‘Flying Bird’ is a fast break of a movie
Print Edition
STRAIGHT, “no chaser” is how NBA agent Ray Burke (Andre Holland) likes his news in “High Flying Bird,” and the same could be said for the cinematic preferences of director Steven Soderbergh, whose stripped-down latest is a fleet-footed fast break of a movie.
“High Flying Bird,” Soderbergh’s second film shot on iPhones and his first for Netflix, has been made with an exhilarating, no-nonsense immediacy. Standard movie gloss has been happily jettisoned to give it to us straight. The “it” is the free-flowing torrent of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s words (McCraney’s play was the basis for Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight”), whose hyper-verbal script has given the film’s talented cast, led by Holland, plenty to chew on.
Burke is a slick, fast-talking agent who, months into a lockout, is carrying out a scheme of mysterious objectives. Soderbergh and McCraney promptly submerge us in a soliloquy of Burke’s at a Manhattan restaurant meeting with his star client, the recent number-one pick of the draft, Erik Scott (newcomer Melvin Gregg).
He speaks of ball as something sacred and pure and hints at the larger powers that control the game with a bravado only slightly undercut when his credit card is rejected. Burke pays in cash, hands Scott an envelope with something he calls “a bible” in it, and huffs it down the street.
It’s a breathless start to a breathless movie, set to “Sweet Smell of Success” speed. It pauses only for Burke, after the lunch, to walk downtown while Richie Havens plays. What we come to gather is that Burke is trying to take control of his own destiny and, for a moment at least, hold the game in his hands. “High Flying Bird” is a heady movie, full of political thought about sport, entertainment, race and power. Rather than float on production value, it sustains itself on the tension of ideas, exchanged rapid-fire in gleaming office towers.
There is almost no basketball in “High Flying Bird,” nor are there any of the normal sports-movie clichés. It’s concerned with “the game on top of the game,” as the wise Bronx coach Spencer (Bill Duke) calls the system imposed on basketball, one controlled mainly by white billionaires like owner David Seton (Kyle MacLachlan), who’s negotiating with player rep Myra (a terrific Sonja Sohn).
What Burke has in mind is disruption and, maybe, a moment of freedom for the entertainers in the middle from the powers that be above.
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