The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

[The following is a belated Blind Spots entry.]

The precision of Raymond Chandler’s prose is rendered almost sleepily in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, trading the laconic for the lethargic. “Rip van Winkle” is what the filmmaker termed his version of Chandler’s most iconic creation in reference to how Elliot Gould’s Marlowe is a 1953 detective carrying on according to his period as he roams the radically different America of 1973, yet the sobriquet could equally apply to how punch-drunk, confused and tired Gould plays the part. Chandler’s books may have been mysteries, but like the best of pulp fiction they were intensely focused. The Long Goodbye, on the other hand, ambles along in confusion, puncturing Marlowe’s hard-boiled competence as both the narrative and even the cinematography seem unable to focus on anything, much less the task at hand.

The Player

People often like to say that a director or an actor couldn't have made a certain movie of theirs when they were younger, that experiences (particularly hardships from the system) shaped a new mindset that informed the film. A good example would be Mickey Rourke's performance in The Wrestler, a performance that had so many echoes in his own life that the line between player and part just about disappeared. Kurosawa himself has said that he could not have made his late masterpiece Ran as a young man.

The Player, contrary to a great many opinions I've seen, is not such a film. Robert Altman would have gladly taken a knife to the veins of Hollywood in his mid-70s heyday, when he was already considered "box office poison." It was the system itself that needed time to change in order for maximum effect. Had Altman gone after the creative titan that was New Hollywood, he would have seemed like a whiner, a sore loser who took his poor box office receipts out on the studios that allowed his genius free rein. But after Star Wars and the various hits of Steven Spielberg ushered in the wave of the blockbuster on the heels of the crumbling excesses of New Hollywood, the studios overhauled themselves back into safe, pedestrian hit-backers.

It is this Hollywood that Altman savages, the Hollywood that finally threw him to the wayside in the 80s after the commercial "failure" of Popeye. He establishes immediate distaste for this system in an epic, near-8-minute opening shot that references other great tracking shots by both style and even in name on-screen. Altman drifts over a sea of actors, many playing themselves, who all speak of projects they're working on while the producers gab on the phone for the next hit.

We meet Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), a producer who spends his days fielding pitches. Writers and lower-level producers rush to him and sell him on their movie, in 25 words or less. If Griffin likes it, he takes it to the executive; he can't approve money for a film. So why the middle man? Well, the president can't hear every pitch of course; just as the sergeant and not the officer always seems to be in charge of the troops in a war film, producers like Mill really make the movies. The pitch-men live in fear of him, as he can kill their movie before it ever even comes close to a deal. If he likes it, it's almost a guarantee.

This stress leads some writers to take drastic measures. One day, Griffin receives a postcard that contains a death threat. Soon, he's inundated with the things. The postcards come from a writer; Griffin heard his pitch and said he'd call, but never did. Griffin's done this so many times he can't remember who it could possibly be. He convinces himself that a crazed, pretentious writer named David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) is behind the threats, and agrees to meet him and approve his movie. But Kahane gets drunk and starts berating Mill, and the two eventually start fighting until Griffin accidentally kills the writer.

The rest of the film plays out as a merciless thriller, as Mill must continue to work, continue to receive death threats and contend with a murder he covered up. We plunge into the emptiness of Hollywood when a pretentious British writer pitches a paranoid Mill on Habeas Corpus, a segregation-era legal thriller with "no stars, just talent" and "no tap Hollywood ending." He makes sure to spout these phrases constantly to Mill, who says he likes the idea even though he knows how terrible the script is. Then he rallies with a clever notion: convince the president to back the film, dump the project on a rival producer, only to swoop in and tack on an upbeat ending to "save" the film, thus ensuring a promotion. Nice to see that fear hasn't crippled his business acumen.

What Altman and writer Michael Tolkin are saying with the film is that Hollywood, as with America as a whole in the 80s, fell into deep and unrestrained greed. Just as Nashville predicted the personal isolation of the 80s that would eventually manifest in the fragmented relationships of Short Cuts, The Player reflects the times, the avarice implicit in Reaganomics that only widened the class gaps. But it's not just the executives filling this role; Whoopi Goldberg plays a detective investigating Kahane's murder, but she spends a great deal of time wondering if capturing the killer is worth losing the dark comedy of letting it all play out.

