a director-for-hire on a project of no importance, he has done better, richer and racier work than he managed as an auteur. Perhaps Soderbergh needed the external discipline of a big-star vehicle to unclench his tight creative personality; in return, he invests a purely commercial enterprise with a portion of his fastidiousness. It's not unlike the proverbial bargain struck between Fred and Ginger—Soderbergh gives the movie class, it gives him sex appeal. The synthesis is a flip elegance that isn't miles away from Leonard's notion of cool.

It's well known that Leonard's crime fiction has exerted considerable secondhand influence on contemporary American cinema via the work of his number-one fan, Quentin Tarantino. Still, I'm glad it was the meticulous Soderbergh and not the blowhard Tarantino who filmed Out of Sight. Judging from the cautious and painfully overextended Jackie Brown (based on Leonard's novel Rum Punch), when Tarantino approaches his idol too directly he chokes up in bashful reverence. Tarantino's indebtedness to Leonard is more patent in his screenplays for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and the benchmarks of his cinema—busy but seemingly random plotting, sudden leaps from comedy to carnage, ‘humanised’ criminals who discuss the merits of consumer items, and non-stop references to movies—are certainly all there in Leonard. But where the author aims at an almost minimalist leanness of effect, the director is a hyperkinetic sensualist who wants to knock the audience flat.

The light touch Soderbergh brings to Out of Sight is far more appropriate to Leonard's book than Tarantino's inflated nihilist chic. That's partly because the story is a crime caper through which a delicate, reticent love affair has been threaded. Fugitive bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and Deputy Federal Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) aren't flamboyant lovers-on-the-lam like the couple in the Tarantino-scripted True Romance. They don't burn up the track with erotic friction; instead, their courtship is oddly oblique, tentative and experimental. Karen, we learn, has a history of romantic waywardness, choosing married men or guys who turn out to be felons. Ambitious to rise in a male-dominated profession, she nonetheless feels an obscure yen for more glamour and adventure than can be safely warranted by the law. (Being a Leonard heroine, she never says so—but you intuit it from Lopez's leggy, provocative demeanour and such carefully planted details as her Chanel suit and the silvery-pink shade of lipstick she wears on the job.) Jack, too, longs for something other. A career criminal with nowhere to go but down, facing a 30-year prison sentence if caught, he harbours the pipe-dream of a regular life where people meet for cocktails, talk about movies, get acquainted. The reciprocity of their desires makes them a perfect fit, like the symmetrical couples (played by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn or William Powell and Myrna Loy) in 30s screwball comedies. Movie love in those days could cause difference to crumble instantly, but Jack and Karen recognise there's no future in their developing rapport: he must continue to dodge the law, and she to hunt him down. The sly conceit of the movie is that these official adversaries choose—now and then, in isolated pockets of the chase—to bunk off from their public roles and find out what could have been.

INIMICAL LOVERS

They indulge their caprice in a handful of the most subtly seductive scenes ever filmed. The first suggests a witty extension (or perhaps contraction) of the ‘meet-cute’ once mandatory in Hollywood romantic comedy. Escaping from a medium-security Florida prison, Jack is obliged to abduct innocent bystander Karen, whom he bundles into the trunk of a getaway car driven by his accomplice Buddy (Ving Rhames). Then he climbs in himself, and illuminated by the lurid red tail-lights, their bodies pressed snugly back to back, the pair soon fall into an easygoing patter about their respective careers and Faye Dunaway movies they have enjoyed. Soderbergh frames this (literal) blind date the only way he can—in huge close-up—yet his darting camerawork offsets the static situation, charging it with emotional expectancy. That trunk stands a decent chance of being as fondly remembered as the motel room across which Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert string the Walls of Jericho in It Happened One Night—and it performs a similar function as a sealed-off free zone where inimical lovers can test their true feelings.

That's the beginning for Jack and Karen, but it's also nearly the end. Since their relationship is untenable, it becomes a utopian space within the narrative—the gateway to a parallel universe where a happier story might be told. In Henry Hathaway's 1935 surrealist classic Peter Ibbetson, the forcibly estranged sweethearts (played by Gary Cooper and Ann Harding) spend a lifetime visiting each other in dreams. It's almost the same with Jack and Karen. Through some of the most understated techniques of stylisation I've ever seen, Soderbergh lends their love duets a hypnotic quality that abstracts them from the rest of the movie. The effect is most pronounced in the sequence where they have cocktails. Sitting alone in a hotel bar high above Detroit, Karen is chatted up by three advertising types, each of whom she repels. Then suddenly Jack appears, as if materialised by thought.

