What's My Motivation: Ocean's Eleven (2001), dir. Steven Soderbergh
New format! How important are character motivations? How long can you go without having to reveal them?
Hey everyone! Sorry, I haven’t been around in a while. Welcome too to everyone who’s signed up in the time since my last post. I want to try out a new format that applies some of the approaches I’ve been discussing in my previous posts. In this format, I’ll be picking a movie from my recent watches (I see up to five movies a week) and discuss some of the narrative takeaways I later apply into my writing.
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If you’d also like to see more from me, consider taking a look at my most recent publication, entitled How to Write a Novel in Seven Years, now out on Code Lit. This piece is about my personal experience of trying to write a novel over an extended period, and draws from my obsession with incremental clicker games like Cookie Clicker.
Sometimes my writing will get a note that says something to the effect of, “The character’s motivations aren’t very clear to me here. I know what they want to do, but I don’t understand why they want to do it.” In this type of comment, there’s an implication that clear motivations will automatically lead to, if not increase the chances for reader sympathy. I don’t have to root for a sandwich stand owner who wants to take on the biggest business on the block, but if I find out that he’s doing it to pay for his son’s mounting hospital bills, then it’ll be easier for me to cheer him on.
But I don’t think that’s necessarily how it has to be. In today’s post, I want to do a case study on one film that shows you can hold off character motivations as long as possible and even prevent them from being the thing that compels your reader to go on. While revisiting Steven Soderbergh’s excellent Ocean’s Eleven (2001), I immediately realized how long it takes us to find out why the titular Ocean (of the Danny variety, played by George Clooney) wants to do the heist the entire film pivots around. I’ll start by breaking down the progression of sequences, noting roughly how much runtime has passed, and pick up my point from there.
The movie opens with Danny Ocean getting out of prison. Facing his parole committee, he is asked what he would do if he were to be released (roughly two minutes in). Then the film cuts to him breaking his parole by traveling from New Jersey to Los Angeles to meet with his first crew hire, Rusty (Brad Pitt; eleven and a half minutes).
Danny tells Rusty what he plans to do (18 minutes), and then they go on to recruit the rest of the gang (28.5 minutes). The crew meet up in Vegas and are given a briefing of the vault (33.5 minutes), then they are assigned to do reconnaissance and initial groundwork around the casinos (42 minutes).
At this point, we know that the vault at stake is owned by one person—Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia)—who is given his own character introduction (44.5 minutes). This introduction ends with Linus (Matt Damon) talking about Benedict’s partner, a museum curator named Tess (Julia Roberts), whom Rusty recognizes instantly (45 minutes). Half a minute later, Rusty tells Danny they need to talk, and by the start of minute 46, Danny admits that he has been planning the entire heist around this vault, because Benedict is the man to whom he has lost Tess, his ex-wife.
Forty-six minutes is a pretty astounding place to drop your character motivations considering the movie is about 110 minutes long. To scale it against a 200-page novel, that’s like learning why your main character is scamming his mother at page 84. It seems far away, and yet the movie is still totally compelling in spite of it. What are the things that Soderbergh employs to delay our need for motivation as long as possible?
First off, Soderbergh directs our attention to keep up with the action at hand. He never has Danny say outright that he is planning to do a heist, and he doesn’t let Danny waste any time agonizing over his actions either. In fact, the opening sequence moves at such an immediate, methodical pace that the viewer can start to guess what Danny might be up to. Soderbergh shows Danny meeting up with Frank (Bernie Mac) to find out that Rusty is in LA. Then Soderbergh shows Danny calling his parole officer to say he doesn’t plan to leave the state, and immediately has him boarding a plane just seconds later.
As a viewer, I’m so compelled by these contradictions to find out why he’s doing them in the first place. My immediate concern is to find out what Danny is up to, and by the time he actually starts talking about the heist, he tells Rusty (and by proxy, me the viewer) what’s materially at stake.
Interestingly, the second thing Soderbergh does to delay the need for motivational exposition is that he gives us two false answers. I held back mentioning that in the very first scene of the film, the parole committee asks Danny why he committed the first crime that got him convicted in the first place. And what’s clever about this moment is that Danny responds by saying, “My wife left me. I was upset. I got into a self-destructive pattern.”
Now although we’ll eventually learn that Danny’s ex-wife is the reason he’s gotten back into the business, Soderbergh writes a misdirection by having Danny qualify that he is unlikely to fall into the same pattern as his wife had “already left [him] once.” Taking this statement at face value, we might assume then that the behavior that follows is some kind of resurgence of that self-destructive behavior he alluded to. Of course, that’s probably not the case, and Soderbergh knows his audience is smart enough to detect that.
And so, Soderbergh inserts a second false motivation, this time demanded from someone he is much less inclined to lie to—Rusty. After Danny explains the intended mark 14 minutes into the movie, Rusty asks upfront why Danny wants to do the heist. He knows it’s not about the money, and Danny replies by telling him that after four years in jail, he wants to bet big and win. Rusty calls his answer out for being rehearsed, but accepts it anyway. We could read the motivation as being sufficient, or we, like Rusty, could realize that it doesn’t really matter.
And then Tess arrives. What I find interesting about this moment is that when Tess arrives, she doesn’t actually represent Danny’s motivation than she does represent a complication. The viewer has come to accept the heist as a compelling enough reason to follow the story, but Rusty suddenly realizes that Danny’s had an emotional reason to do it after all. He puts two and two together. Tess is familiar with Danny’s ways. If she suspects that something’s up, it may jeopardize the plan and send all eleven of them to prison. Now Rusty has to make sure that everything can go according to plan without their ringleader blowing their cover.
Ambiguity, as we all know, is one of the writer’s best friends. It makes for great endings, and it’s also useful in misdirecting the reader’s sense of a character. I think writers can keep character motivations ambiguous as long as they know what those motivations are and can keep their actions clear and compelling. If they’re up to something, clue that to the reader. Make your people interesting, but don’t tell your reader why. Not unless it makes things harder, that is.
Okay, that’s it for me this week. Catch up with y’all in two weeks, after I finish revisiting the Ocean’s trilogy and watch a whole buncha more movies!