November 21st, 2006
Keith Phipps: The first image that comes to mind when I think of Robert Altman isn't one of Altman at all, it's of Warren Beatty trudging through a snowy American west in an almost ridiculously furry buffalo coat, getting nowhere as a Leonard Cohen song plays in the background. It's a scene from Altman's 1971 anti-Western Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in which Beatty plays a gambler determined to make his fortune and maybe bring a little truth and beauty to the American frontier, even though the odds are stacked against him.
He doesn't make it. A lot of people don't make it in Altman's movies, even those who don't dream nearly so big as Beatty's McCabe. Some give up on big dreams and just settle on getting through the best they can, like the absurdity-surrounded doctors in M*A*S*H. Others get exactly what they set out to achieve, like the poker players of California Split, and find it's not enough—in fact, it isn't really anything at all. It's easy to celebrate the winners of the world, but for Altman, the losers always proved much more interesting.
Besides, winners usually had to cheat to get where they're going, either killing the competition like Tim Robbins in The Player, or attempting to brutally remake the world in their own image, like Paul Newman's Buffalo Bill. The really vital people, if not necessarily the good guys, are in the margins, whether finding true love on the lam in Thieves Like Us or cursing their way through a boozy dark night of the soul like Philip Baker Hall's Nixon in Secret Honor.
Altman was born in Kansas City to a privileged family, but he came to direct features by working his way up through industrial films and the television industry. His was, in many respects, an old-fashioned America success story of hard work and its rewards. It's the kind of story that never interested Altman in the least. The traditional American definition of success involves finding a superlative to attach to yourself—the nation's bestselling author, the greatest quarterback of his generation, the most important director of the 1970s. If there's one lesson to take away from Altman—not that he would like anyone finding lessons—it's to not trust that idea.
In 1970, the same year he released M*A*S*H to tremendous commercial and critical success, Altman released another film, Brewster McCloud, about a boy (Bud Cort) who struggles to achieve his one ridiculous goal of flying inside the Houston Astrodome. It's nobody's favorite Altman film. A box-office failure and treated, as best, as a curiosity by critics it's usually talked about as a footnote to his '70s classics. When asked, Altman frequently cited it as one of his favorites.
Noel Murray: I can credit Robert Altman for awakening me to a lot of cinematic virtues that I'd never really considered before I watched my first Altman film (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, for the record). He was a master at creating a sense of place and time, and revealing character by immersing viewers in the character's world. And he had a keen sense of wit, which struck some as misanthropic and even a little mean, but which always seemed to me to come from a place of empathy. It doesn't take too much research into Altman's life and career to discover that he knew what it meant to be an asshole. And to be generous.
I'll miss that generosity the most, though I won't have to miss it for long. Some artists—J.D. Salinger, say, or Terrence Malick, or Nick Drake—have such a limited output that becoming a fan means picking over the bones of the same three or four old hunks of meat. Altman's more like a Kurt Vonnegut or an Elvis Costello: When you first discover you love his work, you've got years of happy exploration ahead.
This was driven home to me when I finally saw California Split six years ago, on a bootleg DVD. Here's one of Altman's best films—a funny, smart, and true ode to male friendship at its most poisonous, and a great document of gambling in Los Angeles and Reno in the early '70s—and yet, even though I'd spent most of my years in college and immediately afterward watching every Altman movie I could find, over and over, here was one I'd completely missed. Now it, plus 3 Women, A Perfect Couple, and a slew of Altman's brilliant TV work, from Combat! to Tanner '88, are all out on DVD, waiting to be discovered. (And don't discount that TV work, which in many ways represents Altman at his purest, finding a way to impart three-dimensionality to some of the most conventional scripts he'd ever film.) And there's more in the storehouse. One of the Altman films that I'd rank in my personal Top Five, Thieves Like Us, got a VHS release at the end of the '90s, but still isn't out on DVD in America. Nor is H.E.A.L.T.H. (which I haven't seen, but I hear is underrated), nor Brewster McCloud (which I have seen, and is pretty dopey, but still worth a look).
I interviewed Altman once, and he wasn't the easiest nut to crack. He was always willing to talk to reporters, but never willing to say much, and even during our interview, I could pick out well-worn phrases I'd heard or read from him in the past. The older he got, the more he fell back on shtick in his promotional guise. But not in his movies. The final Altman films—Gosford Park, The Company, and especially A Prairie Home Companion—are as alive as any in his filmography, and blessed with a kind of genteel patience, as Altman ignores the rules of storytelling and just marvels at the great gifts of actors, singers, dancers, and comics, while trying to match their simple virtuosity with his own.
Altman's final final hurrah, at least on any kind of grand stage, came at this year's Oscar ceremony, where people expected him to stand up and rail against the Hollywood system or the war in Iraq. Instead, he said a gracious, heartfelt thanks. A lot of what he said that night, he'd said a thousand times before. But as always with Altman, the script didn't matter. It was all about the performance.
Tasha Robinson: I first started learning about film from Robert Altman in college, when a professor showed Nashville to one of my introductory classes to illustrate how profoundly the '70s had changed cinema. I feel like I've been trying to catch up with him ever since. It's a daunting task—not just because he was so prolific, and responsible for many of the classics of my lifetime, but because his films have such depth and resonance. Watching them once is never enough.
One of the great things about Altman's films is the way he trusts his viewers to be smart, to keep up, to get involved and absorbed into the big, messy, real worlds he inhabits. He was capable of working with lean, efficient stories—look at The Player, which sends Tim Robbins on a taut trip through Hollywood, looking for the person blackmailing him. But his best films are so dense that they take unpacking, and they're generally a different experience each time they're watched. Take Gosford Park, an Upstairs, Downstairs-style story that takes place over a few days at a British country house in the '30s. It's a murder mystery, a bedroom farce, a character study, a class exposé, a comedy, and a drama all at the same time, with an all-star cast working at the top of its game, and so much complicated, naturalistic, overlapping dialogue that with the subtitles on and all the words laid out in detail, it's almost a different film. It's so rich with character that it's necessary to watch it a second time just to follow from the beginning all the connections and interactions that only become clear as the story unfolds, but Altman's precision—and his complicated, multi-POV setups, with the cameras in constant motion—ensures that it's just as rewarding on a second viewing. Seldom do calculated craft and actorly spontaneity come together so smoothly and seamlessly.
Earlier films like Nashville, M*A*S*H, and the brilliant Short Cuts, and later films like The Company and Prairie Home Companion, often pack in fewer layers and less dialogue but they create the same sort of comfortably lived-in environments, shots and scenes are masterfully realized, but part of an organic, smooth flow. The Company in particular is a hushed, non-talky film by Altman standards, largely because he focuses on the visuals—a dance troupe performing in the rain on an outdoor stage, performers waiting and suffering in the wings—and lets them speak for themselves. Whatever worlds he chose to explore, he inhabited them fully, and let viewers do the same. Like all good filmmakers, he took us all to places we never would have seen otherwise, and made us feel like we were part of different worlds. He will be deeply missed.
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