Soderbergh Marathon: Part 23

Intro

The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
I am in the weird position of having seen the TV series that was inspired by this movie, also called The Girlfriend Experience, but not the movie itself.  And in looking at the TV series, I find out it's still airing and will air a new season relatively soon.  Huh.  The TV series does not involve Steven Soderbergh or as far as I'm aware, the writers of this particular movie.

I couldn't tell you how I would feel if I had seen the movie first, but the TV series is a hell of a lot better at doing what it wants to do than the movie.  There's a similar tone, at least in the first season, of the drudgery and day-to-day aspect of sex work.  They are kind of going for a similar message, which is I imagine why the TV series happened: they saw the movie, saw TV potential out of it, and made it happen.

I feel like I would be less hard on Sasha Grey, the former porn actress turned actual actress, if I had never seen the TV show.  The TV show features someone who can actually act while Sasha Grey can't really, but her acting range fit nicely into what was required of the movie.  She is monotone and emotionless and look at that, the movie requires that.

Riley Keough (star of the first season) can actually act though and while she's by design very similar to Grey in performance, you can really tell the nuances required of acting if you compare their performances side by side.  Yes, she has more time and more to do in terms of displaying acting range, but even the emotionless, monotone version of her just works better.

The Girlfriend Experience features my least favorite side of Steven Soderbergh - the side that employs non-actors to make it feel more natural.  There's of course Sasha Grey, who is basically stunt casting.  There's her live-in boyfriend, who was someone who had also never acted before.  And the IMDB page is littered with absolutely nobody you've heard of, except for maybe one film critic.  (Who I had never heard of so probably not on that count either.)

This premise works way better as a TV show than it does a movie.  Now again maybe I wouldn't think that if I hadn't actually seen it successfully work in a TV show, but this is a pretty boring movie.  Not a lot happens.  It's thankfully short.  I'm not sure if it would work better with a better actress than Grey, but she's in nearly every scene and is just not that compelling to watch.

And for what it's worth, in the interest of providing a different perspective, a perspective I typically visit, Roger Ebert gave this 4 stars.  Which is inexplicable to me, but he also loved Bubble, so he clearly loves Soderbergh doing the mundane, improvisational approach both movies take.  Which I might be on board with if like Keegan Michael Key was the one improvising, not people who've never improvised or even acted.

So this one kind of landed as a dud for me, but I'll also admit that I think knowing the TV show works way better impacted by opinion.  I don't know that I would have liked it anyway, but it definitely didn't stand a chance by being the second Girlfriend Experience that I watched.

1.5/4 stars