Robert Altman – Podcasting Them Softly

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: READY TO WEAR <PRÊT-Á-PORTER> (1994)

December 1, 2021December 1, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Opening on an image that links fashion with death (“Poison”) and the purchase of two gaudy Christian Dior ties, an acerbic tone is immediately set for Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear (initially titled Prêt-á-Porter, which it retains in its opening credits). After all, a film that promises to take a gander at the world of the vacuous fashion industry through the eyes of Altman, one of filmmaking’s keenest observers of human nature no matter how ridiculous, comes front-loaded with delicious possibilities. Unfortunately, everyone (Altman included) looks like they’re having too much fun and in too good of spirit for any of it to land with much weight. Ultimately, this is a movie where looking good is primary. The inability to match any piece of clothing with the stupid tie at the beginning of the movie is the catalyst of the perpetual conflict in the film which is also its greatest flaw. Nothing matches and nothing fits. In the end, clothes become meaningless. Yeah, the world of fashion is all stupid and gouache but, honestly, who gives a fuck when time is short and life is so much fun? Fair enough. But if everything is such a trifle, why should I care about any of Ready to Wear and devote 132 minutes to it if it doesn’t say anything beyond the obvious?

Ready to Wear, like many other Altman films, is an ensemble, wide-canvassed affair in which a multitude of characters mill around a central location and we traverse the course of their lives over a fixed amount of time. In this instance, we find ourselves in France during Paris Fashion Week where armies of journalists, designers, models, photographers, and schmoozers will crawl all over each other and a bunch of dog shit to get the front row seat for a glimpse at the germination of what will be the style for next season. If the financially hectic and cacophonous world of commodity futures seems baffling but fascinating, the world of fashion seems eerily similar, just pitched on the other side of the spectrum. Instead of utilizing information and guesswork to set monetary benchmarks for certain products, what we wear today was based off of something high-end yesterday which got its idea from something ultimately unwearable and ridiculous that was salivated over and ambulated across a catwalk during Paris Fashion Week.

Like Nashville (1975) and HealtH (1980), Ready to Wear builds towards a Big Event conclusion. Unlike those two films, the road to that conclusion is fun but entirely inessential. Beginning with the choking death of the tremendously disliked fashion mogul, Olivier de la Fontaine (Jean-Pierre Cassel), and ending with the unveiling of Simone Lowenthal’s (Anouk Aimée) newest clothing line, the creme filling of Ready to Wear is sometimes rich and sometimes delicious but also messy beyond the point of charming and, curiously, not very filling. For Ready to Wear is a tapestry of various vacuums lacking a feeling of true integration for all of its parts. As bickering newspaper reporters full of as much piss and vinegar as they are devoid of professional or personal integrity, the two (Julia Roberts from the Houston Chronicle and Tim Robbins from the Washington Post) end up falling into a French mini-comedy that sticks them in the same hotel room they cannot seem to ever leave as drinking and fucking become the primary activities that rule supreme in their orbit. As cute as this bit is, it feels completely disconnected from the rest of the film.

And this is double ditto for the thread involving Teri Garr and Danny Aielllo which is only worthwhile for the appearance of both actors appearing in the same frame. In this thread, Garr is set up as a secret paramour to Aiello but the punchline that eventually arrives lands like a big “so what?” while trying to get more mileage out of a (better) visual gag from 1974 with Bert Remsen in California Split. In the instances of these two character couples, I can’t help but feel like both stories are loose strands that would have been better off cut from the whole picture which may have also tightened up the narrative, created more focus, and put this in the company of Altman’s sharp and unjustly maligned, aforementioned HealtH. As they stand, both give the game away and tip Ready to Wear more in the direction of a grand party on the edge of the end of the century and less a wickedly biting satire on the fashion industry. And, consequentiallly, their pieces bloat the project and dilute it of its venom.

I can also say the above applies to Kim Basinger’s arch performance as hick reporter Kitty Wells. Forever out of her depth and highlighting the world of high fashion as steeped in all kinds of invented eruditeness, her “cultured” subjects always juxtapose with her ridiculous, bumpkin patois (both syllables of Dior are blasted out of her mouth like a shotgun and given equal weight). Cute, but she’s just Opal from the BBC in a hillbilly skin and adds nothing to the project other than giving the then-in-demand Basinger a chance to work with Altman again.

While excess is the name of the game in Ready to Wear, Altman seems downright undisciplined in parts. The MacGuffin of hunting for the “murderer” of Cassell’s character feels lazy and, like the threads mentioned above, it would be relatively easy to excise. After all, we still have quite a bit of structure left regarding some palace intrigue surrounding Simone’s business due to the machinations of her ambitious son (Rupert Everett) and a comedy of errors regarding three fashion editors (Sally Kellerman, Linda Hunt, and Tracey Ullman) trying to court a pretentious and self-satisfied photographer (Stephen Rea). In both cases, these two pieces of Ready to Wear are the ones that bring out some of the film’s richest and funniest characters, both primary and secondary. Of course, it’s entirely possible that there is more footage that exists that would go a long way better integrating some of these elements (Kellerman said as much in the press at the time of the film’s release). Given that this is a Miramax film of a certain vintage, it would shock me none to find out that Altman learned the lesson that most all learned when passing through the now-disgraced House of Weinstein and that creative control was all illusory. In the end, this was the only time he worked with the company, taking his action to other, smaller indies for the remainder of his career.