AUTHORIAL POKER-FACE

Soderbergh composes their ensuing tête-à-tête in lustrous two-shots that fill the frame, connoting a self-sufficient world. At the same time, he faintly flattens the image to the dimensions of a comic strip—insinuating perhaps that this world isn't quite real. It's here that the theme of the movie is most explicitly stated. Talking of making eye contact with someone on the street, Jack muses: “And the next moment, the person's gone … and it's too late to do anything about it, but you remember it because it was right there and you let it go, and you think, ‘What if I had stopped and said something?’ It might happen only a few times in your life.” To which Karen quietly replies, “Or once.”

What links Jack and Karen to those flaky 30s movie couples is their willingness to behave irresponsibly, to leave their hide-bound identities and take a chance. What makes them 90s figures is the limited nature of their romantic project. Neither is willing to give up the solid world they live in for something as chimerical as love. And yet Out of Sight becomes possibly even more romantic because that love crystallises in memory as a lost potential, a regret. As Jack and Karen continue to talk, Soderbergh flashes forward to their single act of consummation (and has the taste not to picture it too graphically). Now we understand why the freeze-frames, which in earlier parts of the film seemed an annoying tic, are necessary to its conception—Jack and Karen are storing up images for the long, cold future. The reserved, slightly ceremonial framing contributes to the mood of subdued gravity: we feel the characters are utterly conscious of each moment as it slips away and already view it with sharp pangs of nostalgia.

Aside from the usual condensations and a changed ending, Frank's script stays extremely faithful to Leonard's book. So why does the movie come across as far more vivid and touching? Perhaps the answer lies partly in the ‘reality effect’ of cinema. Reading the novel, you admire the craftsmanlike way Leonard brings everything to a hard point; but he never gives you the impression of a fully imagined world as a major writer can. That's the downside of his authorial poker-face—the locales lack substance, the people feel disembodied. Yet characters who are ciphers on the page become immediately particularised when actors play them on screen. This can feel like a loss in film versions of literary masterpieces, but in the case of Out of Sight the vast gain in concrete physical detail is a compensation. Of course, it isn't merely by virtue of being photographed that Clooney and Lopez elicit our intense emotional involvement—it's because they act together with such unforced charm. And it isn't just that the movie was shot on location in Miami and Detroit that provides a convincing backdrop—it's that Soderbergh, the cinematographer and the production designer succeed in establishing a strong sense of place.

Most commercial directors these days fall back on grandiose aerial views to portray a city. But Soderbergh stays consistently at street level, which keeps the movie looking self-contained and almost suburban. He has said he was after a rough, imperfect feeling, and you can see what he means: outside the formally orchestrated interludes between Jack and Karen, he judders the camera in muted imitation of cinéma-vérité. In some of his previous films Soderbergh would practically quarantine the characters in the tight frame; here it's as if this pan-and-zoom is trying to catch up with them as they go their independent ways.

‘OUT OF SIGHT 2’

The style is certainly suited to the ramshackle sub-plot in which Jack, Buddy and a sprinkling of sociopaths conspire to rob millionaire Richard Ripley (Albert Brooks). It's a storyline seemingly composed of ragtags from such 70s films as The French Connection and Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, and indeed there's flavour of early to mid 70s American cinema in the movie's veneer of airiness and spontaneity. But the underlying control is very apparent—for instance in the expressionist use of saturated colour, evolving from pink and green pastels in Miami to blues, browns and blacks in Detroit, that plots the darkening course of the love affair.

There's perhaps only one spot where Soderbergh's debonair technique goes splat. The crudely staged scene between Jack and criminal confederate Snoopy (Don Cheadle) on the stairs of the Ripley mansion is plainly there to satisfy the meatheads in the audience. And ambiguous though it is, I also object to the new ending in which Karen, tongue faintly in cheek, supplies the deus ex machina whereby she and Jack can keep the ball rolling. Frank excises Karen's final words to Jack in the novel—her bleakly realistic: “I'm afraid, though, 30 years from now I'll feel different about it. I'm sorry, Jack.” The return of Jack and Karen for Out of Sight 2 feels like a dim possibility—but the melancholy beauty of their romance rests precisely on it being an evanescent flash in their lives, which they will never forget.