An Off-Hollywood Celebration
On the 80th birthday of film director Robert Altman
by
Richard Wall
by Richard Wall
 Robert
Altman, the director of the movies M.A.S.H.
(1970), Nashville
(1975), Streamers
(1983), The
Player (1992), Short
Cuts (1993), Prêt
-a- Porter (1994) and Gosford
Park (2001), amongst many
others, is 80 this weekend (February 20th).
A
lot has been written about Altman and his films, so I do not intend
here to do any in-depth analysis. I have no doubt that his movie-making
over 40 years has by now been the object of plenty of psychobabble,
and countless learned dissertations at Film or Cultural Studies
departments in universities throughout the land.
I
will simply put my cards on the table. I like Altman’s films, even
the bad ones (in parts): unlike much of the fantasy-world fare which
regularly tops the charts at the box-office but cannot sustain even
a second viewing, they are thought-provoking, funny-melancholic
and complex, and repay repeated viewing. Being also intrinsically
American, they are especially interesting to one who, like me, is
a keenly interested outside observer of 20th-century American culture
and history, well-disposed to its founding
libertarian traditions.
So
I feel it is right and proper today that, having reached the milestone
of 80 years, Altman should be fawned over, called yet again the
Big Daddy of American art cinema, and have another media moment
in the California sun.
He
was born on February 20th, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, to a Catholic
family of German origin.
Freelance
writer Stephen Lemons, in an August
2000 article in Salon on the 25th anniversary party for
Nashville, describes the adolescent Altman as "a cutup
and hell-raiser – to the degree that his parents shipped him off
to Wentworth
Military Academy in Lexington, Mo., during his junior year of
high school." Joining the US Army Air Force from there in 1945,
he saw active service at the tail-end of World War II as a bomber
pilot in the Pacific.
When
he came back he was at a loose end. He tried acting. He tried out
a crazy scheme for tagging dogs. He ended up back in Kansas City
in 1947 and, at age 22, started out on a life of film by making
documentaries for a firm which made industrial shorts, the (now
defunct) Calvin Company. From the mid-1950s, after he had written
and directed a teen exploitation movie called The Delinquents,
he worked in television, first at the invitation of Alfred Hitchcock,
on the show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and later on
several regular TV series, the best-known of which were "Bonanza"
and "Combat."
Altman
began directing feature-length movies in the 1960s, after leaving
TV. But he would not achieve fame until the relatively late age
of 45, with the controversially satirical film M.A.S.H.,
set at the time of the Korean war but clearly intended to refer
to Vietnam, which came out in 1970.
 "M*A*S*H,"
as the website
of the Directors’ Guild of America tells us on the occasion
of a 2003 award to Altman, "featured a sprawling cast of
largely unknown actors, so naturalistic that you might assume that
they are purely improvising, except that the arching nuances and
comic timing hit all too perfectly. Donald Sutherland and Elliott
Gould's characters embody Altman's split perspective on America,
full of anti-authoritarian cynicism and swaggering braggadocio.
They are neither the accidental heroes, nor the slow-witted innocents
of traditional combat films. They are wise-cracking revolutionaries,
smart enough to see through the charade and insanity of war. In
general, it is not a fixed disdain for authority that Altman expresses
in his films. Instead, he simply combines an outsider's view with
a little wit and lets the absurdity of the establishment reveal
itself."
M.A.S.H.
introduced several enduring Altman hallmarks: the lack of linear
plot, the unifying theme achieved through a device (in this case
the surreal announcements over the field hospital’s PA system),
the overlapping dialogue, the director’s paternalism and love-hate
relationship with his cast, and the feel of creative, ad-hoc improvisation
which can be both so inspiring and so infuriating in all of his
films. It also offered up that enduring triple nemesis of modern
Puritanism: sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. As Lemons says, it fed
audiences "all of the major characteristics of an Altman film:
rabid anti-authoritarianism, anti-militarism, black humor (the blackest),
sacrilege, delight in decadence, adolescent sexual escapades, hypocrisy
revealed and casual drug use."
 Altman’s
next big success was Nashville
(1975). Famously given a rave review in the New Yorker 4 months
ahead of its opening by that renowned critic, the
late Pauline Kael, for many this film is emblematic of America
in the 1970s, maybe even the pinnacle of Altman’s achievement. In
the
first of two
reviews, eminent film critic Roger Ebert wrote:
"Robert
Altman's Nashville, which was the best American movie since
Bonnie
and Clyde, creates in the relationships of nearly two dozen
characters a microcosm of who we were and what we were up to in
the 1970s. It's a film about the losers and the winners, the drifters
and the stars in Nashville, and the most complete expression yet
of not only the genius but also the humanity of Altman, who sees
people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience.
