THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: SHORT CUTS (1993)

Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a mosaic of people who are perpetually faced with bad decisions and who constantly take the wrong path. So, basically it’s about you and me. A spiderweb crack of broken souls stitched together by geography, relationships, and happenstance, Altman takes his well-traveled formula of regular folks just doing regular folks things and applies them to the disconnected, minimalist tales of Raymond Carver, lyricist of the Pacific Northwestern middle class.

The intertwining tales of twenty-two main characters as they navigate a 48 hour stretch in Los Angeles, Short Cuts is the quintessential Robert Altman film and reflects just what a beautiful match his cinematic vision was with Carver’s literary one. And, remarkably, it’s not a straight adaptation at all. Where Carver’s characters existed in their own vacuums that were ripe with meaning in the nine stories that make up the bones of Altman’s film, the common thread afforded to the characters in Altman’s universe is one of miserable parental neglect and colossal personal failure, two themes later played in a similar key in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, itself an operatic ode to casual SoCal connectivity.

Altman also relocates Carver’s rainy and soggy world to Los Angeles of 1993 as it is just on the precipice of technological progress that will forever change the landscape of human interaction. There is no interconnectivity due to the internet but cell phones make an appearance in Short Cuts,though they are of the Zach Morris variety and look more like blunt instruments than tools of communication. In the world of Altman, people are linked together by television programs and natural disasters, both major and minor. In Carver, the only thing connecting the characters is the book binding and the author’s name at the top of each page.

Some of the stories Altman and co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt utilize for the film survive in a form resembling completion. “So Much Water So Close to Home,” the story that makes up the action involving Fred Ward, Huey Lewis, Buck Henry, and Annie Archer, is more or less intact. Other stories are stripped for parts; “Vitamins,” an epic tale about a man who carries on with his wife’s co-worker, only faintly exists in the club confrontation between Chris Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Darnell Williams.

In this world, people meet randomly at concerts, bump into each other in parking lots, and otherwise drift in and out of clustered orbits due to their professions. Class is separated by a phone line as sisters gab with each other amid the chaos of their spouses leaving for work, one a doctor and the other a motorcycle cop. Race is bisected by hospital rooms, with two different kids’ lives hanging in the balance, one is black and one is white; both are victims of the dumbest luck imaginable. People invade each other’s space and engage in transference of energy, creating and destroying as they go oftentimes so absorbed in themselves that they’re oblivious to the wreckage they leave behind.

In Short Cuts, the children are either over-coddled or dysfunctionally adrift. Parents hold dark, wounded secrets and keep their offspring distant by design lest they have to reckon with the damage their choices have caused. Jack Lemmon’s estranged father is one of his most painfully realized characters of his entire career. When he wanders into the film at the halfway mark, he’s treated as if he is a stranger who has been lost for thirty years. We soon learn that he’s been living in Riverside which, despite being about an hour’s drive from his son’s house, might as well be on the other side of the world. When Annie Ross’s adult daughter shows up at the club in which Ross works, the owner is stunned to learn she even exists even though she lives with Ross nearby.

Pursuits are futile. The fish, the symbol of an event that creates a schism between a fisherman and his wife, goes up in smoke before it can be eaten. The cake, the center of the film’s nastiest (and cruelly hilarious) passages and a representation of the last vestige of a grieving mother’s dead son, ends up in the goddamn trash before she can even see it. Death is dealt with in a stark, unsentimental way. These things happen and this is what it looks like. A woman who is raped and killed creates a moral and practical quandary for a group of fishermen but it emotionally waylays another character. A deadly attack on a young girl, generated from emasculated sexual insecurity, is misidentified as an earthquake accident. Things shake up, people fall down, but everyone seems to survive and move forward.

