Jesse Bradford is Aaron, a smart, creative, generous high school kid who spins stories to hide the fact that his family is broke and living out of a hotel, where they are behind in the rent. To stay in his high school, a well-maintained school filled with affluent kids (Aaron is "a charity case," as one of his affluent classmates describes him), he and his kid brother Sullivan (Cameron Boyd) have to keep up the fiction that they reside in a nearby apartment house. His dad (Jeroen Krabbé) is a salesman hawking "wickless candles" that no one is buying while he waits for one of his many applications to pay off with a better job. Aaron picks up odd jobs as he can with the help of Lester (Adrian Brody in his first major role), an older kid who looks over Aaron like a big brother. Lester knows the angles and hustles his way to survival and his mentorship gives Aaron the skills and strength to survive when he's force to take care of himself.
By the time of King of the Hill, or at least looking back in hindsight, you can pick out a theme emerging from Soderbergh's film, specifically an interest in characters isolated from the world around them. Aaron is in fact an engaged and engaging boy, liked by his teacher (Karen Allen) and by the girls his age (including young Katherine Heigl) alike, but he keeps a distance from his schoolmates simply because he's of a different world and constantly spinning stories to cover the truth. His connections are back in his neighborhood, a busy, lively place slipping into poverty and desperation, and that's where his world falls apart. His mom (Lisa Eichhorn) is in failing health and is soon checked into a sanitarium to recover. Sullivan is sent to live with relatives (one less mouth to feed while money is practically non-existent) and dad all but abandons him to take a job as a traveling salesman in a territory that takes him out of state. Dad isn't heartless, he's simply desperate, but the upshot is Aaron left broke and alone in a hotel with no safety net (despite his dad's best efforts otherwise) and a mercenary bellhop who takes personal pleasure in locking out debtor guests and locking up their belongings in storage, his own personal treasure room in the basement.
King of the Hill rests on the shoulders of Jesse Bradford, who gives Aaron the strength, generosity, and intelligence to survive the increasingly dire situation. He keeps his eyes open and sees how the world works and Soderbergh keeps us to his perspective. When things are at their worst, with Aaron isolated and alone, a lone hold-out in siege against his fort, and getting delirious from lack of food, we share his hazy outlook. It's the scariest scene in a film that, despite the subject matter, offers a generally hopeful atmosphere and a young hero as self-possessed and resilient as Aaron. Soderbergh doesn't flinch from the hard realities he faces but presents it with a poetic quality, suggesting the worst rather than showing it, in an urban world painted in sepia colors and brightened by the summer sun (a little too sunny, perhaps, given the hard times it presents). With its mix of guardian angels, mercenary authority figures, eccentric neighbors, and colorful urban atmosphere, it's like a modern version of a thirties street drama painted in the colors of an Edward Hopper canvas.
King of the Hill works because largely because of Bradford's strength and Soderbergh's detail. Most of the film plays out in the hotel or on the streets just outside, where a fat, pig-eyed bully of a cop terrorizes the kids and rousts the hobos in the Hooverville camped out across the square. The gentle but not entirely reliable Mr. Mungo (Spalding Gray) across the hall is a Wall Street victim drinking away the last of his wealth with the help of a hardcase of a hooker (Elizabeth McGovern) running up the room service tab. There are plenty of little character sketches and adventures strewn through the film but Aaron's odyssey, a different kind of coming-of-age story, is the backbone and Soderbergh seems to reward his resilience (and our emotional investment in him) with a small triumph that nonetheless feels like a great victory. Mostly because Aaron and Sullivan do it themselves, with no help from any of the adults. It's Aaron's real graduation.
Criterion releases the film as a three-disc Blu-ray+DVD Combo and a two-disc DVD-only release, mastered from a 2K digital transfer from a Super 35mm interpositive approved by Soderbergh. The image is vibrant and sharp, with the colors both vivid and aged, a palette of browns and yellows and muted primary colors to suggest both yesteryear hues and the warm glow of memory.
Both editions feature the same wealth of supplements and accompanying booklet. There is a new 20-minute interview with director Steven Soderbergh, who has an affection for the film and had a very good relationship with Gramercy Picture during the production, but is more critical than one might expect. He praises his cast and production staff but is pretty hard on himself for many of his directorial choices. There is also a 22-minute interview with author A.E. Hotchner and the video essay "Against Tyranny" by filmmaker :: kogonada that explores the film's hallucination sequence.
The most unexpected supplement is Soderbergh's fourth feature The Underneath (1995), a remake of Criss Cross starring Peter Gallagher, Alison Elliott and William Fichtner. Which is, yes, yet another genre leap, this one a sleek, shadowy modern thriller with tone of nostalgia for old-Hollywood style. This one never really comes together but you can see him working out ideas that emerge fully formed in his later films Out of Sight and The Limey, and it effectively makes this release a double-feature. The booklet features an essay by critic Peter Tonguette, a 1993 interview with Soderbergh, and an excerpt from Hotchner's 1972 memoir.
by Sean Axmaker