Sure, it's only a movie. But after I saw it I felt more alive, I
felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser. It's
that good a movie. […]
This
is a film about America. It deals with our myths, our hungers, our
ambitions, and our sense of self. It knows how we talk and how we
behave, and it doesn't flatter us but it does love us."
It
is also interesting to note in passing that, even 30 years on, users
of the invaluable Internet Movie Database
(ImdB) continue to comment
in uncommonly large numbers on this movie. One very recent comment
makes the point that, "Altman’s slice of Americana has lost
none of its punch… Despite being made in the Watergate and Vietnam
era…. the film is even more relevant today in this age of celebrity-worship
and apathetic, gutless American media who believe missing suburban
wives are more pertinent and crucial to this nation's well-being
than questioning facts and our leaders' motives for waging a needless,
costly war."
 The
next Altman movie on my list is Streamers
(1983). Even in the many surveys and articles on Altman available
on the Internet, this cinematic adaptation of an intense and close-atmosphered
anti-war stage play by David
Rabe, set in a basic-training barracks before a group of recruits
is sent out to Vietnam, is given little attention, coming from a
period in which Altman is regarded as having been generally in the
doldrums. It is not available on DVD. Nevertheless, it is as intense
an Altman experience as you are ever likely to get, and I strongly
recommend it, even if you feel the need for a strong drink afterwards.
From
the IMdB: Streamers is about the truly dramatic consequences
of censored communication. It's a gripping, demanding, powerful
and very satisfying film that leaves your head spinning and your
heart racing.
It
is only fair to mention that there are also strongly negative user
comments on this film: one writer calls it a ‘lengthy, lethargic
and lackluster Altman lecture.’
This
divergence of views highlights the undoubted truth that both Altman
the person and his work provoke extreme reactions. It is almost
impossible to remain indifferent. As he is loved, so he is also
detested: loved by many fans and by the circle of distinguished
and well-known actors whom he has regularly allowed to improvise
and be themselves in his movies; loved by the professional critics
who wax effusive about America having its very own auteur
and art cinema director (and yet cannot resist, many of them, the
mean pleasure of pulling the man down by gloating over his relative
failure at the box-office); detested for his forthright liberal
and anti-war opinions by the faux-patriots
for whom America can do no wrong, and an object of puzzlement for
those who want to go to the movies for nothing too difficult such
as actually having to think, but merely to be distracted and carried
along by a fanciful and morally simple yarn, preferably involving
good guys taking out dark, evil monsters.
 Such
conflicting reactions were also in evidence in relation to The
Player, which came out in 1992 and was hailed at the time
as Altman’s ‘comeback.’ This film is oddly unsatisfying and oddly
fascinating at the same time, perhaps because it portrays an anti-hero,
an unsympathetic and amoral main character who literally gets away
with murder, but with whom we nevertheless are drawn to sympathize
because he is dealing with the enemy within – within himself and
within the vicious, back-stabbing Hollywood milieu, which is portrayed
here with a savage bitterness born of intimate familiarity. There
is also a strong implicit condemnation of the abject superficiality
and pretentiousness of the cult of celebrity, allied with an ironic
and paradoxically mischievous delight in it. Like all addictions,
you love it and can’t get enough of it, at the same time as you
hate what it does to you and want to be rid of it.
Speaking
personally, I also find the character played by the usually elegantly
attractive actress Greta Scacchi unsympathetic and annoying: she
plays a supposedly mysterious and ‘difficult’ artist who is resisting
– and yet not resisting – the charms of the anti-hero. It has to
be admitted there are times when the deliberate ambiguities and
occasional longueurs of an Altman script get to even the
keenest of fans.
This
movie has the dubious distinction of having attracted the ire of
Murray
Rothbard, who was disturbed by what he called the nihilism of
the ‘New Left’ cinema, which led directors like Altman to show that
life is evil and meaningless, rather than to provide happy endings
as Old-Left cinema did (Rothbard wished in 1992 that Altman had
‘stayed away forever’). Personally I think Rothbard comes down too
hard on Altman, based on this one movie: it is easy to agree with
him that what Altman portrays is not a pretty sight. But it is wrong,
in my view, to attribute nihilistic intent to the director.
