‘Full Circle’ Review: Claire Danes and Zazie Beetz in Steven Soderbergh’s Mixed-Bag Max Series

With the presumptive demise of physical media, there’s nothing I’m going to miss quite so much as DVD commentary tracks. It’s less the banal puffery and hagiographic nostalgia of 95 percent of them and more the occasional recording on which somebody would unload with two hours of candor, whether it’s Ben Affleck talking Armageddon or the delicate dance performed by Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Hobbs discussing The Limey.

That Limey commentary track is a spectacular illustration of how great movies can still be made even if two key creative forces aren’t on the same page regarding much of anything. It’s also a reminder of how often the things that Soderbergh does behind the camera aren’t always aligned with whatever might have been the initial goals of whoever wrote the screenplay — and nor need they be, necessarily.

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Soderbergh and writer Ed Solomon have what appears to be a solid partnership, including the largely forgotten experimental HBO series Mosaic and the intriguingly convoluted HBO Max feature No Sudden Move. Solomon and Soderbergh’s latest collaboration, the star-studded Max six-parter Full Circle, is more convoluted than experimental and it definitely feels like an example of a project in which the things that interest one principal aren’t a priority for the other.

A kidnapping thriller — the shades of Kurosawa’s High and Low are many — with international implications, Full Circle is an odd show. Soderbergh’s virtuosity behind the camera keeps the series compelling and you can frequently spot the elements that made Solomon want to tell this story in the first place. But in terms of the unifying values you might hope for given the series’ title and its myriad top-shelf names? Well, the storylines may come together, but Full Circle does not.

Written entirely by Solomon and directed entirely by Soderbergh, the show offers a three-pronged narrative.

We begin in Guyana, with the introduction of Xavier (Sheyi Cole) and Louis (Gerald Jones), teens looking for passage to the United States, where they’re hoping to join Louis’ sister Natalia (Adia) in Queens. Natalia is a massage therapist and acupuncturist whose clients include local Guyanese kingpin Savitri Mahabir (CCH Pounder).

Mahabir is preparing for a kidnapping that involves the teenage son (Ethan Stoddard’s Jared) of Sam (Claire Danes) and Derek (Timothy Olyphant), the creative forces behind the lucrative culinary brand fronted by Sam’s father Jeffrey (Dennis Quaid, with a grotesque ponytail).

The kidnapping, orchestrated by Mahabir’s nephew and Natalia’s fiance Aked (Jharrel Jerome), goes wrong and intersects with a pre-existing investigation conducted by the U.S. Postal Inspector Service. Agent Harmony (Zazie Beetz) wants in on the case, but she has psychological issues, making her boss, Manny Broward (Jim Gaffigan), hesitant to hand over the responsibilities. That’s too bad, because Agent Harmony has a Sherlockian understanding of human nature, if a limited understanding of her own nature.

As is inevitable in shows like this — and as you might expect from a show with this title — everything and everybody in Full Circle is connected and everything and everybody in Full Circle is connected to events from 20 years ago. Are the misadventures in the present day the result of decades of interlocking secrets and bad choices, or is there a curse in play? Or are all curses, no matter how spiritually convincing, just the result of bad choices come full circle? Well, duh.

Plot-wise, Full Circle is ungainly. There’s probably only enough story for a two-hour movie. But there’s some cleverness to the way Solomon makes sure that the devices he’ll need to push the story forward are introduced early, and elegance to the way he and Soderbergh pay them off.

For a show in which characters are constantly being shocked by what they’re learning, none of those surprises carry over to the audience. When the finale rolls around, there’s no way to tie everything together without bushels of exposition, delivered gamely by Danes and Beetz. The last thing that “happens” in the series comes with maybe 45 minutes to go and then it’s just everybody talking through things that either viewers will have figured out already or that viewers weren’t given enough information to deduce.

It’s here that Solomon benefits from Soderbergh’s ability to charge along almost blithely through the gaps in the written storytelling. Full Circle delivers the sort of visual alchemy that fans expect from the “pairing” of Soderbergh and his pseudonymous cinematographer Peter Andrews — kinetic tracking shots, alienating positioning of the camera and a dazzling use of natural light that can leave you almost literally in the dark for long stretches before revealing the close-up or tableau that justified the entire set-up in the first place.

This results in a series that feels like it’s in constant motion, even if that motion turns out to be, intentionally or otherwise, going around in circles. It’s intimate, conveys a strong sense of place and, when that exposition-heavy finale comes around, darned if there isn’t some emotional resonance by the end.

I didn’t expect the conclusion to feel as potent as it does because, all along, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that Soderbergh’s aesthetic and prioritizing of momentum were steamrolling the things that probably most piqued Solomon’s curiosity. Why put this story within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Postal Inspector Service? I haven’t the faintest. Why put the targeted upper-crust family within the culinary celebrity world? No clue.

Full Circle has multiple credited creative consultants and some of them must have been there to give authenticity to the Guyanese piece of the puzzle, but instead it’s just a whisper. The “Why Guyana?” question boils down to something like “Because it’s a place rich Americans believe they can exploit and never think of again,” a provocative answer that’s insufficiently explored from the Guyanese side.

That there is this Guyanese enclave in Queens, that it comes complete with business and crime syndicates butting heads with the city’s other immigrant communities, that it has religious practices that are familiar yet foreign to most Americans — these are fascinating facets for a really good ongoing series about the failures of the American Dream in 2023. And these are facets that get lost in the kidnapping and in philosophical noodling about circles that nobody can deliver convincingly.

Did Soderbergh and his alter ego craftsmen trim some of the nuance in favor of pushing the plot forward or did they push the plot forward to cover for the lack of nuance? Who knows?

People will be drawn to Full Circle by the big stars and they’re mostly solid. Beetz makes Agent Harmony a character I would happily follow to another series — impossibly smart, consistently funny on a level nothing else in the show tries to match and unable to resist her own damage. The perfect match for Agent Harmony might be Natasha Lyonne’s Poker Face character, but Beetz is also great with Gaffigan, playing well against type.

Danes is tightly wound in a way that’s effective if never revelatory, resisting the sort of lachrymose collapse you suspect is inevitable. There’s fun in watching Olyphant, one of our great decisive performers, playing a guy who never quite knows what to do, but suspects everything is his fault.

I’m truly not sure what Quaid is playing and I’m not going to spoil my two favorite supporting performances, a pair of truly delightful nods to my favorite early Solomon projects.

The real Full Circle standouts are on the Guyanese side and not the big names in Jerome and Pounder, both doing their best work wordlessly with underwritten characters. No, the stars of the show are Cole, Adia and especially Jones, who make their parts raw and believable.

They would be the focus of a great show. They’re not the focus of Full Circle, which ultimately either has trouble getting out of its own way or is determined to swerve away from its best elements. How Soderbergh and Solomon’s collaboration came to be this and not something better — or worse — would make for a great commentary track.