Robert Altman,
b. Kansas City, Missouri, 1925 1955; The Delinquents. 1957; The James Dean Story. 1964: Nightmare in Chicago. 1967: Countdown. 1969: That CM Day in the Park. 1970: M’A'S’H; Brewster McCloud. 1971: McCabe rind Mrs. Millar. 1972: Images; The Long Goodbye. 1974-. Thieves Like Os; California Split. 1975: Nashville. 1976: Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. 1977: 3 Women. 1978: A Wedding.
Robert Altaian
1979: Quintet’ A Perfect Couple. 1980: Health; Popeye. 1982: Come Back to the 5 6- Dime, jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. 1983: Streamers. 1984: Secret Honor. 1985: Fool for Lone. 1987: “Les Boreades,” an episode from Aria; Beyond Therapy; O.C. and Sfiggs. 1988: Tanner ‘88 (TV). 1990: Vincent and Theo. 1992: The Player. 1993: Short Cuts.
In 1975, before I had seen Nashville, 1 wrote, “Altman seems less interested in structure than in atmosphere; scheme and character recede as chronic, garrulous discontinuity holds sway.” The tone was critical, and when I fell asleep in Nashville and then faced the unquestionable disaster of Buffalo Bill, I felt confirmed in my opinion of a director who could not tell stories but allowed us to assume or hope that he was interested in something else. As this is written, 1 remain uncertain about everything except the absence of a flawless film in Ajtman’s work. But going back to Nashville, some of the earlier films, and the first half of 3 Women made me reflect. Whether from confusion or density, Altman is that rarity in American cinema: a problem director, a true object of controversy, and a man whose films alter or shift at different viewings like shot silk.
M’A'S’H is still Altman’s only substantial hit, and one of his most overrated films. The willful looking away from war’s slaughter in favor of the preoccupations of camp life is original and arresting, but the movie is callous and flippant (so often, Altman wearies of his own experiments). The treatment of the Sally Kellerman and Robert Duvall characters is brutal, while the final football game is a feeble retreat to unenlightened conventions. That a cozy TV series could spin off from the movie reveals its compromises. Still, M°A°S°H began to develop the crucial Alt man style of overlapping, blurred sound and images so slipper)’ with zoom that there was no sense of composition.
That is what makes Nashville so absorbing—once you’re awake. The notion of twenty-six roughly equal characters moving in random turmoil and coincidence is the ideal material for his style: he aspires to film not just eccentric groups but seething masses. It remains enigmatic how organized or purposeful Nashville is, but there is an attitude to individuals and society in it—of helpless, amused affection, only occasionally spoiled by Altman’s weakness for cheap shots and druggy attitudinizing. The feeling of real time and space stretching to contain the actions of so many people, without moralizing, is both beautiful and demanding. The emiing is a

trite concession to the way commercial movies must end with some sort of resolution, but along the way there are countless moments of felt but uncaptioned human interaction that few American films have been wayward enough to notice. The mosaic, or the mix, permits a freedom and a human idiosyncrasy that Renoir might have admired.
In hindsight, I think California Split, The Long Goodbye, and McCahe and Mrs. Miller benefit from this style and lead it toward Nashville. But as soon as he concentrated on a few people, Altman looked an evasive fum-bler, unable to focus character or to shape his films. As alternatives, he pursued improvisation and a sort of decorative dismay. The Long Goodbye is an ingenious variation on a known genre, hut it has an empty soul: so great is the attention to pretty reflections and the crazed fragmentation of the theme song. All its playfulness leaves one frustrated, for Altman backs away from tragedy or real comedy: a sort of alert, floating drift is his essence, and it works best when people are involved for whom depth can be avoided.
Images is a forbiddingly half-baked showing off and horrid warning of what Altman may believe he’s striving for. Thieves Like Us has an authentic period flavor and a touch-ingly offhand treatment of the love story, but it is ruined by grotesque overemphasis and is far less an achievement than its model, Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night. 3 Women starts off like a breakthrough, but then succumbs to florid illusions of poetry, dream, and the mystical sisterhood of glum women, Buffalo Bill is a mess, too cute or too feckless to give the supportive irony that Paul Newman’s rather brave performance requires.
One of the fallacies attached to Altman is how good he is for actors. Evidently he inspires and captures the mood of a group, especially their vague sense of affinity. But individuals can suffer at his hands: Geraldine Chaplin is an actress tor Carlos Saura, while Altman makes fun of her; Harvey Keitel has been wasted, just as Keith Carradine has been damagingly indulged; Lily Tomliu offered a poignancy in Nashville that Altman was not prepared to touch; Janice Rule postures dreadfully in 3 Women; and Sterling Ilayden is allowed to substitute ham for pathos in The Long Goodbye^ nonentities are mixed in with talented players. But no one else has made as much of Elliott Gould-, the reappraisal of Chandler in The Long Goodbye emerges from Gould’s restless, spacey humor; Warren Beatty achieves nobility in McCabe and Mrs. Miller; while Shelley Duvall in 3 Women is a conception and a performance that take one’s breath away as we forget Hollywood figureheads and face a daft, pretty girl whose personality is as unstable and grating as a marble on a hard floor, rolling this way and that.
Perhaps Altman himself hardly knows how far he rejects the well-made movie (in a spirit of innovation) or cannot reconcile himself to its discipline. He is no more articulate in print than he is coherent on-screen. Like it or not, his method and his nirvana lie bevond meaning. Like Renoir, Warhol, and Rivette, he is a filmmaker clumsily or acutely loyal to the camera’s power of observation, and is bent on a new way of seeing. Drama—as Hollywood understood it—may have no place in the spectacle; the people may degenerate into shadows, reflections, and a hubbub of noise. It could be so aimless as to be antihuman; or it might embody a sense of people being like atoms whirling around to laws no one knows and thus part of a kind of play or hopeful gambling—as in California Split, easily the most passionate ot Altman’s pictures, so far, and one that sees a kind of philosophy in gentle futility.
In the eighties, Altman ran into hard times, obscure pictures, and a reliance on theatrical restagings for the camera that seemed pedestrian after the real movies of the previous decade. Health was pretty had, and Popeye was too much the comic book for a large audience. Come Back… is worthy and well acted, yet Altman never finds a way of transcending the mediocre, sentimental play. 1 .ikewise, Streamers and Secret Honor meekly and rather leadenly live up to their originals. Ftxil for Love- was as bad as Altman has been—how could Sam Shepard act in the film without realizing that Altman was imsuited to the play’s intense, enclosed, and mounting explosiveness? (And Shepard had directed Fool for Love on stage.)
Thereafter, Altman’s films found little or no release, But Vlncnnt and Then was a return to power and quality, even if it didn’t seem Alt-manes Short Cuts came from a number of Raymond Carver .stories—though several Carver enthusiasts disputed the fidelity of the film. It was Altman, for good and ill. The movie caught the slippery looseness of L.A., its casual violence, and its childishness with a precision seldom attempted by mainstream Hollywood, Most of the people were both awkward and interesting, and in many of the transitions there was an inspired sense of incidents interacting, reflecting, and making a kind of helpless, numb philosophy. As in Nashville, the cuts, the pans, and the looking sideways overcame the director’s innate cynicism. But there was also a squeamishness about people (except for pretty, undressed women) that curdled the film. The scale of Short Cutv made this bitterness obtrusive and as disconcerting as Altman’s irritable superiority. Fie has so much facility, so little faith. Few people in L.A. liked Short Cuts—which suggests how good it is.