Clooney's Latest Makes Great Date Material

OUT OF SIGHT

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Starring George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez

Compromising couples, look no further. The Great Date Movie of Summer 98 has arrived; the screen adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Out of Sight has it all. Guys will like the jewel heist. Girls will like the romance. And anyone not staring down the dating divide will just like the movie, period.

Charming convict Jack Foley (George Clooney) breaks out of prison. When U.S. marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), conveniently parked nearby, tries to block his egress, Foley shoves her into a car trunk, hops in and tells his pal (Ving Rhames) to drive. It's certainly a cute way to meet; after the long car ride, the two are besotted with each other. Sisco chases Foley to Detroit, where he's planning to relieve a fellow ex-com of five million dollars worth of diamonds, and she certainly does find him.

The circumstances leading to Foley's jail break and prospective jewel theft are cleverly told in a series of flashbacks that gradually merge into his budding relationship with Sisco.

Strong performances by Rhames and a hilarious Steve Zahn, as Foley's partners in crime, actually make the flashbacks more compelling than the rather illogical romance that poses as the center of the film. The ultimate success of the movie is a real testament to the stellar skills of Clooney and Lopez.

How Karen Sisco ever got hired as a marshal, and how she retains her job, is an utter mystery. She is a flippant smart-aleck who's rude to her boss as she single-mindedly pursues her own unorthodox goals on the job (sound like any of this summers other bigscreen federal agents?). Worse, her goals usually have to do with her personal life; several references to her earlier personal life suggest that Sisco uses her job as a social club.

Certainly she never goes on a bust without a Chanel suit. A sense of humor at work is one thing, but treating your job like a joke is another. At least Ally McBeal gets to make intelligent speeches from time to time.

But if Sisco is a slightly suspect agent, Clooney is the cleanest-living, most personable criminal in cinematic history, the thief in the gray flannel suit, a gentleman and a robber. He steals because that's the way he was brought up, you understand, and it's implied that he only robs because the world treats him badly, or only if he knows a really bad guy with some really good loot. A real Robin Hood, Foley. He's a thief with lots of honor who falls hard once he meets a good woman, even after she shoots at him.

How Lopez and Clooney infuse these cardboard cutouts, this flighty girl and this incidental robber, with so much life that their instant attraction seems not only believable but inevitable is nearly miraculous. Stop and think about the plot an hour after the movie and it doesn't seem too impressive, but you'll never question it as the film is rolling. The chemistry between the two is astonishing. Each is perfectly capable of controlling a scene alone as well, thank you very much. Lesser-known Lopez is incredibly appealing--she might play a lousy employee, but she plays a great human being. And George Clooney is, well, George Clooney, but, instead of choosing the easy way out and smirking through the film to make women swoon, he turns in as nicely nuanced a performance as his role allows. Stat!

Out of Sight is a very visual film, also not because it takes the easy path of dwelling on its attractive main characters. Color dominates the atmosphere of the movie, from the tropical saturation of the Miami scenes to the dingy gray of inner-city Detroit. A mesmerizing clarity of hue and light is emphasized by camera angles more inventive than those of standard industry shots. The surprising shots usually enhance the movie--bright, brittle, nonchalant depiction of the sparse violence appears almost innocuous, preserving Foley's good-guy feel; a dizzying, lightning-quick camera pan around a prison yard makes a scrawny inmate look as ferocious as he really is.

Only the insistent use of freeze-frame prevents this from being the most consistently attractive studio release in recent memory. The sense of slow motion is oddly timed, as when a short still interrupts some slight motion, the motion continues for three or four seconds, and then a newspaper photo of the new and different scene is plastered across Foley's vision and the screen. Fortunately, the frequent freeze-frame is less pervasive than the edgy, upbeat score, which adds at least as much to the general geniality of the movie as the cinematography.

For genial Out of Sight is. Call it feel-good, call it sappy, but really, the movie is essentially cheerful. Everyone has fun. Bank robbing is a barrel of laughs, working for the Feds is better than taking out a personal ad, and, quick, inconvenient jail terms aside, only the really bad guys get punished. It's not fair for something this ideal, this utopian, this completely far-fetched to be so darn good. The illogical plot is utterly captivating from beginning to end, and the performances are superb. Out of Sight is really, well, out of sight.