The Player, as with any good piece of satire, only gets funnier the more you know about Hollywood. I imagine I would have barely found it amusing it all three years ago, and the more I read over memoirs and histories and the more I watch movies I imagine this will only get funnier. The film could easily have been little more than an excuse for actors to get together and bite the hand that feeds while patting themselves on the back (and there is an element of that to be sure), but with Altman's cynical yet human hand at the helm The Player becomes much more. Its characters are despicable but fleshed-out, and they serve not only as indictments of a system that castrates art but as an emblem of the negative side of capitalism. This is simply one of the finest offerings from one of the all-time cinematic geniuses.

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

If I had to describe Robert Altman in one word--and I wasn't allowed to use 'genius'--I'd have to go with 'ambitious.' He subverted genre films with works like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Western) and The Long Goodbye (detective noir); put out blistering satires like M*A*S*H, The Player and Prêt-à-Porter; and wove cinematic tapestries with immense casts (Nashville, Short Cuts, Gosford Park). Choosing his most ambitious film is therefore redundant and generally depends on what criteria you're using, but you could make a strong argument for his 1977 ephemeral masterpiece 3 Women.

Altman thought up the film when he apparently had a dream that laid down the entire film for him, down to the casting. He woke up and wrote a script of it, and boom: say hello to 3 Women. As is befitting a film based on a dream, 3 Women is a rambling, indefinable journey, ethereal and haunting in its soft look and harsh feel. I couldn't possibly tell you what the film was trying to say overall, but then I don't think Altman could either.

Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule play the titular women, and all start out in defined female archetypes before slowly becoming something else entirely. Duvall plays Millie, a physical therapist at a care center; at the start of the film, Pinky Rose (Spacek) gets a job at the same center and Millie shows her the ropes. Pinky immediately looks up to Millie, who breathlessly explains her hobbies and tastes: how she dresses according to the latest magazines, how she plans meals according to the preparation they require, etc. Hers is an endless prattle, so self-absorbed that she never notices that all the neighbors and co-workers she badgers pay no attention to her and even mock her behind her back.

Not Pinky, though. She becomes obsessed with Millie, following her around and eavesdropping on conversations. When Millie's roommate Deidre moves out, Pinky jumps at the chance to be her new flatmate in order to feed her idol-worship. At their complex, we meet the third woman of the story, Willie (Rule), a pregnant woman who drains the pool and paints disturbing murals on the sides and floor. She wades through the film sad and empty; her husband Edgar, the only prominent male of the story, flirts with Pinky and even comes to Millie's apartment while his wife is in labor, just to have a little fun.

The first half of the film plays out with surprising realism, given the fact that it's come from a dream: at the very least it works as a portrait of the California desert, but we get some revealing character moments as Altman drifts over his subjects. We watch as Millie makes herself out to be the center of the world, only to be utterly ignored by everyone. She kind of deserves it, but my heart still broke when she sat between two doctors in the hospital next to the care center and prattled on and on, and kept going even though (or perhaps because) no one around her gave a damn.

Then something strange happens near the first hour-mark: Millie kicks Pinky out of her bed so she and Edgar can get down to it, and Pinky throws herself into the apartment pool in a rage, putting her into a coma. When she wakes up, she does not recognize her parents and insists that she is Millie. Here the dream aspect kicks in big time, as Altman moves through random shots and strange lighting that get thrown together in ways that cannot be explained. Quite right, if you ask me: any attempt to piece together and tell you a meaning or a message would have turned the film into cheap psychoanalysis.

I'm told the film parallels Ingmar Bergman's Persona, but I won't get my hands on that film until this Saturday, so I cannot say. Both apparently feature two female characters who in effect swap characters with each other: following her accident, Pinky dresses as Millie and even writes in Millie's diary. When Millie calls her Pinky, she blows a fuse. "My name is Mildred!" she shrieks. Edgar's wooing of Millie indirectly led to the suicide attempt, and at the end of the film suddenly Edgar moves on to Pinky.

What do these last sequences mean? Damned if I know. I'll have to go and buy myself a copy of the film and watch it several times to come up with anything. At the same time, I wonder if we're supposed to take anything from it at all. It's a dream. Frankly, everyone in this film deserves credit for even having the audacity to make it; that it turns out completely captivating and interesting only surprises me further. 3 Women easily belongs on the short list of Altman's work, and it's one of the best examples of the endless possibilities of film.