I realize that the descriptions above make Short Cuts sound like a depressing slog or a funeral dirge but nothing could be further from the truth. Altman’s precision-oriented focus on character causes every single line of dialogue (often, in true Altman fashion, overlapping with other lines of dialogue) has a breath of life and even when they go wrong, the characters’ actions seem as familiar as muscle memory. Unless you’re an uptight, humorless bore, human foibles are only no fun when they’re yours but they’re highly entertaining when they’re being displayed by someone else. Short Cuts is literally like people-watching a cross section of American society without any of the voyeuristic guilt. And with the film’s impossibly perfect cast giving some of the best performances of their individual careers (Tom Waits has entered the chat), the film should be seen as downright irresistible to anyone interested in the craft of giving an understated performance lacking in all pretense.

Like California Split, the Los Angeles landscape is almost gone its own character, steeped in the functional ordinariness from the pavement-up instead of the Hollywood sign-down. And, just as the previous year’s The Player existed on the edge of change, Short Cuts is a snapshot of an America in rapid flux. Those cell phones will get smaller, our worlds will grow and shrink simultaneously and, parking lot photo huts, the location of the film’s best gags and once as ubiquitous and recognizable as the red roof of a PIzza Hut, will soon be replaced with drive-up ATM’s.

Stylistically graceful, threading the stories of randomness and chance with clever match cuts and seamless transitions, the canvas may be as busy as any Altman film but it’s never not a clear view of humanity at its most mediocre while attempting to be just good enough. A celebration of remarkable ordinariness that uncannily matches Raymond Carver’s triumphs in minimalism, if not for Nashville, Short Cuts would be Robert Altman’s crowning achievement.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

No Country for Old Men: John G. Avildsen’s SAVE THE TIGER

John G. Avildsen has always been a champion of the underdog and his film SAVE THE TIGER is no exception; it is a beautiful tragedy of a man who has pushed himself mentally and physically past the point of no return and he’s fighting with all his might to claw back for a second chance. But does he deserve it; should he deserve it? He’s cheated, cooked the books, in arson negotiations – all to survive.

Jack Lemmon, in his Oscar winning performance, has never been better. He truly is heartbreaking as Harry Stoner. He navigates the waters of his hollow and inflated garment business, setting up buyers with kinky hookers, meeting with a mobster to burn his building down, and suffering from PTSD from his tour in Italy during WWII. Harry does all this, so he can survive one more year, because he is sure his business will recover – but what gain and what loss? Harry is positioning himself to enter into a never ending cycle of hustle where there isn’t a clear goal set before him – or at least one that is tangible.

Lemmon is not Jack Lemmon in this film. While his affability is certainly played on, Harry Stoner is a broken man with absolutely nothing left. His time in the sun is limited, and he knows it. Lemmon is on fire in this film, he chews up the dialogue, he briskly breezes by the camera; he is always on the move. He is looking down the barrel of his own extinction; there’s no stopping his character’s trajectory.

Steven Shagan pens a deeply layered and fertile script. It’s a construction of who Harry is as a man, while simultaneously deconstructing what it is to be a man. The dialogue written, particularly for Harry, is so stoic and to the point, he almost belongs in a hard noir genre picture, or at the very least a Michael Mann neo noir. The film is dark, perverse, and heartbreaking – yet rays of hope shine through the bleak world Avildsen creates.

There’s a kinship between SAVE THE TIGER and Avildsen’s seminal picture, JOE. While he had marked his career as the king of the underdogs, what’s more striking is a subsection of being the champion of the ones going extinct, the forgotten man. Harry Stoner’s world has rapidly evolved to him being phased out. The world doesn’t care about him, his patriotic sacrifices, or his struggles; yet all he ever wanted was a second chance.

Oliver Stone’s JFK

I’m not so much for political films but Oliver Stone’s JFK is an engrossing, obsessive, feverish and altogether brilliant piece of clandestine intrigue and I loved every minute of its impossibly long runtime (the director’s cut runs well over three hours). It might be excessive to take such an indulgent amount of time for one story to play out but Stone is fixated on every single aspect and detail of his narrative, scrutinizing the dark corners of shadowy politics, leaving no stone unturned and the result is a film that draws you in so close that at times the effect is breathless, a surging momentum full of moving parts, characters and secrets all unfolding in a mammoth production.

