Bubble: Already Forgotten

This film will be forgotten and overlooked. The characters, and the millions of people they represent, will also be forgotten and overlooked. Time has already proven both to be true.


Bubble, conceived, produced, and cast in the small town of Belpre, Ohio, follows the lives of three working class citizens trying to eek out living wages at depressingly dead-end jobs producing dolls. Kyle – an awkward, 20-something, high school dropout - molds the dolls from plastic and passes them off to the hulking, red hands of Martha, where she applies facial cosmetics for an undoubtedly diminutive wage. This, they do daily, passing the time with small talk in the breakroom and between shifts, sustaining off of fast food and soda. Much of Bubble is composed of what a typical TV show or film may refer to as “filler”, and is in fact the focus of the film. With foley, seemingly unprocessed sound, and being shot on HD with a hand-held camera, Soderbergh attempts to give that - yet again - documentary feel to his subjects, presenting them with candid grace.

Released in 2004, this was supposedly the first of 6 locally shot, small town films to be directed by Soderbergh and released through HD networks. What happened to this deal? No one seems to be too sure. Then again, Soderbergh is one of the more interesting exploiters of Hollywood cash, his career entirely composed of contradictions and surprises, so it’s no wonder the deal mysteriously vanished. His films post-Bubble have ranged from the third installment of the lucrative Ocean’s series to the absolute flop of The Good German. It’s a bummer, though, that this deal wasn’t seen through, as the films would most definitely create local film collectives around the country, while simultaneously providing a small economic boost for the communities as a whole. But, alas, it’s quite possible that Bubble simply did not do well enough in the boxoffice, on TV or DVD, as not even the progressive distribution idea didn’t provide a big enough push for the film (Grindhouse recently attempted the same with it’s trailer, also falling flat on it’s face).

This creative form of distribution logically follows the experimental nature of Bubble (that is, by Hollywood standards). Soderbergh does his best to properly represent this growing class of the borderline impoverished. For the most part, he does a fantastic job of remaining subtle and implicit, eliciting wonderfully ad hoc dialogue from his inexperienced cast with his well-worked script (by the talented Coleman Hough). The film works precisely because nothing substantial takes place for the first half of the film, that is, until Rose comes along.

The doll factory receives a large order from an ambiguous buyer, hiring Rose as a temporary to fill in the labor holes this creates. She’s introduced to her co-workers through her manager - who gives one of the best, most forgettably amazing two-appearance-roles to date, fitting the “I’m a gigantic middle-management toolbox” position better than any of the other alarmingly few American films that attempt to portray the lives of the lower-middle class.

Rose befriends both Martha and Kyle in a hurry, seeking companionship from Kyle, and debtless favors from the morally guided Martha. Martha becomes deeply jealous of Rose – the audience only made aware of this through ever-so-slight, off-kilter behavior – and as one conflict leads to another, murder ensues, at which point Bubble sells the appeal it garnered for cheap narrative convention. Bubble takes a unadventurous narrative function, displaces it in a relatively unexplored locale in smalltown Ohio, and captures it’s inhabitants with an unconventional style, in the hope of attracting the type of viewership that is accustom to this type of storytelling. The result is a pastiche of form and content rather than symbiosis, clutter instead of fusion. Thus, as the story goes – and has gone since the silent era, the earliest days of literature, and the ancient pictographs of days past - the remainder of the film is dedicated to the inevitable capture and incarceration of the culprit, leaving little to the imagination.

It’s the lack of narrative direction that made Bubble so interesting in the first place, and this is shattered through generic convention. Sodeberg has, essentially, through imperial mandate, made a film about a people whose jobs he, “…cannot imagine doing [himself]” (DVD special features).

Luckily, the first half of the film resonates across the American class-scape, and the consistent realist style thoroughly engages the viewer to the point of forgiving the second half of the film. At the same time, we can all be glad that Bubble has already made the inevitable plunge into the awkward space of non-memory. In this sense, the film – and the public at large – remains true to the meandering characters of Bubble, and the people it represents.