I’ve never been asked to review an app before. My area of (questionable) expertise is film and television, and while Steven Soderbergh’s “Mosaic” probably qualifies as both, in its purest form it’s simply an app. Henceforth: my first app review.
When “Mosaic” was first announced, there was talk of it being the first mainstream “choose-your-own-adventure” television series; “choose-your-own-adventure” implying that the viewer could arrive at one of several distinct endings based on decisions that they would make as they watched the show. Soderbergh and HBO rushed to clarify that no, “Mosaic” was not in fact a “choose-your-own-adventure.” Rather, the viewer could simply choose to follow one character or another as the narrative pushed forth toward a single, set conclusion.
This is in line with Soderbergh’s brand of innovation, which is to say: he is clearly compelled to explore the limits of traditional film and TV distribution, but has yet to present his audience with a truly new model for film/TV consumption. Take last year’s “Logan Lucky,” or the upcoming “Unsane,” for example. Both were touted as particularly innovative projects—the former for its (failed) social media marketing gambit, and the second for being shot on an iPhone.
None of this is to criticize Soderbergh, who belongs to the uppermost echelon of brilliant contemporary auteurs. No, the problem here is with the discourse around Soderbergh’s work. It’s not enough that he regularly produces film and television of stunning quality, or that he’s one of the hardest working dudes in the biz — he must be a genius technological innovator as well. This sentiment inevitably leads to a feeling of mild disappointment when his latest piece of work is simply a masterpiece, not an innovative masterpiece (true of “Logan Lucky,” and presumably of “Unsane” as well).
This brings me to “Mosaic,” which, like Soderbergh’s other recent projects, is less innovative than you may have heard. Here’s how it works: you open up the “Mosaic” app — it’s available on desktop now as well — and are presented with what is the first chapter in the series. It is called “Meet Olivia Lake,” and is told from the perspective of Olivia Lake, a famous children’s book author played by Sharon Stone. In it, Olivia makes the acquaintance of con-man Eric Neill (Fred Weller); she falls for his charms, he has ulterior motives.
Upon completing “Meet Olivia Lake,” you are presented with the option of continuing the story from Neill’s perspective, or switching over to the perspective of Joel Hurley, the mysterious, bearded bartender who lives with Olivia for some reason. Joel is played by Garrett Hedlund, so you will probably opt to go with Joel. After each chapter, you have the option of going down one path or another, until a given story path expires. There is only about seven hours of content total, so the story paths cross often and have little impact on how the overall narrative plays out.
Regardless of the order you choose to watch them in, you’ll want to watch all the individual chapters to get a complete sense of the story. What Soderbergh has essentially done is present us with a movie, and given us the option to just skip around past certain characters that we dislike. You can get to the ending without ever seeing an “Eric” chapter, for instance. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should—you’ll be missing key plot points if you ignore even one distinct chapter.
The other cool thing the app does is called “discoveries.” Periodically throughout each chapter, you’ll have the option to leave the primary narrative to watch a short video or scroll through a PDF document. These videos and documents typically have something to do with the onscreen events — it might be a quick scene from the perspective of a tertiary character, or a series of emails shedding light on events that happened years before the series began. It’s a cool concept, but rarely makes a serious impact on the show’s narrative.
On to the series itself: “Mosaic” is a modern murder mystery. It jumps around in time, before and after the central death, dropping hints as to who the murderer could be as it goes. At various points, we have the option of taking the perspective of Olivia, Eric, Joel, Eric’s sister Petra (Jennifer Ferrin), and local cop Nate (Devin Ratray). And it is excellent.
Its excellence begins in its performances, which are, every last one of them, exceptional. For all of Soderbergh’s monumental technical skill, perhaps his greatest gift as a director is his ability to get layered, naturalistic performances out of his actors and make it look so easy. To start with, Sharon Stone is in rare form as Olivia Lake, a troubled one-hit-wonder with an unhealthy habit of sleeping with much younger men. She has less total screen time than some of the other players, yet her performance is what grounds the entire series; she sets the tone perfectly.
Garrett Hedlund does some of the best work of his career as Joel, in what is the series’ largest performance. Joel develops some mental instability as the series progresses, and while Hedlund portrays that nicely, he holds back just enough to keep the character real. Joel’s story becomes a lot scarier and more engaging as a result. On the other hand we have Fred Weller as Eric, a much more external character, prone to bouts of wild shouting, who we are meant to suspect is the killer from moment one. Bottom line: Weller has an unnaturally scary face, and it works well here. (Even in warm lighting, dude looks like a cannibal muppet.) He was born to play a falsely-accused murder convict.