Short Cuts

Sometimes I think people overstate Altman's state of affairs in the 80s. First of all, "Popeye" didn't flop, and regardless of whatever box office business his films did after that, it's not like he was a commercial titan in the first place. Nevertheless, everyone can agree that Altman returned to making classics with 1992's biting satire The Player, but it was this follow-up that confirmed one of the best late-career resurgences in cinema.

Consisting of 22 major players and 10 distinct and interweaving storylines, Short Cuts may not be Altman's best film (I gotta give it up for Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller), it's certainly his most daring. If The Player examined the ins-and-outs of Hollywood, Short Cuts pulls the camera back a bit to capture all of Los Angeles, and he uses this larger frame to delve into the modern state of America. Here, community has given way to individuality too self-absorbed and detached to produce anything of worth, and even the ties that remain are weakened by dysfunctionality.

To tackle all of the films threads would utterly drain all the entertainment I take from this film, so here's a recap: waitress Doreen Piggot (Lily Tomlin) accidentally hits a young boy with her car, and the boy's parents (Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell) must deal with his comatose state for most of the film. Meanwhile, two marriages crumble from infidelity, one comes under strain due to the wife's occupation as a phone sex operator, and another, the most stable, survives on the husband's (Robert Downey, Jr.) sadism. Also, three fisherman spot a dead woman in the water on their trip but decide to continue fishing before altering the police. Yes, this is a recap.

It'd be easy--hell, almost understandable--if Altman lost his way amongst the disconnect of the original Raymond Carter stories, but not only does he make the stories work, he ties them together in ways that manage to be both tangential and vitally important. Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) cleans the pool of the Finnigans (the parents of the struck child), then he goes home to his phone sex operator wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Both are friends with Downey's character Bill and his wife Honey (Lili Taylor), the daughter of Doreen and her husband Earl (Tom Waits). All tiny, insignificant little threads, but they combine to make a much fuller story.

All of these individual stories confirm Altman's predictions in Nashville: with that film the director noticed the growing self-denial and personal isolationism of Americans, what with the constant pontificating of empty words no one really paid attention to and the immediate denial of the ending tragedy. Here, at last, is the final outcome of that mentality: some have labelled the film as misogynistic because its various abused women stay with their men, but it's because everybody's so wrapped up in themselves that interpersonal conflicts come second to internal ones.

There's something about Altman's direction that I just love: he gives us all these characters, but there's never anything episodic about his visual style. Even though the cuts between stories and characters are more jarring and sudden here than in Nashville and McCabe, Altman moves between characters with grace, and often tackles more than one story at the same time using overlapped dialogue that confuses as it enlightens. This style of visual narrative is much of the reason why I think Altman is one of the best directors ever and a true original.

The use of music in Short Cuts also adds a dimension to the proceedings. This is my second time viewing the film, and this time I paid attention to the music after flipping through Michael Wilmington's essay for the Criterion booklet. A mixture of somber classical music and upbeat jazz variations, they do what all great scores must: capture the mood. Of course, Altman's working with a soundtrack, and he has to capture moods within moods, so the fact that he and his music department pulls it off is nothing short of amazing. The classical music plays over moments of despair--indeed, the suicidal cellist (Lori Singer) is the only person who confronts her despair head-on instead of burying it under obliviousness or drugs--while the jazz songs, which all belie severity under their swinging tempos, characterize those who mask their pain.

All in all, this is a late-stage masterpiece from a man who had been dismissed by most in the business as a has-been. For a film with almost no character evolution, it gets out unbelievable levels of pathos, and it uses characters that would be one-dimensional in any other film to paint a complex portrait of personal interaction and the despair of the human condition. It's absolutely essential.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

It must be so depressing to be a director of ensemble films. Not because of any limitations of the genre, but because of the knowledge you'll never equal Robert Altman. That great maverick of American cinema has permanently identified the genre with him, with sweeping, incisive dramas involving impossible numbers of characters. For this film, Altman applies that approach to the Western genre, and crafts one of the ten greatest entries in the history of the genre.

At the start of the film, a man (Warren Beatty) enters the town of Presbyterian Church, a homely little village in the Pacific Northwest whose log cabins seem to be as much an extension of the surrounding forest as I imagine they were when they were trees. The man walks into the local tavern, surveys it, returns to his horse for a cloth, and comes back in to play some poker. Even before everyone sits down for the game the bar seems crowded, already overflowing with characters Altman does not introduce but who still have establishing dialogue. From the start the conversations overlap; the townsfolk wonder who this strange man is and why he walked out of the tavern as soon as he stepped in, but they could care less when he tacitly indicates he wants to play.

