I suppose I should warn the unwary that "Bubble" is a low-budget, low-keyed film that was made using nonprofessional actors. Some great European films have been made with nonprofessional casts—Robert Bresson's "Au hasard Balthazar" (1966) and Luchino Visconti's "La Terra trema" (1948) come to mind—but I can't think of anything comparable in the English-speaking world. However, I found the performances in "Bubble" quite convincing.
Soderbergh shot his movie in and around Belpre, Ohio, which appeared to me to be a blue-collar town. Belpre is on the Ohio River and is connected via bridge to the much larger Parkersburg, West Virginia. The actors were recruited from the people living in the Belpre-Parkersburg area.
To my way of thinking, "Bubble" has a fairly strong narrative drive. However, watching the story unfold is what made the film so enthralling to me, and I don't want to spoil things for others by revealing too much. Nevertheless, I'll try to give some idea of the movie's flavor.
Martha is an overweight 40-something woman who has a job, takes care of her elderly father and attends church. Over at the doll factory where she is employed, she has a work buddy—Kyle, a shy young man of about 20. Then one day at the factory, the boss introduces a new employee—an attractive young single mom named Rose—and the situation quickly gets sticky.
Auditions for "Bubble" consisted of interviewing local people, and parts of three of those interviews are on the DVD. Debbie Doebereiner, who plays Martha, states she worked for 24 years for Kentucky Fried Chicken, starting out as a drive-thru cashier and ending up as a restaurant general manager. Dustin Ashley, who portrays Kyle, says he is 19 and works for a pizza company. Misty Wilkins, who plays Rose, describes herself as the mother of four children, ages 4 through 10. Elsewhere on the DVD, she says she normally works as a hair stylist. I found it very interesting to get a little more information about the nonprofessional actors who appear in the movie.
I would say the director's audio commentary track on the DVD is well above average. In it Soderbergh is asked questions by Mark Romanek, who is best known as the writer-director of "One Hour Photo." Lots of the discussion is about working with a nonprofessional cast, and Soderbergh says that before each scene he told the actors what points he wanted covered and left it up to them to improvise the dialogue from there. Also, there's quite a bit on the commentary track about shooting in high definition digital video. In that connection, I should mention that Soderbergh functioned as his own cinematographer, and he's credited under the pseudonym Peter Andrews.
There's an 11-minute featurette on the DVD titled "Bursting the Bubble: The Real Lives of the Actors" that focuses on the three principal actors, but the part of it that was more interesting to me was to see and hear from screenwriter Coleman Hough. She says she initially wrote a barebones script, then after she got to know the actors incorporated things she learned about their lives into the backstories of the characters they portrayed. That made it easier for the nonprofessional cast to stay in character and improvise their lines.
Other bonus materials on the DVD include an audio commentary by the three principal actors, a 10-minute interview with Soderbergh and a six-minute deleted scene with an alternate ending.
"Bubble" got a lot of news media coverage because it was released in theaters and shown on pay TV on the same day, and the DVD I'm reviewing here was released only four days later. It seems to me this strategy may make sense for low-budget films that are difficult to sell to mainstream moviegoers, but we're unlikely to see it used for any movie that has a reasonable chance of generating a few million dollars in box office revenue. In any case, I think "Bubble" is an excellent film, and if you like offbeat fare, I recommend you see it any way you can.
On the next page, I've given all the details for the "Bubble" DVD.
