‘Full Circle’: Steven Soderbergh’s Max Series Is a Confounding Mystery
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Midway through Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller miniseries Full Circle, Sam Browne (Claire Danes) asks her brooding husband Derek (Timothy Olyphant), “Is there something else going on?” The query comes as the Brownes are dealing with a kidnap threat against their son, an apparent murder, and someone targeting the corporate empire that the couple runs on behalf of Sam’s celebrity chef father, Jeff McCusker (Dennis Quaid).
“You mean more than all this?” an incredulous Derek replies.
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So, yes, the Brownes are dealing with a lot. And Soderbergh and writer Ed Solomon are dealing with even more throughout Full Circle. It’s a sprawling, ambitious, but ultimately frustrating story filled with characters from across a wide spectrum of race, class, nationality, sexuality, and more. The title comes in part from the attempt by crime lord Savitri Mahabir (CCH Pounder) to deploy ritual magic from her native Guyana to break a curse against her family — magic that literally requires someone to draw a circle around the spot in a New York City park where the murder is meant to happen. But things of course go wrong with her plan, and the circle is both literally and spiritually broken. Mrs. Mahabir spends much of the season attempting to get everyone back inside the circle again. No spoilers as to whether she succeeds, but the creative team definitely has problems on that score.
This is Soderbergh’s third major collaboration with Solomon, following the 2021 film No Sudden Move and the 2018 HBO miniseries Mosaic. Each of them is inscrutable in different ways. Mosaic was originally released as an interactive mobile app; the more straightforward version that was edited together for television frequently felt like it was building to Choose Your Own Adventure moments that never came, though it at least had commanding work from Sharon Stone at the center. No Sudden Move got by on the sheer charisma of leads Don Cheadle and Benicio del Toro, not to mention Soderbergh’s facility with crime drama, but the story was gibberish; even the movie’s most vocal fans among Film Twitter struggled to explain to me why characters made various decisions toward the end of it.
Like those other projects, Full Circle does not lack for star power. In addition to Danes, Olyphant, Quaid, and Pounder, the cast includes Zazie Beetz and Jim Gaffigan as bickering colleagues within the U.S. Postal Service’s law-enforcement division(*), and When They See Us Emmy winner Jharrel Jerome(**) as Mahabir’s cruel nephew Aked. All are strong, and there are also solid performances from less-heralded actors Sheyi Cole, Gerald Jones, and Adia as a trio of Guyanese immigrants who quickly begin questioning whether they have made a devil’s bargain with the Mahabir clan.
(*) Gaffigan plays his part entirely straight, but I would not object to a comedic spinoff called Jim Gaffigan: Mail Cop.
(**) A good chunk of the cast is double-dipping with summer TV projects. Beetz was in the new season of Black Mirror, Jerome was just the star of Amazon’s I’m a Virgo, and Olyphant puts Raylan Givens’ Stetson back on later this month in Justified: City Primeval.
Beyond eliciting those performances, Soderbergh’s work behind the camera is reliable as ever. He keeps finding interesting ways to visually connect these characters who come from, and live in, such different worlds. And he brings in excellent collaborators like Zack Ryan, whose score evokes Bernard Herrmann’s work with Alfred Hitchcock.
Solomon’s script is less effective at showing how things are connected. At one point, Mahabir’s lieutenant, Garmen Harry (Phaldut Sharma), complains to her that every member of the crew knows a small part of her scheme, but nobody has been shown the big picture. Full Circle takes a similar approach for its audience, keeping various motives and schemes opaque for as long as possible. With that kind of plotting, you hope that the eventual reveal of what’s really been happening, and why, will enrich both what you’ve already watched and what’s to come. In this case, though, Solomon and Soderbergh wait so long to begin clarifying things that Beetz — who to this point has been having the most fun of anyone in the cast, playing the Postal Service equivalent of the renegade cop who plays by her own rules — has to repeatedly bring the story to a halt just so she can explain things. Even if you can fully grasp all these new details (and I confess that, as with No Sudden Move, I’m still scratching my head at parts of it), the sheer amount of exposition required at such a late phase of the series derails whatever emotional momentum was building. There is, for instance, a tense confrontation in a later episode between Sam and one of the men involved in the kidnapping plot. It takes what’s meant to be a powerful turn when she realizes exactly where this stranger came from in Guyana, and how this connects to her own past. But despite Danes’ best efforts, the moment doesn’t land because it’s still not entirely clear what Sam did.
Though Soderbergh’s understandably more famous for his movies, he’s had an impressive career in television, going back 20 years to K Street, a largely improvised HBO series mixing real-life Washington politicos with fictional characters played by the likes of John Slattery and Mary McCormack. And his Cinemax hospital drama The Knick is one of the great technical achievements in the medium’s history. It’s always an event when he has another show debut. But not all of them work. As a director who often doubles (under pseudonyms) as his own cinematographer and editor, he’s more equipped than the Brownes to handle multiple problems at once. But he can’t quite shape this Circle into something entirely worthy of all the talent contained within it.
The first two episodes of Full Circle are now streaming on Max, with two episodes dropping next week, and the final two on July 27. I’ve seen all six.
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