Film Friday: Ocean’s Thirteen (2007)

I should hate this film on so... many... levels. Half the actors are jerks. The writing is nonsense. The whole film is nothing but a product placement. Wow. I should be railing against this sucker. Yet, I really enjoy this film. This is one of those rare films where style trumps everything else. This isn’t a film, it’s an experience, and if you’re using your brain, then you’re doing it wrong.

Plot

Willy Bank (Al Pacino) is an evil man. He dominates the Vegas casino industry and he just cheated his partner, Reuben, who just happens to be good friends with Danny Ocean (George Clooney). This was wrong. See, Bank shook Sinatra’s hand, as did Reuben, and that means Bank broke the code by cheating Reuben. So Danny and his crew set out to bankrupt Bank’s new casino to set things right. From there, the film becomes a Rube Goldberg heist plan in which Ocean and the boys need to break Bank’s security, rig the games to cheat in favor of the guests at a specific time, and then get all the guests out of the casino before they lose the money back.

Why This Film Works

To understand why this film works, let me explain why the original Ocean’s 11 worked... not the Soderbergh remake, but the original 1960’s film staring Frank Sinatra. Ocean’s 11 worked because of a form of nostalgia. Ocean’s 11 is like an invite to spend time with the hippest cats America has ever produced... the Rat Pack. When you watch Ocean’s 11, you aren’t watching to see if they pull off the heist, nor are you watching for plot or to see the acting. No. You are watching to get a glimpse of Frank Sinatra playing around with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. You are watching to get a sense of what it was like to go to Vegas in 1960 and sit in the audience as all these guys showed up and clowned around for a couple hours right in front of you... these singers and comedians who advised presidents and ran with the mob, married the most eligible women of the era, stormed Hollywood on their own terms, and dominated the music world. These guys represent an entire era in American culture.

What does this have to do with Ocean’s Thirteen? Well, Ocean’s Thirteen is the second sequel to Ocean’s Eleven, which is a sort of remake of Ocean’s 11. Only, whereas Ocean’s Eleven really was never more than just a heist film that borrowed characters from Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Thirteen captures the spirit of Ocean’s 11.

Like Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Thirteen is entirely about the experience, not the story. It is about accessing a world you will never access on your own, no matter what you achieve in life. It is a world of casino whales and high rollers at a fantasy casino that is so ornate and stylized that it is the very essence of the image we have of “the casino experience,” an image that wasn’t true in the 1960’s when it was created and certainly isn’t true today. Indeed, nowhere in this film will you see slovenly tourists in Bermuda shorts placing one dollar bets in this casino. There are no rooms the size of closets and no employees who don’t speak English. The hotel staff here look like models or Hollywood butlers, not fat, lazy SEUI members. The guests are models dressed to the nines. The rooms are like mansions decorated by the best designers. Everywhere you look there are designer brands, premium alcohol, luxury cars, beautiful people.

Within this world you find yourself among a huge group of friends: Danny and Rusty and Linus and Reuben and Terry and the rest. And these aren’t like any friends you know. No, these people are all highly educated, clever, funny, beautiful, athletic... celebrities. They have amazing skills you can only dream of – gymnastics, computer hacking, super scheming, card sharping, etc. They are classy too, and they live by a code... a code of infinite loyalty, the kind of loyalty that makes you spend every penny of your millions of dollars to set right an insult made against one member of your crew. Even beyond that, they have amazing chemistry. In fact, they finish each other’s thoughts all the time and any one of them can completely screw up the entire plan without a hint of reproach from the others, because loyalty comes first and they never give up and never lose hope.

They have a good time too. In fact, despite the film being about a heist, it really isn’t. To the contrary, this film is about a chess match played against the ultimate fantasy casino for amazing stakes with no prospect that you will lose and played in a consequence free environment.

To put it simply, this is a fantasy world as much as if it had dragons... it is the American consumer vision of Heaven, and it lets you in completely. That’s why this film is so great. It offers you more and better friends than you’ve ever had, a playground you can never experience, and a game you can never really play in real life. It’s a hell of a ride.

What’s interesting to me is how the film builds this, because there are some fascinating little tricks that other writers should examine closely. First, to create the environment, the director essentially made a study of what works in the luxury advertisement world, and then he brought it to life. If you drive a Rolls, then hot chicks will get out of the car with you. If you drink Gray Goose, you will be rich and respected. If you wear the right clothes, you will be hip. This film takes all of American high-end consumerism and distills it to the images that appeal to us and injects them directly into your brain.

The friendships are interesting too because of how they’re built. First, no one has friends like this. Name one friend of yours who would throw away ten million dollars, everything they own, just to avenge an insult made to another of your friends. Moreover, no one has this many close friends. In fact, management studies have found that humans aren’t capable of monitoring more than about eight relationships with any level of attention, which is why companies don’t put people directly in charge of hundreds of people. Yet, here you are literally surrounded by dozens of loyal-to-the-death friends who are closer to you than any real life friend... these are people you’ve adventured with.

Even more interestingly, to give you the feeling that they are in fact close friends, the writer uses a dialog trick to make you believe there’s a long-time relationship there. Specifically, the writer has the characters speak “in their own language,” by having them reference things you don’t know, and has them constantly finishing each other’s sentences and thoughts, as people who are long-time friends often do. Just as interestingly, the writer starts each scene with one character telling the end of a story involving people the two characters know. Not enough information is given to tell you the story, but enough information is given for you to guess what they are talking about. For example, a character might say, “So I jumped out the window as her husband chased me,” which is enough to let you understand what happened even if you don’t know any of the actual details. What this does is it gives you the feeling that you are in on their relationship because you can understand what they are talking about even as you think other people couldn’t understand because it’s an insider story. In effect, they trick you into thinking that you share their special language, which makes you part of the relationship. This is actually pretty brilliant writing.

Finally, the film rushes all of this past you in a bombarding montage of sound, colors and stylized images, sometimes even being shown in split-screen images. Essentially, the film runs at such a quick pace that you never get a chance to focus on anything you are watching. Adding to this intentional confusion, the film shows a good deal in quick flashbacks, which keep you disoriented, and it often requires you to keep track of the dialog between cuts, as the last line in one scene becomes the first line in the next scene. The result is a film that keeps you from focusing on the plot itself and makes you just “live in the moment.”

Ultimately, this film works not because it’s a good film, but because it immerses you into an idealized, stylized world of intense friendship and camaraderie, unimagined wealth, and an impossibly-high party atmosphere, all wrapped up in a thick sense of adventure. That’s why this film works and that’s why the original Ocean’s 11 worked: because it sells you a trip into a fantasy world with friends you could never have in real life. And for a brief moment, you can be buddies with the coolest people on earth.