 No
such reservations apply to the bitter tragi-comedy of manners and
life in Los Angeles, Short
Cuts (1993), one of my favorite films of all time. It is
based on the short stories of the late Raymond
Carver (1938–1988), and portrays a set of characters whose
lives overlap in strange and unexpected ways. It is a melancholy
film, in that its linking theme is the incidence of death, both
physical and of the soul, and our common helplessness in the face
of it. "The most representative plot," writes Doug
Thomas in the editorial review on Amazon.com, "deals with
a group of friends (Buck Henry, Fred Ward, and Huey Lewis) who decide
to keep fishing even after discovering a body in the river. The
story works as a morose comedy and a flag holder for the movie:
the inability to take the correct action. […] A huge and
talented cast twists in the wind, bumping into moments of truth,
sex, and passion. Some even come out all right in the end. The accidental
nature of life – a common theme in many Altman films –
has never been so maddeningly persistent, or absorbing. The
score
by Mark Isham, with songs sung by Annie Ross (also a cast member),
fuels the moodiness, as does the opening number in which Medfly
helicopters spray the town to the tune "Prisoner of Life.""
Short
Cuts, at 3 hours longer than usual even for Altman, could be
the object of a review unto itself. I will limit myself to saying
that this in particular is a film which repays concentration and
revisiting: the first time around, you are likely to miss a lot,
on account of the wealth of detail, the initial confusion of the
overlapping stories and coincidences, and indeed moments of irritation,
embarrassment or intense personal drama, as in the argument about
marital infidelity between the characters played by Matthew Modine
and (a nude) Julianne Moore.
 1994’s
Prêt
-A- Porter (Ready to Wear) was slammed by many critics,
and once again, viewer
opinion is harshly divided. The film, which is a shaggy-dog
story, actually contains some delicious moments (particularly those
involving the scenes between Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren),
some fine acting, and for anyone who has experienced – or better
still, worked at – the Paris Fashion Shows, it is a brilliant, witty
and sexy satire, evoking all that is worst in their superficiality
and pretentiousness while meditating on (and causing us to reflect
sadly on) the amorality of human betrayal for the sake of – not
much, in the end. As with "Short Cuts," a lot of unnecessarily
prurient attention has focused on scenes involving nudity. If such
scenes cause some viewers difficulty, the short answer is that they
should not be watching Altman movies, as they will only be made
angry and indignant by seeing those scenes out of context.
An
interesting group of Altman-directed movies, uneven, some say bad,
others say terrible, came out in the second half of the 1990s. Kansas
City (1996), a Depression-era pseudo-gangster movie which
has just been re-released on DVD in the US, is a flawed but interesting
tribute to his home town, and is dominated by the improvised jazz
soundtrack. The
Gingerbread Man (1998), starring Kenneth Branagh and Robert
Duvall, was a John Grisham adaptation generally reckoned not worth
viewing after its opening 15 minutes, yet even this thriller has
its moments, and there are fans who like it. Cookie’s
Fortune (1999), described as ‘a drowsy Southern comedy’
and starring Glenn Close, was a mediation on life in a small Southern
town, and my personal favorite of this group, Dr.
T and the Women (2000), starring Richard Gere and Farrah
Fawcett, performed the brilliant reflexive trick of having Gere,
who has played many Don Juan roles in his time, take the main part
of Dr. T., a gynaecologist with a failed marriage who cannot cope
with (his) women. And surely only Altman could succeed in having
the ever-lovely Farrah Fawcett dance totally nude in a fountain
in the middle of a Dallas shopping mall!
 All
this led up to Altman’s biggest box-office success in years in 2001,
the ‘English country house’ 1930s period piece, Gosford
Park. I had mixed feelings on first viewing this lavishly
decorated film, with once again an all-star cast – all the
usual mixed feelings: it was too long, had no real plot, and was
at times irritating; but it improved tremendously on second viewing.
I think this has everything to do with expectations. We have become
so conditioned by Hollywood mainstream fare to expect moronic, fast-paced,
shoot-em-up action, posturing instead of acting, and platitudes
instead of thought, that when a thought-provoking cinematic experience
such as Gosford Park comes along, many are simply too impatient
and unskilled at knowing how to absorb and appreciate it, and so
react not just with indifference, but with active hostility at having
had their own limitations shown up and having been, in their own
estimation, cheated.
One
reviewer has put this issue succinctly: "Director Altman
does NOT make films for everyone. He often makes films for the 'Advanced'
film-goer. His work is often disjointed and overlapping to an extent
that it requires one to actually pay attention to the goings-on
rather than to spoon-feed the answers to the audience. Couple this
with his tendency to allow the plot and the character to meander,
evolving slowly over the course of the film, and you often get a
movie that is distinctly 'un-Hollywood', which can turn some film-goers
off. I would recommend that you allow yourself to watch [an Altman
film] without any preconceived ideas of how a movie is supposed
to be."