Aside from Stone herself, the real “Mosaic” MVP is Devin Ratray. As the series progresses, Ratray’s Nate slowly but surely becomes the real hero of “Mosaic.” Ratray reminds me here of Colin Hanks in the first season of “Fargo,” playing a fundamentally decent cop pursuing the truth against all odds. Now, “Mosaic” is ultimately a much more cynical show than “Fargo” turned out to be, and so the “truth” that Ratray arrives at is immediately called into question. Be that as it may, it’s no easy feat playing a truly “good,” everyday sort of guy. Especially not a cop, especially not in 2018. Add to that the fact that Ratray is not the sort of guy who generally gets cast as the hero on a prestige drama (his most recent role was that of a likely-schizophrenic squatter on Amazon’s “The Tick”), and what Ratray does with the role becomes all the more impressive. I’d love to see him become a Soderbergh mainstay, or otherwise go on to be cast as a lead in future projects, instead of a wacky tertiary character.
And there’s a secondary performance that deserves a special shout-out: Jeremy Bobb as Joel’s buddy Frank. You may remember Bobb as the sleazy administrator on Soderbergh’s “The Knick”; he gave one of that show’s stealthily greatest performances. He’s equally good here, playing a character of equal squirreliness. Bobb is a uniquely dynamic screen presence, and is quickly becoming one of the most essential character actors of our time.
The one performance that suffers is Ferrin’s, as Petra Neill, but it’s no fault of her own. Unfortunately, the show is at its weakest whenever it leans on the procedural aspects of its story, and Petra bears the brunt of the Crazy Wall nonsense. The other characters do their fair share of investigating, sure, but their chapters are first and foremost about their subjective experience of events. Petra’s chapters are laser focused on the investigation, and unfortunately, she’s the least fleshed-out character. And while Ferrin is certainly as good at her job as the rest of the actors here, she can’t elevate the material beyond what it is.
And that brings me to the fundamental problem of “Mosaic:” it sets up a bunch of amazing pins, and only knocks maybe one or two of them down. The one, set ending is totally underwhelming, not least because it disregards all of the clues dropped in earlier chapters in favor of a conveniently out-of-nowhere solution. It’s an incredibly disappointing climax, considering how brilliant much of the early going is.
However, there is just enough brilliance in the early going of “Mosaic” to make up for the trudginess of the last few installments. I haven’t even touched on Soderbergh’s cinematography, which is stunning, and which he does himself. What makes the lensing especially notable is the ways Soderbergh conveys subjective, point-of-view filmmaking. One of the series’ best scenes takes place in a hotel corridor. It’s a confrontation between Joel and Nate, and if you watch every “Mosaic” story path, you will see this scene play out twice: once from Nate’s perspective, and once from Joel’s. It’s absolutely brilliant, and while we’ve seen work like this before, it’s never been done quite this thoroughly. Scenes like this one are what inspire internet-wide “Soderbergh as innovator” thinkpieces, and it’s hard to argue that they’re incorrect (although narrative innovation is distinct from technological innovation). The other seriously cool thing that Soderbergh is able to do with the individual perspectives is to show us different sides of various text-message conversations; watch one chapter and have no idea what Petra is texting or to whom, watch another and be illuminated.
I can’t believe that I’ve gotten this far without mentioning the hilarious fact that both “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” and Sylvester Stallone’s 2013 throwaway movie “Escape Plan” are very prominent plot points in Steven Soderbergh’s “Mosaic.” It’s amazing.
I maintain that “Mosaic” doesn’t live up to the “innovative” hype. Sure, you can pick and choose which chapters to watch and in what order, but is that so fundamentally different to a regular TV series? Soderbergh is constantly searching for new and interesting ways to present his material, and one day he’ll surely strike upon a genuine innovation which will knock all of our socks clean off. In the meantime, I’m satisfied to watch every movie or series, innovative or otherwise, that Soderbergh deems worthy of his time and effort. “Mosaic” might be a fairly straightforward viewing experience, but it’s a fairly straightforward viewing experience by Steven Soderbergh. And that’s all that really matters. [A-]