The man, whom we later learn is John McCabe, came to this town to start up a cheap brothel. His seemingly friendly game establishes his intellectual dominance over the simple denizens, silently letting them muse on a rumor that he's a gunfighter as he slowly makes ties through cards. At one point he calmly asks who owns a section of property in town, but at this point he seems like one of them and they think nothing odd nor sinister of his request.

In true Altman style, the camera darts not between individuals but between groups; people dart between social circles, inquiring about this stranger, yet not out of suspicion. Though the gunfighter rumor spreads, it carries with it more intrigue than distrust. He enters town not a legendary desert warrior, as most Westerns would have us treat all newcomers to peaceful towns, but as a soft-spoken businessman.

At the game's end McCabe's earned a nice bit of profit, and uses it to purchase 3 women to get his brothel off the ground. He must not have won as much as I thought, because he doesn't exactly pick the cream of the crop: one of the whores is fat, another toothless. But they establish McCabe as a permanent resident, and he views them more as an investment than "display-worthy."

Then the other title character enters town. Constance Miller (Julie Christie), a professional Madam addicted to opium, sees McCabe's makeshift brothel and offers to run the business better than he ever could. Constance, like many in her profession surely, has outgrown sex, using it only to make a living. She tells McCabe that he doesn't know women so she'll watch over them and make sure they're healthy and paying their share; she'll also import some classier prostitutes from her old gigs.

With this basic setup Altman crafts one of the saddest films I've ever seen. McCabe, who speaks chiefly in profane mumblings, occasionally lets some of the real John out from beneath his outer shell. "I got poetry in me!" he cries finally to himself unable to disguise his feelings for Constance any longer, yet unwilling to actually tell her. Yet Miller, like McCabe is too individualistic to be compatible; their only difference is that Miller knows where McCabe's romanticism will lead: eventually he turn into her, broken by the truth of the matter.

Other stories end in tragedy as well. When a man dies, his widow (Shelley Duvall) speaks with Constance. She knows, as does Constance, that she must become a whore in order to provide for herself. Miller offers the closest thing she can offer to comfort without lying, but it leaves you feeling empty. Elsewhere, a young cowboy played by Keith Carradine runs into a gunslinger who forces the lad into a duel. Carradine tries to charm his way out of it, but as the town looks on he knows he's going to die as much as the onlookers do.

The scene works as a parallel for McCabe's story; at the midpoint of the film, two businessmen ride into town and offer to buy out McCabe's property, and he drunkenly refuses. When he laughs about it to Miller, her face tells us how badly he just messed up before she ever speaks. She tells him that he better hope the two come back, and if they do to agree to their offer. The men do come back, make an even higher offer (though not by much) and McCabe gleefully refuses again. When he sobers up the full implication of his actions hits him and he searches for the two men, but they're long gone. He tempted fate, just as Carradine's character did, even though neither really did much. But there's is an unforgiving land, and many in this climate are born to die.

This second half brings the full pain of the relationship between McCabe and Miller to the fore, resulting in that revealing soliloquy with the perfect line about his inner poet, but Constance is the one really in pain; she, like John, knows he signed his death certificate, but she's the one who'll have to live with the grief.

The inevitable showdown between McCabe and the bounty hunters dispatched by the scorned Harrison Shaugnessy Company is one of the most inventive in Westerns, precisely because it meticulously identifies and dismantles the criteria of the Western shootout. McCabe, certainly never heroic in any of this, tries to evade his pursuers through heavy snowfall, rather than meeting his foes at the town square at high noon. The chief bounty hunter wields not a revolver or pistol but a giant elephant gun.

As McCabe meets his fate we are left only with Miller, who never acts like the mourning widow of the fallen hero. When we see her at the end she drifts off into an opium haze; though she certainly felt something for McCabe, now he's just another memory for her to try to purge through drugs. In a film full of sadness and regret, this scene stands above them all.

Aiding this depressing dirge is the beautiful yet haunting cinematography from the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, who makes terrific use of widescreen by setting up characters by filling up the screen, be it with the awesome spectacle of the encroaching forest that seeks to reclaim its felled brothers back into the fold or stuff the frame with people. He also uses a number of filters on the lenses to give it a dreamy quality, making the film seem even more elegiac.