 So
finally to The
Company, a 2003 documentary project on the Joffrey Ballet
of Chicago suggested to Altman by Neve
Campbell, an actress who trained from childhood with the National
Ballet School of Canada but was obliged to give up ballet on account
of repeated injury. Most critics were unsure of what to make of
it, and many of the usual complaints were in evidence in the reviews
– that it lacks plot, is neither one thing nor the other or,
for one
writer, is "a sloppy, ill-focused ramble through the rehearsal
process of a top-drawer company." I watched this documentary
rather defiantly, in a comfortable movie theatre in which there
cannot have been more than half a dozen patrons, as if to prove
that, when it comes to Altman, all this doesn’t really matter. Preconceptions
about what a movie should be are indeed to be left at the door.
Games can be played with the director’s conscious or subconscious
references to earlier work, like the ballet which must go on despite
(or perhaps in harmony with) a dramatic thunderstorm, echoing the
shattering tornado at the end of Dr. T and the Women. "Pleasurable,"
the word used by the Washington Post’s critic, just about
sums it up. I also feel that The Company is a neat, evocative
return to the documentary form in which Altman started out, albeit
that its effortless sophistication and the luxurious restraint of
its sensuous and vulnerable atmosphere now reflect a maturity gained
through a lifetime of movie-making.
Conclusions
Altman’s
films are about damage and about excess, about calling out the inner
demons and enemies within, and the diagnostics and therapies we
choose – or choose not – to apply in order to cope with, limit
or reverse them. Unsurprisingly, they often show the dark side of
the psyche, the working out of addictive behavior, the apparent
survival of those who "get away with murder," a concept
which still jars with a common sense of moral justice, even in these
morally befuddled times. They can therefore be profoundly disturbing
to those who are afraid to delve into the corresponding depths of
mind and soul, or tell themselves that they would just prefer not
to have their inner demons exposed.
In
contrast to that other great American cinematic master, Woody Allen,
who deals in neuro-comedy to touch many of the same subject-matters
– psychological vulnerability, love and death, the obsession with
celebrity, and the often vacuous nature of urban and suburban inner
life, Altman deals with them in a psycho-tragic way which, more
than with Woody Allen, offers a ray of hope in the possibility of
a radical change when the personal cataclysm finally happens, as
it so often does at the end of his films: Dr. T., physically whisked
up high into the sky by a tornado, finds himself set down on earth
again having to deliver a child somewhere in the Mexican desert.
The dysfunctional couples in Short Cuts are all given a second
chance by the freak coincidence of an earthquake at a key moment
of moral decision.
As
he celebrates his 80 years, Robert Altman’s cinematic activity is
undimmed. One new movie, Paint, is currently being filmed,
while the 2006 title A Prairie Home Companion starring Altman
regulars Lyle Lovett and Lily Tomlin as well as Meryl Streep, is
in pre-production. When asked about retirement, his oft-quoted rejoinder
has been along the lines of "You’re talking about death, aren’t
you?" I doubt that even mortality will push this hell-raiser
off our screens, because, as both M.A.S.H. and Nashville
have shown, his work is enduring. In the meantime, as perhaps
the temporary occupant of the White House might care to note, a
suitable postscript to Altman’s substantial filmography on this
his 80th birthday might be that "no inner demon has been left
behind."
Links
and Further Reading
Articles
-
Sterritt,
David, Altman,
Christian Science Monitor – February 8, 2002
Books
Other
Resources
Selected
Film Reviews
Roger
Ebert, first review in Chicago
Sun Times, January 1, 1975
Roger
Ebert, second review in Chicago
Sun Times, August 6, 2000
Roger
Ebert, Chicago
Sun Times, April 1992
Hull,
Christopher: Kansas
City – Filmcritic.com, 2004
Sragow,
Michael: Altman’s
Fortune – Salon.com, June 3, 1999
Danks,
Adrian: I
Don’t Think We’re in Dallas Anymore – Senses of Cinema,
March/April 2001
Dawson,
Tom: Robert Altman on Dr.
T. and the Women – Channel4.com, 2000
Applebaum,
Stephen: Robert Altman on The
Company – Channel4.com, 2003
Hunt,
Mary Ellen: The
Company – Critical Dance, January 2004
Kipp,
Jeremiah: The
Company – A Film Review – Filmcritic.com, 2003
Quinn,
Anthony: The
Company – The Independent, May 7, 2004
Thomson,
Desson: ‘Company’
– Altman’s Dance Film with Legs, Washington Post, January
23, 2004
 February
19, 2005
Richard
Wall (send him mail) has a Master's
degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics
& Political Science, and lives in Estoril, Portugal, where he currently
works as a freelance writer and translator.
Copyright ©
2005 LewRockwell.com
Richard
Wall Archives
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