Sex, Lies, and Videotape

August 25, 1989  |  Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape offers everything promised in its provocative title, and much more. It is no small compliment to say this small-budget, high-profile independent production almost lives up to all the multi-media hype generated since last May, when it won the prestigious Palme d’Or grand prize at the 1989 Cannes International Film Festival.
 
Produced on a frayed shoestring of $1.2 million in Baton Rouge, La., sex, lies, and videotape is an emotionally precise and perceptively written chamber drama, tightly focused on four twentysomething adults and their psychosexual secrets. Making his debut as a feature filmmaker, Soderbergh directs his own screenplay with astonishing self-assurance and gracefully fluid camerawork, giving an urgent sense of dramatic momentum to the evasions and revelations of intimate conversation.
 
Voyeurism is a major theme of the movie, so it’s altogether appropriate that, in the opening scene, Soderbergh turns his audience into eavesdroppers. We overhear Ann (Andie MacDowell), a prim, sexually repressed housewife, as she describes her free-floating discontent to her analyst.
 
Ann finds herself thinking a lot about garbage, airplane crashes, and other terrible things far beyond her control. She’s not particularly happy, she admits, ”but being happy isn’t all that great — the last time I was happy, I got so fat, I must have put on 25 pounds.” She loves her husband, John (Peter Gallagher), a slick young lawyer, ”except that I’m going through this thing where I don’t want him to touch me.”
 
That may be the cause, or the effect, of John’s hot-blooded affair with Ann’s sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), a brazen sexpot who revels in her own aggressive naughtiness. Cynthia isn’t in love with John — not by a long shot — but she does enjoy the idea that John finds her more sexually attractive than her ”perfect” sister. Ann, who knows nothing about the affair, is too proper to speak ill of Cynthia. But she does sound very much like someone clenching her teeth when she refers to her slatternly sister as ”an extrovert.”
 
Enter Graham (James Spader), John’s long-lost buddy from his college days. Graham, who apparently has spent the last few years on aimless wandering, has returned to Baton Rouge for reasons he will not, or cannot, fully explain. John suggests he might want to contact a former sweetheart who still lives in town. Graham smiles, warily, then quickly changes the subject. He seems to have very little in common with John these days. He seems much more interested in Ann.
 
With his open-faced curiosity and soft-spoken directness, Graham is captivating — seductive, really — as he wins Ann’s confidence. He says he used to be a liar and a promiscuous lout, hinting he caused his former girlfriend a great deal of pain. But he’s different now: He tells only the truth, and means no one any harm.
 
Ann, her defenses lowered, confesses she finds sex ”over-rated.” Graham nods, then matter-of-factly drops a bombshell: He is impotent. The only way he can excite himself, Graham adds, is by videotaping, then viewing, interviews with women who describe the most intimate details of their sexual histories. Granted, this may be the ultimate in safe sex, but Ann is shocked and — initially — revolted.
 
Cynthia, however, is very, very interested.
 
James Spader, an actor usually typecast as a silken yuppie villain, gives a thoroughly persuasive performance as Graham. It’s a tricky role, potentially creepy and heavily burdened with symbolic weight. But Spader is effortlessly convincing as someone capable of quietly, methodically talking women into becoming case studies for his bizarre hobby. More important, he reveals Graham as someone who, in his own way, is every bit as repressed and self-deluding as Ann. Both characters have taken extreme measures to avoid the unpleasant aspects of life. Little wonder, then, that they are drawn to each other.
 
Graham turns out to be much more vulnerable than Ann, who offers him the healing and nurturing that he cannot get from a TV monitor. The character’s motivation remains fuzzy: We never learn the precise details of the trauma that drove Graham to escape through videotape in the first place. Even so, Spader does a lot to define the character with sympathetic shadings, so what we don’t know for certain, we’re more than willing to surmise.
 
For all its frank talk and sexual intrigue, there is hardly any nudity, and no graphic physical action, in sex, lies, and videotape. Instead, Soderbergh concentrates on the ways people use words: to reveal, inadvertently or otherwise, and to deceive, by omission or design. There is a brilliant sequence, at once infuriating and howlingly funny, in which Ann tells John that she suspects him of infidelity. With a great show of indignation, John denies the charge, so convincingly that Ann begins to doubt her own emotional stability.
 
John, of course, is greatly relieved when she apologizes for her accusations.
 
Here and elsewhere in sex, lies, and videotape, Soderbergh brings a bracing edge of humor to his probingly analytical drama. Unfortunately, he turns a bit too moralistically serious, and his plot gets much too schematic, in the final third of the movie. Graham has his video camera turned on himself; Ann and Cynthia declare a truce in their sibling rivalry, and John finds that sexual excess can slow your progress up the corporate ladder. After spending so much time with characters filled with unsettling surprises and quirky eccentricities, it’s disappointing to see them detour onto familiar paths.
 
Still, even when the story is most predictable, the dialogue crackles with wit and rings with truth. And the acting is excellent. Spader earned a Cannes Film Festival prize for his performance, but he is simply first among equals in the ensemble cast. Ex-model Andie MacDowell, who did little to distinguish herself in Greystoke and St. Elmo’s Fire, gives Ann an unexpected strength of will to break through her frazzled confusions. Laura San Giacomo vividly plays Cynthia as a shameless, but hardly brainless, voluptuary, exuberantly sensuous yet rigorously tough-minded. And Peter Gallagher is amusingly smug as John, beaming with the misplaced confidence of a man who fools himself into thinking he’s completely in control of a volatile situation.