The work of film-maker Steven Soderbergh – purveyor of blockbuster heists (Ocean’s Eleven), neon-lit tales of hustling for the American Dream (the Magic Mike series), and daring slice-of-life dramas (The Girlfriend Experience, big and small screen versions) – tends to follow the money. Whether its a small-scale drug operation or a major casino robbery, his multi-player ensembles offer not just a sense of the numbers, but the who and why of a scheme, a sense of purpose along with the pleasures of how.
Full Circle, the director’s new star-studded, mixed-bag Max limited series (RIP HBO Max), is a bit of an overdose. Sprawling yet often sedate, it disjointedly packs too many of these schemes into an overly complicated, sputtering noir mystery set in present-day New York. Written by Ed Solomon, Soderbergh’s partner for the 2017 choose-your-adventure series Mosaic and the comparatively sleeker and more scintillating film No Sudden Move, Full Circle attempts to braid a thicket of secrets, plans, deceptions and exploitations into a grand picture of cascading connections. The result is less artful collage of counterbalanced motivations and complicities than a rubber-band ball of plot and money, money and plot.
Some of that money is stolen, as in the first scene, when an ageing Asian American crime boss axes the brother-in-law of inscrutable rival Mrs Mahabir (an underused CCH Pounder), head of a Guyanese community in Queens. Some is spent by Mahabir’s consigliere Gharmen (Phaldut Sharma) to bring two starry-eyed Guyanese boys, Xavier (standout Sheyi Cole) and Louis (Gerald Jones), to America as unwitting trainees, and then sought by said deputies to return home. There are series A investments and bribes and NDAs and an old, failed business in Guyana – numbers and accounts bandied about for six 45-55 minute episodes until my eyes blurred.
But first and foremost, there’s ransom for the kidnapping of a child: $314,159 – pi in dollars, a circle, as part of a ritual conducted by Mrs Mahabir to lift a curse on her family (the show’s incorporation of the occult and Caribbean folk religion is messily handled, at best). The series is based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low, in which kidnappers accidentally abduct the wrong child and ignite a complicated chain of events and, as such, things go awry from the start. Mahabir’s nephew Aked (When They See Us’s Jharrel Jerome, vibrating with stress), was supposed to pick up Jared Browne (Ethan Stoddard), grandson of celebrity “Chef Jeff” (Dennis Quaid, with a french-braided rattail that speaks volumes); instead, he unwittingly grabs a similarly aged runaway stalking Jared and stealing his things (Lucian Zanes).
The ransom debacle causes the real Jared’s parents Sam (Claire Danes) and Derek (Timothy Olyphant) to unravel in different directions. (With her blunt blond bob and chagrined swilling of fine wine in a luxe Manhattan apartment, Danes essentially plays the downtown version of her character from last year’s Fleishman is in Trouble.) To further scribble the lines, a rogue Postal Service inspector unfortunately named Melody Harmony (Zazie Beetz) starts connecting the Guyanese group to old business deals by the Brownes and her bumbling boss, Manny Broward (Jim Gaffigan). Beetz, so excellent in Atlanta, disappointingly plays a cop whose chronic boundary crossing and know-it-all attitude irks everyone, including the viewer. Part shallow writing, part gratingly self-righteous performance, she’s a tough pill to swallow as one of the series’ main protagonists.
If this sounds like a lot to keep track of, it is, and I’m even eliding a few subplots. But as circuitous as it may be, Full Circle has its moments, largely thanks to Sodebergh’s keen eye for lingering details and a visual style that burrows in with the characters, especially Danes’s Sam.
The result is a curious, ultimately frustrating collection of disparate parts. There’s a nagging discordance between Solomon’s writing – which trends between too oblique and obvious drops of exposition, the kind I’d expect in a dime-a-dozen Netflix thriller – and Soderbergh’s vérité direction. His tracking shots and shaky cam, lingering on the mundane details of repetition (turning the key at the front door, following someone through Postmates) gives the series a lived-in feel the dialogue and dense well of secrets do not. The performances, too, often mimic an archetypical scene – strained parenting of a Manhattan teenager who won’t eat his avocado toast, two wives of reconciled brothers ruing old pain over wine – that never quite coheres into the full suspension of disbelief.
I do appreciate, however, that six hours of investment does not produce one grand reveal or secret – there’s no master to this web of shifting loyalties and plans, only those crushed when it inevitably buckles. It feels true to a film-maker long preoccupied with economic inequity and attempts to subvert it, though I can’t imagine many viewers will see all these underwhelming plots through to the finish.
Full Circle is now available on Max in the US with a UK date to be announced
