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Debbie Doebereiner, Dustin James Ashley, Misty Dawn Wilkins, Omar Cowan, Laurie Lee ... see more see more... , David Hubbard , Kyle Smith (II) , Decker Moody , Steve Deem , A. Paul Brooks Jr. , Daniel R. Christian , Ross Clegg , Terrence V. Williams II , Scott Smeeks , Leonora K. Hornbeck , Katherine Beaumier , Dawn Hall , Joyce Brookhart , Amanda Massey , Adam C. Anderson , Jeffrey R. Morris

Steven Soderbergh followed up his slick, star-studded sequel, Ocean's Twelve, with Bubble, a small-town drama about workers in a doll factory, played by a cast of unknowns. Martha (Debbie Doebereiner)... read more read more... seems to have acclimated herself to a very simple life. She works at the factory, where she eats lunch with a younger co-worker, Kyle (Dustin Ashley), and goes home to take care of her elderly father. Her routine is disrupted when an attractive young woman, Rose (Misty Wilkins), is hired at the factory to help them with the holiday rush. Rose soon tells the others that she's eager to leave their town, where there is "nothing to do." She immediately attracts Kyle's attention. One night, Rose asks Martha to baby-sit for her two-year-old daughter while she goes out on a date. Martha is startled to learn that her date is with Kyle. When Rose returns home that night, she's greeted by her angry ex-boyfriend, Jake (K. Smith), who accuses her of stealing from him. Martha looks on while Rose and Jake have a heated confrontation. The next morning, one of the characters is found murdered, and a detective (played by Decker Moody) begins to investigate. Bubble was written by Coleman Hough, who also scripted Soderbergh's Full Frontal. It was shown at the 2005 New York Film Festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi

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102 critics

R, 1 hr. 13 min.

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

Release Date: January 27, 2006

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DVD Release Date: January 31, 2006

Stats: 493 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (493)

  • stevenecarrier
    March 19, 2011
    stevenecarrier
    Where "Full Frontal" (also written by Coleman Hough) was Steven Soderbergh's ode to Polish meta-narrative and "Ocean's Twelve" was his valentine to Jean-Luc Godard, "Bubble" is Soderbergh's neorealism tribute. Employing non-actors (whom are all extremely potent) and filming in a ... read morereal, decaying Ohio town (a doll factory is at the center) Soderbergh proves how deadly the banal black holes of middle American can be in the 21st century. Watching as these people are ripped from their lives by impulsive crime (there is more going on here than just the murder for attentive viewers) is oddly harrowing. Steven Soderbergh has proved that he can deliver slick Hollywood entertainment like "Ocean's Eleven" and "Erin Brockovich" but it's the fact that he is able to pull off films like "Bubble" that prove he is a true filmmaker and artist. This is yet another truly unique Steven Soderbergh experience.
  • LorenzoVonMatterhorn
    June 18, 2010
    LorenzoVonMatterhorn
    "Another Steven Soderbergh Experience"

    Set against the backdrop of a decaying Midwestern town, a murder becomes the focal point of three people who work in a doll factory.

    REVIEW

    A hypnotic a... read morend haunting art film from director Steven Soderbergh, Bubble tells the story of three Ohio factory workers and the relationships that they share and fall into and out of. No description of the script or story, though, can hint at the amazingly simple, yet dark and fascinating portrait that Bubble displays of the three people's lives. It is expertly executed and performed, and it mesmerizes from start to finish. Cast with local non-actors (and at points filmed in their real-life homes), the acting is better than what one would expect from seasoned studio actors. Bubble stands apart from the crowd of other films that are out there. It may not be for everyone, but for any film buff that is interested in seeing a character study that is very different and original, it's definitely for you.
  • DrZeek
    May 18, 2009
    DrZeek
    Jesse: So your sayin' she's dead, not breathing anymore?
    Detective: That is correct.
    Jesse: Man...I got to make some calls.

    Director Stephen Sodebergh remains one of my favorite filmmakers because he manages to move back and forth between making high budget, entertaining flicks ... read morelike his Ocean's films and the low budget, experimental type films that he makes such as this one. Working with no-name actors, improvised dialog, and a simplistic premise, I could easily rate this lower because I have no desire to see it again and because it wont be an attractive film for everyone, but it is well made and I found myself very engaged in what was happening in this film, even if it is mostly just people talking for a little over an hour.

    The story is set somewhere in the midwest. A young man and an older woman carpool to work everyday at a doll factory. A new girl is hired on and makes friends with these people. About midway through, after a date with a co-worker, a twist occurs that gives this film a plot to follow through with.

    The plot is extremely straight forward with no real surprises, but the way this film is handled held my attention,. The actors are all pretty much improving their conversations, and a few mumbled deliveries aside, they do their parts well. The acoustic guitar score in various moments was also fitting. And Soderbergh's visual style pops in now and again.

    Its certainly not a film that everyone will enjoy, but I enjoyed it more than I though I would, and I give that credit to Soderbergh's craft.

    Detective: Well you seem to be passionate about your work...
  • MovieGeek13
    March 19, 2009
    MovieGeek13
    Strange, absorbing, hypnotic. It's not something I can talkabout; just something you have to see.
  • romy861
    October 27, 2008
    romy861
    This was really good - I was really impressed with how well the non-actors did in this. The whole thing had a very realistic feel to it, and while I acknowledge it would probably be a little slow and plodding for some people, I really enjoyed it. The one fault was that it was a ... read morelittle on the short side.
  • ceWEBrity
    October 6, 2007
    ceWEBrity
    Bubble earns its rating because as an experiment, it succeeds. The movie is cast entirely with unprofessionals and the dialogue is improvised and yet it still feels like one of the most believable films I've seen in a long time. Steven Soderbergh really pulled this one off.

    It'... read mores not the most fast-paced film in the world, but we continue to learn more and more about our characters as the narrative progresses, and in a character piece, that certainly doesn't hurt. At times the film seems to dwell on petty, unimportant things, but that is really just a reflection of these characters' lives; Martha is possibly one of the most pathetic characters I've ever seen. This entire movie is just flat-out depressing in that way - living in a small town is an emotional sinkhole, is what Bubble seems to say.

    Bubble's final offering, the murder mystery, offers a view of the effects of change on such an undisturbed atmosphere. The title of the film is appropriate simply because when that bubble pops, hell breaks loose (hell being a comparative term because this film's dramatics barely rise above a whisper).

    At only 73 minutes, Bubble is informative and fascinatingly different. I recommend it.
  • fb1142797643
    February 18, 2012
    fb1142797643
    The term "sleeper" was invented for movies like this. Steven Soderbergh, ever jumping between blockbusters and personal projects, directs this simple, small-town tale. The cast is entirely composed of first-time actors with no further film credits.

    Middle-aged, overweight Martha... read more and young, tall Kyle are unlikely friends who work together at an Ohio doll factory (the molding of rubber doll parts is fascinating to see, regardless of the story). After pretty Rose is added to the company's small staff, she and Kyle inevitably feel an attraction. Rose also has a daughter via an unstable ex-boyfriend. Relationships in this area seem to be a matter of convenience rather than choice -- these isolated people just don't have many options. But the characters are not as benignly bland as they appear to be, and emotional tensions lead to at least one surprising crime. A police detective enters to investigate and (relatively speaking) ends up giving the movie's best performance.

    The storytelling is conspicuously low-key, and the actors' untrained, wooden delivery actually helps the film -- these lost souls really do seem like sluggish, uneducated people stuck in humdrum lives. "Bubble" (the title's meaning eludes me) was shot on video, and its dialogue was reportedly improvised. Guided by Voices' Robert Pollard strums a guitar to supply a crude musical score -- he probably was improvising too. But don't be reluctant to try this mild little movie. It's better than you think.
  • gator681
    February 2, 2007
    gator681
    [font=Century Gothic]In "Bubble", Martha(Debbie Doebereiner) and Kyle(Dustin Ashley) are friends who work at a doll factory in Ohio near the West Virginia border. She is middle-aged, cares for her elderly father(Omar Cowan) and drives Kyle to his second job across the river in W... read moreest Virginia. Kyle is much younger and lives with his mother(Laurie Lee). In order to help with increased demand, Rose(Misty Wilkins), a single mother, is hired at the factory and soon befriends Kyle and Martha.[/font]
    [font=Century Gothic][/font]
    [font=Century Gothic]Directed by Steven Soderbergh, "Bubble" is a valiant attempt at neo-realism using nonprofessional actors but there is almost no story to speak of until desperation leads to something akin to a plot. However, the movie captures the economic and emotional depression of living in a small Midwestern town without amazingly being condescending. Most of the characters have a second job, but it is strange that business is booming; jobs are plentiful but people are not.[/font]
  • michaelneumann
    February 14, 2006
    michaelneumann
    [center][img]http://www.frenchspot.com/Holidays/Valentine/Heart/heart10.jpg[/img][/center]

    The world swelled with intense emotion this night. A kind of fizzle hissed at the edge of vision, glowing inwardly violet and fiery, focused. It might as well had been a hallucination of ... read moreeuphoria. The breathless violins often had that effect on him, dancing to his ears like merry fauns, crisply twisting the mind like soft-serve ice cream, letting the ice crystals settle neatly across his skin, every hair erect and listening. His heavy drags, thick as moleskin, seem to unfasten to loose, feathery sashes, as he danced with his instrument in hand in the middle of the room. The cellos of the next movement burrowed deep, far below the earth, and sprouted all around him in waves of D Minor. And then, he saw his companion, the woman with whom he'd share this magic affair.

    He loathed her. Greasy pigtails, deviled lipstick, fake tan. Who allows themselves to sass around with such sodding embroidery and an affray of color schemes? She was simply not suitable for public viewing any further.

    But, he confessed as the violins retorted, she had one thing going for her. Those twin suns, pocked within her skull full of useless jelly and spun in bristly blonde clumpiness. His mood rose in spite of her face, as the violas joined and sped gracefully like synchronized birds into red areas of his mind, beautiful and previously unexplored. Yes, yes, it was the refracting cadence in her eyes that distracted him most, in a good way. Those magnificent green discs, full of all life and mystery, glittering like fireworks during a victory parade, like gemstones cut by the great hands of God Himself with the sparkle of a hundred thousand karats. He was bonded by her silver gaze, pained by them, vulnerable. The movement evolved into flautists, slowly removing gravity from his mind, and he gasped. Starlight spoke through the window, glaring off her rouge-smathered cheeks and bathed the room in a whitewash of heaven. It must have been her eyes radiating magic, infecting the neighboring regions of her reptilious face, but he could think no more after that. Molecules seem to flit away like quivering flower petals, like windborne seeds instinctively flocking to follow the source of the nourishing light. He became less a man and more the kind of thing you discover at the nucleus of a song. The timbre, the crescendo, unrestrained elevation. How could one exhale? This was divinity.

    Dizzy, the man pawed through the air for leverage and at last caught the table, transfigured only momentarily as his senses reset. The sound, his sound, had deepened agin, to a solitary oboe, channeling energy into a slow change of tension. It warmed the corrugated steel, but not his leather heart. It was still the same, wretched, beastly girl-thing. Those prisms, he lamented. They are trapped within her wicked shell, like wrongly convicted angels banished to their own hell, or cuckoo clock creatures caught forever in the doorways of their dutiful cycle, leaving protrusions of flesh exposed to the world while courageously concealing unthinkable nightmares within. It was a crime for her to have them, both of them. Why their overpowering beauty hadn't burned and gnarled the rest of her flesh to a wispy pile of red cinder was beyond him. He would have concocted more evil images in his mind, but the strings walled to her defense.

    He stood there, dimming lightbulb swaying, a purging darkness tensing him. He continued to fend the bravery of the trumpets and their modulating brass friends, watching her eyebrows twitch like small black newts. Tiny sacks of perspiration formed glistening constellations on her forehead, connecting and slipping down her face, scooping the demon's mascara with it, rolling over her duct taped lips. Fear. Fear and heavy strings, slower this time, deeper, darker. Meaningful. Her gorgeous eyes grew more exalted as her brain wires siphoned more fear through the outermost layers of her skin. Almost pop-eyed, they were desperately reaching for him. They wanted to shoot out and be with him. He knew it, and he reciprocated their understanding, vacant of hubris. I will save you tonight, he thought, gently. I will take you with me.

    The appendages from the others seem to dully vibrate with the double-bass and pounding percussion, the piece drawing to a close. The man grabbed the smudged handle roughly, swinging a dark red orb to the floor. A cold finger, hanging brittlely on the wall, broke mysteriously from its nailed hand and landed on the table.. The snarling girl-thing flailed in her chain harness, pounding against the cold shed wall, pitching through her gag. He yanked the gas cable and revved the only musical instrument he possessed to a furious monotony, raising it above his head in reverence. It was his favorite way to end movements.
  • staindslaved
    March 13, 2012
    staindslaved
    Bubble was a great idea with fine execution that just didn't work. A film with unknown actors about just normal everyday people. An idea so droll and implausible that it seemed brilliant. Unfortunately that is not the case. I don't know if it failed because the fact that a mu... read morerder and hysterical memory loss are both kinda extreme plot elements in a film desperately trying to look as ordinary as everyday life or what...but it definitely fails as a film.

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Critic Reviews

Peter Rainer
October 14, 2006
Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

The local atmosphere, filmed on the Ohio-West Virginia border, is rigorously authentic and so is the cast, none of whose members have acted before. Full Review

James Berardinelli
February 16, 2006
James Berardinelli, ReelViews

There's an honesty in what Soderbergh's camera has captured that, while not real in the strictest sense of the term, is nevertheless true-to-life. Full Review

Roger Moore
February 10, 2006
Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

It's not really interesting enough to warrant a regular run. But it's worth a one-shot 73-minute outing on the program of your local festival. Full Review

Andrew Sarris
February 8, 2006
Andrew Sarris, New York Observer

These conversations are about as deadly dull as any dialogue I've ever heard even in the earliest talkies. Full Review

David Denby
February 7, 2006
David Denby, New Yorker

Soderbergh's use of the new technology makes this situation work.

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie
February 4, 2006
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Soderbergh holds up a mirror to these lives of quiet desperation and shows us how unquiet they can be. Full Review

Ruthe Stein
January 27, 2006
Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle

Proves that in the hands of a director with an artist's eye for telling details, a wholly original story revealing the complexity and, yes, bizarreness of human nature trumps star power every time. Full Review

Stephen Whitty
January 27, 2006
Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger

The plot isn't really more than a situation, with a few vaguely condescended-to characters who shuffle about wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Full Review

Lou Lumenick
January 27, 2006
Lou Lumenick, New York Post

A deadpan commentary on the emptiness of middle-American life, and Soderbergh manages to pull this off without condescending to the characters.

Bruce Westbrook
January 27, 2006
Bruce Westbrook, Houston Chronicle

A simple yet oddly profound tale of banal blue-collar lives shattered by an impulsive crime. Full Review

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