November 21st, 2006
Some reflections on Robert Altman from the staff of The A.V. Club.
Nathan Rabin: Today we mark the passing of Robert Altman, a man who single-handedly expanded the vocabulary and parameters of film. Altman was a plainspoken man who hated clichés, conventions, and predictability and sought to imbue movies with the messiness, unpredictability, and kinetic energy of real life.
Over the course of his venerable, glorious career, he worked in seemingly every genre, but he left such an unmistakable imprint on each of his films that the "Robert Altman movie" became a genre unto itself. He could take the most commercial assignment in the world—say, adapting an iconic comic-strip sailor for Robert Evans—and transform it into something singular and unmistakably his own.
Altman's stylistic trademarks—long, elegant camera movements, deep focus, overlapping dialogue, elaborate sound design, and long takes—discouraged passive viewing and provided ample rewards for audiences willing to work for their enjoyment. Altman respected audiences and actors alike. He demanded a lot from both, but repaid that commitment many times over. He loved actors, and in return was beloved by actors.
Altman's films are so rich in detail and nuance that they demand repeat viewing. Even his minor efforts are rife with incidental pleasures and unexpected grace notes. Even when his career bottomed out commercially in the mid-'80s, Altman never stopped experimenting, never stopped trying to push cinema closer to beauty and truth. His films are often cynical and funny, but also unexpectedly warm and humane. Altman experienced a major comeback in the late '80s and early '90s with Vincent & Theo, The Player, and Short Cuts, spurring a late-period revival that was a joy to behold. It's fitting that Altman's last film will be Prairie Home Companion, a lovely little swan song and a joyous, funny-sad celebration of everything he stood for, particularly the glory of collaboration among a community of artists. He will be missed.
Donna Bowman: Even though I grew up in Tennessee, I didn't see Altman's most successful "Altman-esque" film, Nashville, until I was in graduate school. But I'll never forget hunching over the TV on the top floor of the University of Georgia library, the laserdisc whirring away somewhere behind the librarian's desk, letting the master teleport me from Haven Hamilton's recording session to the baton-twirler-bedecked Nashville airport, to an Opryland stage, and finally, to that oddest of all Nashville landmarks, the Parthenon. I was jolted into a South that was as intimate to me as my own blood (with all the incipient self-loathing and inferiority complexes that already coursed there) and as strange as another planet.
Somehow, Altman's crazy-quilt of characters felt just right for this character of a town. And of course it was here that his overlapping dialogue style finally met its technological match in the eight-track recording system. My friends and I treasured the unstudied dialogue, delivered by some characters as if they were declaiming from a stage (I think of Lily Tomlin's description, in a voice of peculiarly decorous pity, of an entire ward at Baptist Hospital filled with beautiful young boys all paralyzed from the neck down due to motorcycle accidents), and by others as if no one is really listening (like wisecracking third wheel and terminally Jewish Allan Nicholls).
Most of all, Nashville was my first deep recognition of the golden age of film in my lifetime, the '70s. I knew that nothing else was ever going to be like it again—certainly not playing at multiplex near me. And God help me, but I still think "Dues," one of Barbara Jean's songs, is the most beautiful, sad thing I've ever heard, and it still amazes me how it emerges without fanfare, in the middle of this cobbled-together quasi-musical, as if the city of Nashville just sprouts songs like this all the time. Altman himself imitated its magic many times, most notably in A Wedding, A Perfect Couple, and Short Cuts, but he never caught its particular lightning in a bottle ever again. No matter. When you create the Great American Movie, once is all it takes.
Scott Tobias: It surprises me that Altman never got around to collaborating with another one of my favorite artists, Neil Young, because the ups and downs of their maverick careers have such clear parallels. They both strung together an extraordinary run of masterpieces in the '70s—Altman with McCabe And Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Nashville, Young with After The Gold Rush, Harvest, On The Beach, Tonight's The Night, Zuma, and Rust Never Sleeps. And they were both virtually written off a decade later after a series of calamitous flops—Altman with Health, Beyond Therapy, and O.C. And Stiggs, Young with Trans, Landing On Water, and This Note's For You. And yet, to go by Young's credo, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." Neither of them ever quit taking chances and pushing their craft, even if those risks just set them up for a fresh round of ridicule. This resiliency led Young to end the '80s with a bracing statement of purpose in Freedom, and let Altman kick off another renaissance that continued from The Player through his moving swan song, A Prairie Home Companion.
I wouldn't place any of Altman's '90s and '00s work above the best of his '70s films; in fact, there are few contemporary directors whose work can measure up to those lofty standards. But these recent decades found him at his most versatile, capable of dropping into many different worlds and capturing their essence on film, from Hollywood (The Player) to fashion (Ready To Wear) to the Deep South (Cookie's Fortune) to period Britain (Gosford Park) to a professional ballet troupe (The Company). By then, Altman's signature style—the overlapping dialogue, the sprawling ensemble canvasses, the lived-in quality of every frame—was so refined that he could apply it to any environment and count on truths to emerge organically as a result. Nothing ever feels forced in Altman's films; they're relaxed, confident, and above all, intellectually curious.
All that said, my favorite film of this late period remains Short Cuts, which some have brushed off as an inappropriately sour take on Raymond Carver's humanist short stories. Granted, Altman's reputation as a cynic is enforced to a certain extent by his mosaic of crumbling relationships in Southern California. And yet, these nearly two dozen characters are bound together by an unmistakable compassion and heartbreak. And who can forget the frisky interplay between Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin, or slow-burning meltdown of the late Chris Penn, or Tim Robbins harassing Anne Archer while she's in her clown getup? (To say nothing of Huey Lewis' wang.) The associations Altman is able to make between these disparate lives—and the cataclysmic manner in which he ties them together—are something only he could pull off.
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