Like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Soderbergh is a great director whose career is replete with Hollywood crowd-pleasers that also manage to satisfy the more fastidious tastes of art-house snobs. Presumably he makes them for the same reason Coppola does,which is to finance his riskier, more artistic projects, as well as prove a point that as a master craftsman he can take standard studio fare and elevate it into something richer. He usually succeeds—Soderbergh has crafted yet another understated gem in “Ocean’s Eleven”—but a cloud of disappointment hovers over the film in that it feels like he’s making a point he’s already made with “Out of Sight”, “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic”. How long must Soderbergh tread water by transforming paltry projects into surprising pleasures?

Because though “Ocean’s Eleven” is a pleasure, the core material is paltry. The story doesn’t have any holes, mind you, and a lot of the dialogue is sharp (if a little pat at times), but that’s only because the whole thing is not particularly daring, despite the unusually chancy robbery itself. The film keeps your attention, but only because of the collective starshine that blinds you from seeing the story as it really is. Consider the penultimate scene in the movie, which offers a good peek at the real poverty of the film’s story. After the heist has been pulled off, the eponymous crew gathers for a final triumphant look at the just-robbed Bellagio, and Soderbergh briefly shifts the tone from slickness to poignant lyricism in an effort to bring out the moment when this group of disparate individuals, who have come together and shared a few weeks of exhilarating cooperation in completing a nearly impossible task, must now part ways as quickly as they came together. Soderbergh is deft enough to handle such a moment; as with many of his films he magically opens a deep vein of emotion you didn’t think was there.

But that scene only punctuates a larger point. As we gaze at the beaming mugs of this motley gang of baby-faced con-artists and haggard scammers, the effects of the orchestral music and slow-motion footage become ironic because there’s no reason to feel the sentiments those effects are meant to evoke. We know nothing about these characters. It may not be necessary to “care about” every character in a movie, but here Soderbergh obviously wants his audience to respond emotionally to a scene that is all artistry and star power, containing little that is native to the script. A problem that plagues nearly all ensemble crime or action movies is that the event overshadows the characters, who are left one-dimensional at best. In a movie with a largely anonymous cast, characters are portrayed synecdochically: their personalities are reduced to a facial tic, or a pet phrase is repeated at various junctures. We rightly complain that these characters are not fully fleshed out. “Ocean’s Eleven”, suffers from the same malady, but, featuring what amounts to an all-star cast, everything works. That’s Elliot Gould! That’s Don Cheadle! That’s Brad Pitt! Meanwhile the unremarkable characters remain squarely nailed to the pages of the unremarkable script.

Still, there’s no denying that Soderbergh has worked his wizardry on “Ocean’s Eleven.” The movie may be a ragged orphan adopted and raised by glamorous royalty, but for most of its entertaining two hours you don’t really care. Clooney is his wonderfully cool self as Danny Ocean, though he’s beginning to get the Nicholson Syndrome (Clooney’s credits, no matter what sort of role he plays, should read “Starring George Clooney as Himself”). Julia Roberts gives Tess all the dignity of a princess, while Brad Pitt gives his character the weary air of a man who only really enjoys life when he’s pretending to be someone else. Garcia’s Terry Benedict is neither as slimy or vain as the script requires him to be, but his steely composure and slit-eyed menace work much better than more typical doses of villainous histrionics. He might come up on the short end of the robbery, but his threats are anything but idle, as we find out in the film’s last shot. The supporting cast is superb, needless to say, as actors like Matt Damon, Elliot Gould, Carl Reiner, and Don Cheadle were brought in to enliven their underwritten parts (even though Cheadle has apparently studied at the same school for British accents whose infamous alumni include Messrs. Reeves and Costner). The only surprise here is that Casey Affleck and Scott Caan steal the show as a duo of shamelessly puerile but reliable con-artists.

The real star, though, is Soderbergh. After last year, movie audiences outside of New York and Los Angeles can hear the phrase “a Steven Soderbergh film” and consider it an automatic green light to throw down their eight bucks, and he deserves that status. His narrative style achieves a look that is effortlessly fluid and yet full of splendid static images, and his trademark quirks, including the use of split-screen and “revising” flashbacks (that is, a previous scene presented from a different angle and conveying different information), never disrupt the story. He is skilled at creating subtexts, as in the placing of the different characters at dinner when Danny first makes contact with Tess. He likes to employ subtle visual themes, and picking them out in his films is always enjoyable; in “Ocean’s Eleven” he uses close-ups of the backs of two characters to frame a third character whose situation he wants to underscore, as when Danny is in the “torture” cell in the Bellagio or when Rubin (Gould) meets with Danny and Rusty (Pitt). The cinematography is luscious and vibrant.

What I like best about Soderbergh’s movies is that he always uses the mundane or the commonplace to puncture fanciful movie conventions, which generates satisfying, low-key comedy while allowing an audience (which is, after all, likely to be of the mundane or commonplace variety) to become more engaged with the characters. So Yen, the acrobat, performs his task in a bandage after someone slams a van door on his fingers, or Danny can’t get some explosives to work because his batteries are old, or the tech geek gets lost after doing one part of the job because the sweat ruins the map drawn in ink on his palm, and so on. Most heist movies try and wow their viewers by seeming to give them a “privileged” glimpse at a highly technical, almost swashbuckling profession, but Soderbergh’s slices of the criminal life prove much cannier in making out their protagonists to be as blue-collar as bricklayers. Hence the reason his films are often described as smart: they respect the intelligence of the audience inasmuch as they openly address the small-change issues that often prove costly to weaker action movies that ignore them. Soderbergh is far from the first to do that—David Mamet tries something similar in “Heist”, to name only a recent example—but he’s probably the best.