Bubble [DVD] [2005] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

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Customer reviews

review by: MikeonAlpha date: 2006-02-03 rating:
Soderberg's experimental masterpiece….
Bubble is a staggeringly realistic story, an intriguing, and bleakly entertaining, and even strangely haunting slice of Middle America heartland film noir. As a piece of film making it's slight and obviously highly experimental, but as a low-key drama set in a working-class Midwest town that hones in on the dangers intrinsic in jealousy, it's staggeringly effective. pShot on a limited budget in Ohio river valley, the town of Belpre, and in West Virginia by director Stephen Soderbergh with local amateur non-actors who have led largely uneventful lives, Bubble centers around the friendship of three characters, who have a type of lonely passionless love triangle that plays out with devastating consequences. pThe frumpy, blue-eyed Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) is a doll factory worker with an appearance of slightly frantic optimism, who has become a little too close to her co-worker, a quiet young man named Kyle (Dustin James Ashley). When she's not working at the doll factory and picking up Kyle to take him to work from his mother's house, she's sharing a lunch break with him, and even driving him home. pWhen Martha's not working, she spends most of her time looking after her elderly father, whilst making doll clothes at night. Kyle is her link to her outside world; he's a close friend, but to him, she's just Martha. Life for them both is rather predictable, with nothing much else happening or looming on the horizon. Until one-day a third person, Rose comes to work at the factory, she's a new young female co-worker brought in to help work on a rush order. Rose with her 2-year-old daughter takes a shine to Kyle, much to the chagrin of Martha. pAlmost immediately Martha becomes suspicious of this restless and cynical single mum. She's disturbed by Rose's casualness and is shocked when Rose, having asked for a ride to her second job cleaning a new multi-level middle class home, uses the home owner's Jacuzzi tub. Almost immediately it becomes clear to Martha that Rose is a first rate user, an unmatched confidence trickster. pThe last part of the movie is very much a police procedural as someone in Bubble is eventually murdered, and although it doesn't take much nouse to figure out who did it, the real mystery is not the crime but Soderberg's portrait of these stultifying lives. Bubble is a sharply deceptive character study: Martha seems happy on the surface, yet she's is middle-aged, single and overweight and it becomes obvious that she's compensating for something.pRose admires Martha for taking care of her father rather than putting him in a nursing home, she's developed a tough exterior and her experiences as a runaway at fifteen and her life as a single mom make it clear that she intends to make the moves on Kyle. She's sort of consolingly passive aggressive. Kyle works two jobs and rarely dates, until Rose takes notice; he's an innocent, prone to panic attacks, with the hint of a beard on his chin, who keeps his saved money in a drawer.pSoderbergh frames each scene with such a stagnant realism that the result is a portrait of sedated lives silently screaming from inside a bubble. Martha's bubble eventually bursts with devastating consequences, her banal world shattered by an episode of intermittent violence. Bubble presents a scathing portrait of Middle America as a no-man's-land of aimless clock-punching existence and airless flatness, peppered with the occasional hiccup of violence.pBubble is mostly worth seeing for the stunning and utterly believable performances of its three leads, as they naturally observe the mundane exchanges of every day life. Although Doebereiner, brings the most depth to her character, the other actors also provide the feel of young people, uneducated, eking an existence in a small town where working two jobs to make ends meet is the norm. Bubble is indeed an astounding achievement; it's cutting edge American independent film making at its best, and must see cinema from one of America's most talented directors. Mike Leonard February 06.

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