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Bubble

2006, Movie, R, 73 mins

Bubble: Review

A gloomy little slice-of-blue-collar-life drama with a small, sad mystery thrown in, Steven Soderbergh’s low-budget, high-definition video feature was cast with nonprofessionals, shot in sequence and partly improvised. Chubby, middle-aged Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) works at a local baby-doll factory, cares for her aging father (Omar Cowan) at home and sews doll clothes for extra cash. Her only friend is much-younger coworker Kyle (Dustin James Ashley), a quiet high-school dropout who lives with his mom (Laurie Lee), works two jobs and rarely socializes because of a social anxiety disorder. Martha drives Kyle to work and shares lunch with him in the employees’ break room; their friendship is clearly based on little more than proximity and shared loneliness, but it’s Martha’s lifeline and Kyle’s key to mobility until he can save up enough for a car. The fragile balance of their mutual needs is upset when the factory hires 23-year-old Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins), a single mother with a 2-year-old (Madison Wilkins) and a volatile relationship with her hot-tempered ex-boyfriend, tattoo-artist Jake (Kyle Smith). Martha suspects that Rose is trouble and watches warily as Rose and Kyle take cigarette breaks together. Her worst fears are realized when Rose asks her to baby-sit so she can go out on a date and the date turns out be with Kyle. Worse, after Rose returns home she has a screaming fight with Jake, who was waiting outside and accuses her of stealing; when Rose is found strangled the next day, Jake is the obvious suspect. Touted as “another Steven Soderbergh experience” without specifying that it’s a scruffy, no-frills experience of the SCHIZOPOLIS (1997) or FULL FRONTAL (2002) kind, not the sort of glossy, star-studded entertainment epitomized by OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001), BUBBLE is the first of six short low-budget features Soderbergh contracted to make for the HDNet cable network. Shot on location in Belpre, Ohio, (“baby-doll capital of the world”), its greatest asset is the real-life Lee Middleton Original Dolls Factory, a spooky place where flexible doll parts are popped from molds with a natal slurp, and wide-eyed plastic baby heads stare blankly from boxes. The horror, the horror! Ultimately, BUBBLE is less important as a film than as an experiment in simultaneous cross-platform film distribution: It debuts in theaters and on cable today, and will be released on DVD on Jan. 31. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh