Once again, he shot the movie himself, and the result of this unusually up close and personal mode of directing is that his actors, even in their most tossed-off moments, come across with a vibrant immediacy that seems to emerge from the very grace notes of their personalities. Soderbergh, after the impassioned socio-domestic panorama of ”Traffic,” now goes in the opposite direction, crafting a cinematic layer cake of sheer sugar-high escapism. ”Ocean’s Eleven” has no pretenses, yet it’s a scrumptious and dizzy-spirited lark, a what-the-hell-let’s-rob-the-casino flick made with so much wit and brains and dazzle and virtuosity that the sheer speed and cleverness of the caper hits you like a shot of pure oxygen. He appears to be having the time of his life, and so does everyone in the cast so, I suspect, will the audience. In Ocean’s Eleven, the director, Steven Soderbergh, stages some of the cheekiest, and also the most elegantly complicated, tricks ever seen in a heist film, and he’s in such relaxed, exhilarated command of his medium that he barely works up a sweat.
