Movie Review – sex, lies, and videotape

sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
Written and directed by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker I feel ambivalent about. Of his prolific filmography, I’ve seen sixteen of his movies, and I still don’t have a strong opinion about him. This is likely because his subject matter, themes, and tone are profoundly eclectic. The director seems quite at ease making crowd-pleasing Hollywood fare as much as he enjoys experimenting with technology and structure. Often, I have a sense of the filmmaker as a person from their work. Directors like Scorsese, Kubrick, and Altman conjure specific emotions and images for me. Soderbergh remains a blank, an enigma that exists outside of any definitions I can articulate.

In Soderbergh’s feature debut, he tells the story of three interlinked people through the three things in the title. Ann (Andie MacDowell) has lived in Baton Rouge all her life. She’s married to John (Peter Gallagher), a successful lawyer, and they are happy…ish. Ann has found herself repulsed when John touches her or tries to initiate sex but is unsure why. Graham (James Spader), a college friend of John’s, is passing through with plans on possibly putting down roots. Otherwise, he’s been a drifter for the last few years. The two men find that they don’t have anything in common anymore, yet Graham and Ann hit it off quite well. 

What Ann doesn’t know is that John has been having an affair with Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), her sister. He rationalized this choice, citing Cynthia’s free-wheeling temperament as more alluring than the frigidity he perceives in his wife. 

Ann’s initial warmth towards Graham is tempered when, while helping him move into an apartment, she discovers a box of camcorder videos labeled with women’s names. At first, she interprets these as recordings he’s made of himself with other women. However, Graham reveals these are interview sessions with women where he asks them intimate questions about their sex lives while never physically interacting with them. These recordings have been the only way Graham can experience sexual pleasure.

I had watched this once before over a decade ago, so apart from the basic plot and characters, I didn’t really remember much about it. It’s certainly not my favorite of Soderbergh’s films, but it’s not his worst either. Sex, lies, and videotapes was one of the films that propelled Miramax into prominence and you can see how it affected tons of small-scale indie dramas that were to come throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. The film feels like a stage play – four characters, a handful of sets, lots of dialogue – so it should be no surprise that it was adapted into one. I also feel like “James Spader as someone with a particular fetish” became a sub-sub-genre of independent film as a result, too.

This film won the Palme d’Or over Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which seems hugely questionable. However, the idea of films being ranked and giving out awards to the “best” ones has become a practice I’ve found less and less attractive as I get older. I understand it can affect the film’s reach to audiences that might otherwise not know of it, but Lee’s film has undoubtedly won out in the long run over Soderbergh’s debut in terms of continued recognition. Both are fantastic in their specific ways and are great freeze frames of a particular moment in life as it was in the late 1980s.

While the film centers around Spader’s sexual peccadilloes, Andi MacDowell’s performance is the standout element for me. MacDowell is a significantly underestimated actress who hasn’t always chosen or been cast in films that play to her particular strengths. I think my perception of her was a slightly airhead-y Southern gal, and sex, lies, and videotapes reminds us she’s capable of a lot more. I found her wholly authentic in her performance, giving nuance to a character type that has often existed as a caricature in most films. Her repulsion to sex with John is not played as a negative or the butt of a joke but as a genuine psychological/emotional issue surrounding social norms and personal preference.

The same could be said for Spader as Graham. The premise of him convincing so many women to open up about their sex lives and kinks sounds absurd on paper, but the way the film presents and develops the idea comes across as entirely believable. He doesn’t play Graham as a creep or weirdo but as a troubled man trying to keep these parts of himself hidden because he knows how others might perceive it. He cannot connect sexually with anyone in person, but what arouses him is a type of distant intimacy. He doesn’t do anything sexual during the interviews; he simply listens and asks follow-up questions. It is only by himself that he performs any sex acts while watching the tapes.

The three concepts in the title reveal something about the nature of people amid Reagan-era capitalism and the dawn of the digital age. Sex has become a means of delusional self-empowerment, a transactional act. Lies are aimed at others and towards ourselves to deny the reality of our actions. Videotape is an intersection between the two, a means to deceptively empower ourselves while perpetuating these lies. 

Ironically, it is only when John leaves the comfort of his life, fueled by the misconception that Ann has slept with Graham, that he is confronted with the truth through videotape. The videos exist as an escape for Graham, but when John forces himself inside and watches Ann’s tape, he comes up against the brick wall of reality. She says the things that have gone unspoken for so long and now can no longer be denied. 

Despite the title, very little about this film is sexy. The only people we see in physical, sexual situations are John and Cynthia, and even then, it’s either just before and they are still dressed or after the fact, as they are about to part ways. It’s a movie that feels strangely like intensive therapy in the way it plays out and the conversations people have. That shouldn’t work, but Soderbergh, all of 26 years old when he made this, delivers and keeps us captivated from start to finish. He even employs the technique of layering dialogue from an adjoining scene into the next as a form of transition and connecting the ideas of one scene to another. Its small budget shows occasionally, but that reminds us of how rich U.S. independent cinema once was. 

I recommend a watch if you’ve walked past this one if you have avoided it because of the title or your perceptions of it. It’s a movie for grown-ups without unnecessary tension-ruining quips or infantilization. Characters are introduced in one way, how they want to present themselves to the others, only to slowly recede from that and eventually reveal their true natures. It’s also a historically significant piece of cinema that shows how the independent film boom of the 1990s came about.