Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a film that feels preserved in amber. It’s a slow paced and bleak look at the inevitability of death, and I can’t seem to find one negative thing to say about this neglected work of art. Neglected in the sense that it’s not on Blu-ray; how the hell can this be? This film deserves nothing less than some love and restoration from The Criterion Collection, and it’s a further reminder of how versatile and unique a filmmaker Robert Altman was, especially when compared with today’s cook-cutter studio mentality. I love how this film isn’t really a “western” in the traditional sense, but it’s got the atmosphere and personality of one at times, and don’t get me started on the use of overlapping dialogue and ambient background noise – weak in the knees I get with this stuff. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie were both flawless here, subverting expectations and creating two lasting portraits of tough-love individuals who are more realists than anything else. Vilmos Zsigmond’s warmly fuzzy cinematography goes for wide shots mixed with slow zooms, creating a sense of openness while still retaining a certain level of intimacy, and never losing sight of the desolate and chilly landscape. The “flashing” technique that Altman and Zsigmond favored in post created a halo effect to the images, eliminating any color saturation, resulting in a picture quality that’s dreamy and opaque. Roger Deakins must have watched this movie 1,000 times before shooting The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. There’s an aesthetic chill that extends to the film’s themes as well, creating total package cinema, and it’s strikingly unsentimental in a way that most filmmakers could only have dreamed of achieving. Few other filmmakers would have been able to pull of the tricky balancing act that is McCabe & Mrs. Miller, yet Altman, ever the sly storyteller, managed to keep you engaged to a narrative that offers little in the way of conventional cinematic pleasure, and instead invites you to watch and listen as two exceedingly selfish yet practical people try and figure out how to survive life in some of the most unpredictable and unsparing of circumstances. A film like this NEVER gets made today.
Podcasting Them Softly 