Although not as highly regarded or remembered as his other films, King of the Hill is nonetheless one of Soderbergh’s best: a painterly, thoughtful, and subtly emotional portrait of preadolescent coming of age in dire circumstances. Beautifully adapted by Soderbergh himself from novelist and playwright A.E. Hotchner’s 1972 memoir about growing up poor and often alone in the slums of St. Louis during the Depression, the film centers on Aaron (Jesse Bradford), a resourceful eighth grader who navigates the difficulties of life with a vivid imagination and a fabulist’s sensibility. He lives in the dreary, run-down Empire Hotel with his father (Jeroen Krabbé), a infrequently employed salesman who is constantly waiting for a job with a watch company; his mother (Lisa Eichhorn), who suffers from tuberculosis; and his rabble-rousing little brother Sullivan (Cameron Boyd).

Over the course of the film, Aaron’s family is slowly stripped away from him. First Sullivan is sent to live with an uncle out of town so that the family can save a dollar a week, then his mother goes to live in a sanitarium, and finally his father gets the coveted watch company position, which immediately sends him out on the road. Thus, for the latter half of the film, Aaron finds himself living completely alone and isolated, subsisting on a steady diet of cheap dinner roles while constantly dodging the owners of the hotel lest they lock him out of his room for nonpayment of the rent. Aaron’s isolation is palpable, and the emotional intensity it generates is one of the film’s most powerful currents.

Through Bradford’s sensitive, thoughtful performance and Soderbergh’s perceptive direction, we feel Aaron’s intense aloneness, which is often never so acute as when he is surrounded by others who can’t (or won’t) understand him. This is particularly true of his schoolmates, most of whom come from wealthy (or at least solidly middle-class) families and are unaware of the poverty in which Aaron lives. Although he befriends some of them and is pursued by the prettiest girl in class (played by a young Katherine Heigl), Aaron’s difference from them is bound to get in the way, which it does at a graduation party in which his extraordinary tall tales and ill-fitting clothing finally give him away. The pain of his embarrassment is heart-breaking.

True to the memoir, Soderbergh populates Aaron’s world with a curious collection of secondary characters who move in and out of his life. He is aided at various points by Lester (Adrien Brody), a cunning young resident of the hotel who also has a sick mother, and Mr. Mungo (Spalding Gray), a dapper older man who lives across the hall and presents himself as if he is still in possession of the wealth he has clearly lost. On the other end of the spectrum, he is impeded constantly by both a portly patrolman (John McConnell) who takes special, sadistic delight in tormenting the neighborhood children, and Ben (Joseph Chrest), the hotel’s grungy, match-chomping bellhop whose greatest delight is locking people out of their rooms and confiscating their belongings. At school, his teacher, Miss Mathey (Karen Allen), protects him by accepting his lies about where he lives at face value even though she knows otherwise. She clearly recognizes that he is a smart, inventive kid with a potentially bright future and that he doesn’t have anyone else looking out for him.

Working with cinematographer Elliot Davis (the first of their four collaborations in the 1990s), Soderbergh made King of the Hill one of his most visually rich films. Shot on a relatively low budget, the film nevertheless has a warm, painterly palette, inspired largely by the works of Edward Hopper (the color scheme is heavy on burnished amber tones and heavy maroons; there is rarely a primary color to be seen, except when a shocking pool of blood begins seeping from underneath a doorway). Especially given his first two films, which were emotionally chilly and fundamentally downbeat, it was surprising to both critics and audiences that Soderbergh would make a film of such emotional and visual warmth. This is not to say that the film skirts the ugly realities of true poverty and emotional devastation, but rather that the narrative’s harder edges are balanced with a sense of humanity that leaves us with a sense of hope and admiration, the lasting idea being that Aaron, despite the hardships he suffers, will endure and perhaps even blossom.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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