Stone has taken the real life investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, used it as a launching pad and blasted off into his own theories, queries and plot turns. Kevin Costner is excellent and uncharacteristically vulnerable as Garrison, an idealistic family man determined to shine a light on the truth until he realizes he and his firm are in over their heads. This thing has one of the most jaw dropping ensemble casts I’ve ever seen assembled, right down to supporting turns, cameos and walk-ons populated by recognizable faces. Costner and his team are the constant, a dogged troupe that includes varied folks like Laurie Metcalf, Wayne Knight, Jay O. Sanders, Gary Grubbs and the always awesome Michael Rooker. We spend the most time with them as they discuss theories at length, argue in roundtable fashion, interview witnesses and it all feels eerily as if every discovery they make leads to ten more even more unnerving ones. Others show up throughout the film and when I say this is a cast for the ages I’m not even kidding. Jack Lemmon does paranoia flawlessly as a nervous informant they visit, Gary Oldman is a super creepy Lee Harvey Oswald, Joe Pesci impossibly rambunctious as oddball David Ferrie, Tommy Lee Jones and his poodle wig are icky as a corrupt US Senator and that’s just the start, there’s great work from everyone under the sun including John Candy, Walter Matthau, Sissy Spacek, Vincent D’onofrio, Kevin Bacon, Martin Sheen, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Edward Asner, Frank Whaley, Brian Doyle Murray, Bob Gunton, Lolita Davidovich, John Larroquette and more. Donald Sutherland is pure showstopper as a mystery man who has an epic, sixteen minute long tinfoil hat monologue that is so well delivered and perfectly pitched that we don’t even really notice what a massive enema of exposition it is simply because he and Stone keep up the energy levels and, in turn, us riveted.

That’s the thing here, I went in expecting perhaps something intriguing but maybe a little dry in places or bits that might lag because it is, after all, a three plus hour film revolving around politics. This is Stone though, and the way he films it is taut and immersive the *entire* way through, which is just so fucking impressive. He plays rogue agent with the facts, using established suspicions to draw one wild conclusion after another until we aren’t sure if everyone we see onscreen perhaps had something to do with JFK’s death. That’s his goal here though, he seeks not to provide concrete answers (how could he) but instil the kind of creeping dread, mounting uncertainty and fear that I imagine gripped the nation for years following this event. Conflicting conspiracy theories, clues that lead to nothing, unexplained and admittedly suspicious witness deaths, it’s all here and it all makes for one damn good mystery film.

-Nate Hill

James Foley’s GLENGARY GLEN ROSS

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The deconstruction of the alpha male has never been so fierce as it is in GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. The entire film is one pitfall after pitfall of brazen machoism being shed, and the true colors of all the characters are blatantly glowing by the end of the film. They are men who strive to be the best, without having any idea what that really means.

David Mamet is one of America’s most seminal playwrights, and James Foley has always been a filmmaking champion in regards to slow burning character studies. Mix both these auteurs with the greatest cinematic ensemble ever, and what we have is a masterclass of filmmaking in any and every aspect possible.

The blistering dialogue and fiery performances are so powerful that after each dialogue exchange we’re left completely gobsmacked by what we’ve just witnessed. Regardless of how many times you’ve seen the film, how many times you’ve quoted Alec Baldwin’s punchy lines; the film is still as fresh and potent as your first viewing.

The film strikes a very fine balance bewteen tearing down the archetypal 20th century man, yet shadows as a cautionary tale of how hollow and empty all these characters are. Beneath the ego and big talk, these are all men who have put up the ultimate eminence front (it’s a put on). They are all incredibly sad and broken people, who have lived lives of emptiness, regardless of the charade of their salesmen banter.

This film remains the benchmark for an acting ensemble. Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, and Jonathan Pryce all feed off each other so well, it is an awesome experience to absorb. There have been fantastic ensembles before this film and after this film, but there will never be an equivalent calibre of actors together on screen ever again.