When you get right down to it, this is the death-knell of the Western. Altman cuts through our notions of the West and presents us with a truer vision though, unlike other revisionist films, not one filled with violence. Instead, he paints the West as a place of great sadness, where lofty dreams met unfathomable hardship and forced people to harden with them. Though he takes great care to get the look right, he scores the film chiefly with the songs of Leonard Cohen, an anachronism, yet one that perfectly fits what he's trying to say; Cohen's folk tales paint a portrait of a dying West as much as the images. In this world, McCabe represents the romanticized notion of the West, Miller the cold hard truth that remains after the dreams die, and the townspeople stand in for us. They see this all unfold, yet before it's even over they've moved on to more trivial things. If this is not Robert Altman's best film, it places at an indistinguishable second behind Nashville. See it now.

Rachel Getting Married

Watching "Rachel Getting Married," I couldn't help but notice there were so many ways this film could have gone wrong. It could have gone the route of cloying melodrama meant for a Lifetime Original Movie, or it could have become the typical (and typically unfunny) wedding comedy, or it could have even made a open grab for Oscars; instead, Jonathan Demme crafted a understated film containing equals amounts of uncomfortable humor, family drama, and fun.

Don't let the title fool you: Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) does get married, but this is not her show. The story mainly centers around her sister Kym, a recovering addict who's finally found a treatment program that seems to work and who gets a day pass out of rehab to attend her sister's wedding. Anne Hathaway imbibes the character, infusing her with a sharp wit and a completely selfish personality. Not many are happy to see Kym at the house, and you quickly get the feeling that it's not because of her habit, or at least not directly.

The first half of the movie is a fairly dark comedy; Kym is offended that she is not the maid of honor, she wants all the attention, and she is, of course, the token disastrous toaster. So many movies about weddings make practically every character do their best to ruin the whole affair, but writer Jenny Lumet knows that it really only ever takes one.

The third act of the film is where the tensions finally come to a head the night before the wedding. Kym must confront her biggest demon and how it affects her family, and it threatens to rip them all apart before Sidney and Rachel make it to the altar. Hathaway, whose been so biting and self-centered the whole time, suddenly taps into some powerful emotions that expel a great deal of pent-up self-hate in a way that seems totally realistic. All that talk of her Oscar worthiness is true: as clichéd as it may be, she is Kym, and at no point during the near two hour running length did I even think "Hey, she was in The Princess Diaries."

The wedding itself is both wholly irrelevant and the fundamental triumph of the film. For Kym, whose story drives the film, it serves as little more than a device, yet the wedding and everything concerning it contains the ultimate subject of the film: marriage and its affect on family. Rachel, who has been locked into her own personal hell more or less because of Kym and her effect on the family, has a chance at a new and happy life with Sidney. My absolute favorite part of the film, even beyond the actors, is the fact that Lumet not once comments on Sidney and Rachel's interracial relationship. Hollywood loves to pat itself on the back when it comes to social issues, but we see a couple and their families simply interacting; there is no racist grandmother, no initial distrust between the two clans. Sidney's family immediately treats Rachel's family like their own, as does Rachel's. If nothing else, "Rachel Getting Married" hopefully points to a future in which race is a non-issue like it truly should be.

Also deserving mention is Demme's hand-held camera work. He gets in close to the actors, and you feel like that guest who awkwardly stumbles into a party where you don't really know the people or, worse, into a family situation. The way the camera sort of finds itself in the middle of an argument has a humor all its own. Demme gives Lumet's superb script a bit of an Altman-esque feel; he does not examine the background characters like the master did, but Demme does do a good job of exploring people other than Rachel and Kym. As much praise as Hathaway is (deservedly) getting, attention must be paid to both Rosemarie DeWitt and Debra Winger as Rachel and Kym's emotionally distant mother, who has one scene with Kym of great power. Personally, I think DeWitt deserves a Supporting Actress nomination more than Winger, but the Academy loves to pick supporting noms based on scenes, and Winger has the best I've seen of a supporting actress this year.

"Rachel" is not quite perfect; Kym moves through her path just a bit too quickly and there are some scenes that Demme might have bettered served with more traditional shooting. But it is a painfully honest film that, in true Altman fashion, weaves together a tapestry of potential stories, many of which remain unexplored, as they do in real life. Lumet, Hathaway, and DeWitt all deserve Oscar nominations and, barring some great revelations in the last few weeks of the year, wins. It is far and away the best wedding movie I've ever seen, and to understand just how much it breaks the usual mold, just consider that Hathaway's next project is called Bride Wars.