There’s Truth in the Fine Details : ‘Sex, lies and videotape,’ and ‘The Abyss’ prove once again that little things mean a lot

Details, details. God and the devil are supposedly lurking in them, depending on your source. In movies, details filter to us through speech that sounds real--or not--and makes sense--or doesn’t--and through particulars of place that make us feel that this Lower East Side flat or that floating space station are inhabited , not simply designed.

Details can heighten great moments or blight them for us; they can seduce us into following a character anywhere with a sense of absolute trust, or cut off growing empathy with a guffaw at exactly the wrong moment.

Money spent is no guarantee that the details will ring true. “The Abyss” seems to have spared almost nothing on its shimmering undersea netherworld technology, but it overlooked common sense in some of its details, and it ignored dumbness in its dialogue. Like many another beauty before it, you can watch it enraptured, but as soon as it starts to talk, it’s done for.

At the other extreme of the production spectrum, the independently made “sex, lies and videotape” is built from nicely observed details, not vast sweeping ones. It’s a film with the feeling of first-hand experience, transmitted in details that pick out these characters as unerringly as a circus knife thrower.

In “The Abyss,” writer-director James Cameron has made a beautiful-looking technologically obsessed inspirational thriller that can probably fake out 92% of its audience with its jargon. More than a few of us may not know about the world of submersibles, about High-Pressure Nervous Syndrome, or hyperbaric drilling platforms. That’s OK. Cameron writes with such fanatic, humorless authority and directs with such full-throttle intensity that we’re inclined to take his word for almost everything we see.

So, you can stop a pair of heavy steel, hydraulically controlled doors with one heavy, well-placed gold wedding ring, finger attached. Granted that in terms of this story, this is already one of the world’s most hyper-symbolic rings; nevertheless, common sense says that a trick like this is an invitation to the nickname “Three Fingers” the rest of your life. Nope. As several thousands pounds of water batter Ed Harris and the jawlike steel doors, his ring alone holds until help arrives. OK, it’s a tricky gimmick but this is movie magic; we’re still game.

Even after “The Abyss’ ” most jaw-dropping scene, we’re loyal. That would be watching a white rat struggle frantically as it fights against drowning in liquid fluorocarbon until, we’re told, it has adjusted to using this pinkish liquid in place of air. (Cynics may think they see Rat 1 followed by Rat 2, but that is not the official studio explanation.). It’s not a sight to forget easily. And as it lingers, Cameron goes one “fact” over the top.

One of the film’s authority figures soothes Ed Harris’ Bud, who is as nervous as that rat about switching from breathing air to fluorocarbon, by telling him, “We all breathe liquid for nine months, Bud, your body will remember.”

“Breathing liquid” for nine months? Babies don’t breathe at all until that astonished moment after birth when that smack on their bottoms encourages them to cry and to breathe for the first time.

Rats we may not be sure about. Humans we are. Gloriously cliche-ridden dialogue is one thing; a detail this wild can just snap your willingness to go along for this particular ride. It also makes you wonder about the platoons of experts assembled to work their collective magic on “The Abyss.” Was there not one valiant Emperor’s New Clothier among them, willing to step forward, to raise an eyebrow and say, “Wait just a minute here, has anyone really thought this through?” Pity.

If James Cameron’s cast is drenched to the skin throughout “The Abyss,” in “sex, lies and videotape” Steven Soderbergh’s modest five-person cast is drenched too, in an aura of sexuality. (It is a modest film, incidentally. There’s always the danger of backlash when a film of such intimate scale gathers the sort of hype that now surrounds “sex, lies,” after its triple crown at Cannes: best picture, actor and international critics’ prize.)

Soderbergh, its director, writer and editor, sets up details of character tersely and with lovely assurance. Think of the amount of information we absorb about this handsome Baton Rouge quartet within minutes of meeting them. And how relatively silkenly we learn it. We’ve discovered, off-handedly, a wife quite possibly sexually repressed, a husband quite definitely philandering, a self-admittedly impotent old college friend, and the wife’s desperately competitive, hell-for-leather sister. Much more is to come; this is only the overture.

Then, as we look beyond the big, clean close-ups, at the way these four live and dress and decorate their houses, at what they eat, drive and cannot do without, we begin to get clues about why they behave the way they do.

Younger sister Cynthia (the memorable Laura San Giacomo) has very nearly chosen to be the family’s wild one because her sister, “the beautiful Ann Bishop Millaney” (Cynthia’s lip-curling words, but also the truth) is as good as she is guileless. And so, if Ann (the beautiful Andie MacDowell) wears loose-fitting, Laura Ashley-ish smocks without a trace of sophistication to them, you can bet that Cynthia pours herself into tank tops and short, short skirts. And that her current choice in lovers is Ann’s randy husband John (Peter Gallagher.)

Though it’s never mentioned, and she holds down a job bartending, Cynthia may also be an artist. Her apartment is put together with an artist’s eye as well as a sensualist’s priorities--her sprawling, inviting bed dominates her bedroom. Over at the apartment of the mysterious visitor/catalyst Graham (James Spader, in that delicately calibrated, Cannes prize-winning performance), it’s significant that we never see his bedroom, although his video camera has recorded the bedroom sagas of every woman he’s encountered over the past few years. We have to grab clues to Graham’s psyche from the growing number of portraits he tacks up on his bulletin board, faces with some weathering to them, Samuel Beckett, Lillian Gish.

Black-Irish John may be too simplistically drawn for some tastes, too much the smug manipulator, deserving anything he gets, but we haven’t had a really sensual American heel in too long a time. And his gyrating, lusty scenes with Cynthia are marked with the kinds of private jokes--his gifts to her of plants, growing larger each time--that feel so real they’re like eavesdropping. (Even so, is there really a husband among the 30-somethings who can acknowledge a compliment to his wife’s cooking with a lordly, “Ann usually achieves critical mass with the salt, but tonight . . . “? Perhaps only in the South.)

And finally there is Ann, a true sleeping beauty. MacDowell’s performance is such a unfolding surprise. In memory, her performance seems to be a play of blushes sweeping over her face like light, as for the first time she begins to question her life. Mercifully, even in sequences like the one at her therapist’s, as questions of extreme intimacy come up, her attack is gravely, gently still. Even flustered, she doesn’t flutter and she doesn’t flute, but she is so delicately true. And as she and Graham, the master of revelation/concealment become friends, and then he begins to invade her thoughts, she seems to gather strength from somewhere, so that when, finally, his video camera is in her hands, there is a real person there, insisting upon the truth.

So Soderburgh’s assault on the duplicitous state of love and marriage, as he finds it, is a symphony of details. A few of them may be underlined a trifle heavily, as though to make sure we didn’t overlook anything, but that might be permissible in a director not yet 27 years old. What Soderburgh makes of his accumulated details is as funny, as sad, as subtle and as penetrating a portrait of his peers as we have any right to hope for.