This herd gathers at no dried-up water holes: their tracks lead to where the action is. And for Altman to be at the center of the action is one of the great Hollywood stories. Written off, if not ridden off, by the movie establishment a decade ago, the director who bestrode the ’70s with films like “MAS*H” and “Nashville” popped back up like some moviebiz Beetlejuice with “The Player,” a stun-gun satire of Hollywood. Taking advantage of his restored cachet, Altman moved ahead with a cherished project, “Short Cuts,” based on the work of the late short-story master Raymond Carver. The three hour-plus film (written by Altman with longtime collaborator Frank Barhydt) transforms several Carver stories involving 22 characters into a dazzlingly intricate and riveting portrait of America approaching a moral millennium.
“You just don’t quit, do you?” said Lauren Bacall to Altman after one of the screenings. Recalling that moment last week during a break at the sound studio, Altman said, with deceptive diffidence, “Well, I’m alive.” The diffidence is deceptive because Altman is enjoying his resurgence, even while he’s wary of a volatile industry that could turn its kiss into a bite before you could say Hannibal Lecter. Putting together “The Player” and “Short Cuts” so quickly is an extraordinary one-two punch. “People say ‘The Player’ is a movie about Hollywood,” said Altman. “But I was using Hollywood as a metaphor for the entire culture.” In “Short Cuts” he goes directly at the culture.
It’s rare that a great movie is made from the work of a great writer. “Directors try to be too reverent toward the material,” Altman said. When he first spoke to Tess Gallagher, Carver’s widow, about obtaining the rights to the stories, “I told her, ‘Don’t think I’m doing some homage or a literal translation. A lot of Carver fans are going to be disappointed’.” But Gallagher, a noted poet, was delighted with the way Altman “metamorphosed” the stories. She was also surprised that he used so many of her suggestions. “Like Ray, Altman is a chance-taker and a sticker. The movie is a daring mirror on America. Bob is saying we’re losing the distinction between fantasy and reality. I’m lucky to be alive to see it.”
Possibly no movie has ever made such a strong synthesis between a major American writer and a major American filmmaker. In Altman’s most complex and innovative structure, the stories interweave like themes in a jazz symphony. Jazz plays a major part in the film in the person of Annie Ross, the singer-actress who plays a decaying saloon singer. Her daughter (Lori Singer) is a classical cellist, and the two kinds of music reinforce the theme of emotional dissonance between parents and children, lovers and losers. A young mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works as a telephone-sex girl. An L.A. cop (Tim Robbins) cheats on his wife (Madeleine Stowe) with another woman (Frances McDormand) whose helicopter-pilot ex-husband (Peter Gallagher) takes a grotesque revenge on her. A waitress (Lily Tomlin) married to a boozing limo driver (Tom Waits) accidentally hits the young son of a TV commentator (Bruce Davison) and his wife (Andie MacDowell). Davison’s father (Jack Lemmon) does a nine-minute confessional speech that’s almost unbearable in its naked self-exposure. Lyle Lovett is a baker who plays a bizarre role in this family’s fate. Three buddies (Fred Ward, Buck Henry and Huey Lewis) go off on a fishing trip and find the nude body of a murdered girl in the river. Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, Lili Taylor, Chris Penn and Robert Downey Jr. round out one of the most remarkable ensemble casts in any American film.
The atmosphere of excitement at the screenings is unique in Altman’s career. “I’ve known Mike Nichols for maybe 15 years,” said Altman. “He’s never been very nice to me. He came up and said, ‘After seeing this movie I’m going to have to re-evaluate everything I do’.” But Altman can’t resist looking under the Hollywood rock. “Somebody told [producer] Joe Roth about seeing ‘Short Cuts’ and Roth said ‘I know, I know, it’s over three hours long, it’s great and it’s got a lot of frontal nudity.’ After all the subtlety, all the metaphors, all the work, it comes down to great, three hours, nudity.”
Well, whatever works. Altman’s peers, the directors, have reacted with a kind of ecstatic shock to “Short Cuts.” Robert Benton (“Kramer vs. Kramer”) says: “I love it beyond being jealous of it. He’s a guy who never gave up. A lot of us become more and more despairing as we get older. Here at 68 Altman makes his most radical movie. He’s the greatest argument for getting older.” Jonathan Demme, last year’s Oscar winner for “The Silence of the Lambs,” had one complaint: “It’s too short. You feel cheated that it didn’t go further. It’s a great ocean of a movie with vast calms, raging waves, everything. It can make you laugh so hard and then break your heart. Once again Altman has sent everybody back to square one.”
Altman himself keeps moving, the oldest American sprinter. He’s just signed a contract to film Tony Kushner’s epic, two-part, seven-hour play, “Angels in America,” which won the Pulitzer Prize last week and is about to open on Broadway. But that project is months away. Time enough for another movie. “Last night a lightning bolt hit me,” Altman reported. “I’m going to make a movie about my hometown, Kansas City, 1934, a multistory film about jazz, gangsters, Harry Truman. It’s my roots. I’m going home.” He is, he says, content. “I’ve been doing this since my 20s. I live well, I’ve had acclaim, I’ve had girls take off their knickers for me. Who’s had a better shake than me?” He’s still shakie.
1992: A scathing black comedy about Hollywood’s lower life forms, with many celebrities kind enough to play themselves. Tim Robbins is a movie exec who makes a different kind of killing.
1990: A penetrating study of the brothers van Gogh and an alternative to puffed-up Hollywood biopics.
1975: Altman sings the body electorate. A free-verse poem of politics, country music and all things American.
1973: A fitfully brilliant morality tale about a P.I. out of his depth in sordid southern California.
1971: Free enterprise comes to the mining town. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie run a saloon/whorehouse, and face a very hostile takeover.
1970: A viciously funny protest movie (that later spawned the hit TV series, minus Altman) about draftee doctors beating their heads against the Korean War. One shot fired. Countless casualties.
