Despite his mainstream success, Steven Soderbergh hasn't lost his appetite for smaller, peculiar movies. After "Full Frontal", "Bubble" marks his second collaboration with screenwriter Coleman Hough in another experiment—only instead of casting Julia Roberts in a wig, the star happens to be the real-life manager of a fast food franchise in Ohio.
Set in a poor Midwestern town and cast with amateur actors, "Bubble" portrays the claustrophobic lives of its working class inhabitants--sitting silently in front of TVs in their trailer homes, exchanging banalities over Happy Meal lunches, driving cars through the poverty-stricken landscape, exhausted from not just one, but two mind-numbing jobs.
Martha (Debbie Doebereiner), a matronly woman who takes care of her aging father, and Kyle (Dustin James Ashley), a young high school dropout whose main pleasure in life is the solitary joint he puffs before bed, work together at a doll factory. They share a friendship forged from solitude and expressed in few words. When attractive single mother Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins) arrives in town, the fragile balance of their relationship is upset--and soon, there is murder. A stoic detective arrives on the scene, played (of course) by a real cop (Decker Moody.)
It is somewhat of a miracle that "Bubble" works at all: it is, after all, a simple story about simple people told in simple words. And yet, the intensity of emotion communicated by the amateur actors is a testament to the power of the movies. Soderbergh, who has already proven himself as master of the weightless Hollywood confections ("Ocean's Eleven") and rousing populist cinema ("Erin Brokovich") can add another notch to his belt: "Bubble" is astonishingly economical and effective melodrama--down to the devastating last line.
