Robert Altman

Here is an intelligent and sensitive review by Nathaniel Rich of Altman's work in "Nashville" and "Short Cuts."  I'm going to watch both movies again as soon as I get home. Altman was so original that I believe most filmgoers and not a few critics really never"got" him. He always was a bit like god, or Shakespeare, with respect to his characters. All the world's a stage, and all that. There is plenty of comedy and tragedy in his films, and often it's hard to say which is which.

Here is something I wrote about "Short Cuts"  at the time of its first release:

 Hollywood Misses Postmodernism 

Robert Altman's film,  "Short Cuts,"  which uses material from  Ray Carver's short stories, is an intelligent  film that has called forth much intelligent critical response but only a lukewarm  public reception.   Altman  uses  a technique of post-modernist fragmentation with a large array  of characters and stories  but produces a unified work nonetheless through  his hovering narrative presence,  a presence which also  provides the moral force of this work.

To illuminate Altman's  moral view,  I cite the experience of a friend of mine who found "Short  Cuts"  boring,  overlong and expressive of an ugly side of human nature that did not give people a break,  but who then  had something happen to him which changed his mind.  Shortly after he saw "Short Cuts,"  a woman injured my friend.  She  opened her car door on the street side;  he, on his bike,  slammed into the door,  vaulted over it and landed on his head.  His injuries, luckily not very serious since he was wearing a helmet,  did not bother him so much,  he said,  as the woman's "unremorseful"  response to her deed.  After all,  she could have killed him with her carelessness.  Now he understands  what Altman was getting at--that people can hurt each other (or worse) without feeling guilty or repentant. 

Sentimental,--or conversely,  dark and pessimistic  yet morally satisfying-- views  of humanity can only be achieved through  the use of pre-formed ideas about the human condition, the trails and tribulations of men and women not unlike ourselves, or as we imagine ourselves or wish ourselves to be.  Short Cuts  lifts itself out of the realm of popular film,  which panders to our need for entertainment and  for easy answers to human dilemmas,  to  ask these hard questions: What do we really think of murder? Rape?  How do we feel about alcohol?  Infidelity?  Incompetence?   Indifference to the misery of others? Nasty  rich people enjoying life?  Cruelty to animals?  Nudity?  Where do we see ourselves in this work?  Which one of us has not at some time done something as dangerous, ridiculous, upsetting, etc.  as some character  in this film? 

What if, we might ask ourselves, these people, and we, started connecting up again instead of talking past each other?  If we stopped drowning our feelings in alcohol?  If we started believing that other people have as much right to exist, and on their own terms,   as we ourselves do? If we starting noticing how evil we were and vowed to become good again?

Altman,  by  (apparently but not really) withholding moral judgement (or as one critic would have it,  political judgement),  makes a very strong indictment of contemporary life which goes far beyond the everyday mass media portrayals of drug-crazed ghetto dwellers, hookers,  serial killers and single moms that titillate the modern pop-culture sensibility.  Good folks  don't have to identify with such evil and/or feckless people;  they're free to condemn.   But what about the characters in "Short Cuts,"  ranging from trailer people to hill dwellers? They work, they pay their bills,  they're  even white!  They're also murderers, wife-beaters and deserters, cuckolders,  hit-and-run drivers, telephone sex purveyors, etc.

Altman connects all the twenty or so characters in Short Cuts  at the end  through  a unifying natural disaster that affects everyone (the earthquake).  As one critic said,  he wants to "shake some sense" into people.  I think he's done it.  But the implied  moral judgments he makes show a modernist rather than a post-modernist sensibility,  because of the  godlike, disembodied omniscient narrator's condemnation. This invisible mental entity relieves us of the blank terror that characterizes  the Carver stories by allowing us to share in  the immortal feeling of the filmmaker.  But  Carver's  unlucky characters ,  particularly  in the bleak collection, What We Talk  About When We Talk About Love,   face disease,  loneliness,  death, with no mediation. They confront extinction with raw animal terror; God is dead.  Altman,  a moralist of the old school, a believer in heaven and hell, could never  construct a vision as  desolate as Carver's.   
  

Comments

[scratchy888]

You should buy my newly edited book -- available from Lulu.

[Hattie]

Will do when I get home and get caught up.

[naomi dagen bloom]

Loved "Nashville" but not so crazy about later ones. You wax so poetic about "Shortcuts" that may try on Netflix.

[scratchy888]

I'm happy to send you one in the post if you will write a feminist leaning review of it when it comes out on Amazon. (I'm hoping prof zero will do me the favour as well.) Just remind me of your address via email...

[Hattie]

Wow. That's pretty flattering, Jennifer. I'll find something you'd like to read & send it to you, then.

[scratchy888]

No need to send me anything, Hattie, unless you want to...

Thanks.

[Z]

I love what I've seen of Altman and should see all his stuff... Hi scratchy888!!

[Jennifer Cascadia]

HI Z

Would you like a book of mind to review as well. Send me your address privately and I will get you one.