Movie Review – In the Soup

In the Soup (1992)
Written by Tim Kissell and Alexandre Rockwell
Directed by Alexandre Rockwell

One of the misconceptions about being an artist is the glamor of living in squalor. I don’t recommend it as I was someone who has lived in less than stellar circumstances. You can still produce great art without living in poverty if you can avoid it. There’s not much romantic about being unable to afford groceries for a week or feeling an icy winter draft blow through poorly insulated windows. There’s also the misunderstanding that working in the arts is about refusing to compromise your personal vision. The challenge is balancing your perspective with getting work to pay your bills. Writing is a job like any other that involves taking gigs and doing what you can to get to the next one. Along the way, you keep working on the personal pieces, and one day, they come to fruition.

Aldolfo Rollo (Steve Buscemi) is an aspiring filmmaker with a 500-page screenplay. He’s passionate, but the work is unfilmable, and he needs help finding financial backing. He places an ad in the newspaper offering his script for sale as he has no other means to make money. Cue Joe (Seymour Cassel) a fast-talking gangster who hands over big wads of cash but insists Aldofo be the one to direct the movie. They have a whirlwind friendship, with Joe buttering up the impressionable writer, eventually offering his “tweaks” to the script to make it more audience-friendly. He also raises funds for the movie by committing a series of thefts, which are becoming more challenging for Adolfo to overlook.

In the Soup vibrates with the energy of 90s indie films. I started watching them near the end of that decade, and there’s something quaint about the low budget being evident on the screen. Despite lacking the funds of a Hollywood flick, Alexandre Rockwell makes smart directing choices to create a texture & atmosphere that makes the world of In the Soup feel unique. The film was actually shot in color, but when Rockwell made the theatrical prints, he had them done in a high contrast black and white palette reminiscent of the French New Wave pictures. There are apparently color prints for foreign distribution and home video releases, but I cannot imagine this film in anything but black and white. Color would totally change the entire feel of the picture.

In the Soup also represents a collision of two eras of American indie filmmaking. Buscemi is an icon of the 1990s era. 1992 was also the year Buscemi would appear as Mr. Pink in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, a movie that kicked off a boom for the independent film industry. Throughout the decade, Buscemi would hop back and forth between prominent roles in small movies to very memorable supporting roles in larger budget films. Living in Oblivion is another of his indie flicks that I think of when I see his trademark face. 

The flip side of this is Seymour Cassel, whose career trajectory was shaped by his work with director John Cassavetes starting in 1968. Cassavettes is considered the “grandfather” of American independent film and is remembered for his guerilla tactics of shooting without permits and a sense of improvisation on the set. The work done on films like A Woman Under the Influence would help pave the way for other filmmakers to bring their personal & often unique visions to the screen. Having these two actors on screen together serves as these two filmmaking movements meeting as one transitions into the next.

A half-baked love story is tossed into the mix involving Adolfo’s neighbor (Jennifer Beals), but that feels more like a plot point you’d expect in this type of film. Instead, the film is more about Adolfo’s inability to live his life because he’s stuck in these filmmaking aspirations. He’s paralyzed himself by shaping a box where he refuses to compromise on a single detail of his work. That doesn’t appear to make the young man happy; he seems miserable. Adolfo struggles when given opportunities to communicate his vision and goes off on long tangents that lead nowhere. 

That’s the challenge of being an artist in any society. If your art becomes too personally intellectualized, then few can connect with it. Emotion and the human experience have to be a part of things. Even in something as abstract as a David Lynch picture, the filmmaker understands that human emotion links the art and the audience. Adolfo’s journey through the movie is to come to that understanding. You have to live life in some way; you have to connect with other people in order to make stories that communicate something meaningful. The movie never frames him as wrong for having a vision; he’s wrong for hiding himself away from the world. 

Beneath the surface is the obvious metaphor of commerce and art. You need money to get art out there to the largest number of eyes. Money is often obtained through unscrupulous means, which is troublesome for an artist who wants to live ethically. Thus, the great conflict of filmmaking in our modern capitalist realist era: How do you make art for the masses that doesn’t contribute to world exploitation? In the Soup isn’t going to provide that answer but it will explore the question through Adolfo’s comic experiences alongside Joe.