The 90’s were more or less as if the hedonistic 70’s had returned from a vacation in the money hungry 80’s and Ready to Wear ultimately finds Robert Altman caught up in the giant spectacle of colorful and loud vapidity that colored the decade. In fact, this movie is probably the closest in spirit to a celebration of the 90’s that there ever was. In highlighting the outlandish and garish nature of the world of fashion, Altman unveils a shallow culture that doesn’t give a shit about politics, gender, sex, or anything else. Everything is a hustle in the pursuit of a good time which, obviously, runs on money. This is a film that says those things with some elements of criticism but this is also a film that was also a multi-media product generator as it was released alongside its mass market screenplay book from Hyperion Press (almost a staple with any Miramax film released in the 90’s) and its uncommonly hip (for an Altman joint) soundtrack, the latter a crass idea satirized by Altman in the opening credits of Nashville all those years ago.

Not without its own certain charm, Ready to Wear is by no means a bad movie. It’s just a phenomenally inconsequential one. For all of its light callbacks to previous Altman films, its charming moments (mostly all belonging to Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroiannni), and is heavy emphasis on 90’s excess, the film feels like a soft confection wrapped up in opulent packaging. The end is explicitly articulated as the closing of a circle and Altman is a little ahead of the curve, but Ready to Wear’s denouement is a little more satisfyingly nihilistic than it is laugh-out-loud funny. If the idea of a clothing line that features no clothes seems like an unthinkable thing not worth considering, let me tell you about the vulgar game show host from Queens, New York who one day became the President of the United States.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: SHORT CUTS (1993)

November 29, 2021November 29, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

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.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: THE PLAYER (1992)

November 16, 2021November 16, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

It’s remarkable to consider the elements that went into the production of Robert Altman’s The Player, the 1992 adaptation of Michael Tolkin’s incendiary novel from 1988 about the bitter grist mill that is Hollywood. Here was a hot screenplay, written by Tolkin himself, that quite literally took the fiercest of aims at itself with a toughness not seen since Alexander Mackendrick’s The Sweet Smell of Success in 1957. That Hollywood would want to get fifteen feet of it was surprising. That the project would fall into Altman’s lap as he was hazily stumbling out of a decade-long exile in the show business wilderness on the shoulders of his triumphant Vincent & Theo, a miniseries made for British television in 1990 that was then edited and released to stateside theatrical audiences to some of Altman’s best notices in years, was unthinkable. That Altman would use the project with maximum glee to give both fingers to Hollywood with the loudest “fuck you” that he could muster was glorious. That Hollywood participated in and loved him for it, showering him with the kind of accolades and support not felt since about 1975 was as heartwarming as it was puzzling. After all, Altman used the film to charge them with being shallow, amoral phonies and they responded with “we know; welcome to director’s heaven.” For after The Player, Altman was never starved of a juicy theatrical project with A-listers champing at the bit to work with him. As Harvey Keitel’s character said in Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians “Boy, I tell you there is no business like the show business.”

One of Altman’s greatest films, The Player is, on the surface, a neo-noir involving studio executive, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), who, after receiving a litany of anonymous, threatening postcards from a writer he once brushed off, accidentally kills an idealistic screenwriter (Vincent D’Onofrio) who Mill believes to be the originator of the postcards. Mill then does his damndest to avoid suspicion and arrest by members of the Pasadena police department (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett) while reckoning with the fact that his his position at the studio is in continuous jeopardy due to internal politics.

I say The Player is a neo-noir because the film is awash in both references to shadowy crime films of the past (posters of Laura, The Big House, and Niagara decorate the offices of the unnamed studio in which Griffin toils) and in the attitudes of its characters, most especially studio security chief, Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward), who doesn’t seem to care that movies were made after 1958. Mill himself is not a man who’s been wrongly accused but more like a Colombo antagonist, dipping and ducking the cops while drawing the worst kind of attention to himself by brazenly dating the dead man’s girlfriend (a fantastic Greta Scacchi).

This is a strong film made stronger by the details. Not only is the main story of the beleaguered executive utterly compelling, the studio politics swirling about are fascinating, revealing an industry not to terribly different from any other despite its high-powered glitz. Gina Gershon’s ambitious assistant is an easy character to miss on a first watch but a real joy to observe on repeat viewings as she slyly moves with the winds of corporate change. Like the best of Altman’s work, this film has a life beyond its central story. The movie’s color palate, captured brilliantly by cinematographer Jean Lepine, gets darker and darker as the film goes on and as the characters become more and more corrupted. When Robbins and Scacchi beat retreat to a desert hot springs, they wander about as if they are in a Stygian hell, both of them sweating profusely during a sexual encounter and then, in the bright daylight and finding themselves both morally compromised, they relax in a vat of mud. Even therapeutic measures taken by the characters look dirty and unclean.

And if one thinks the film is just aimed at the upper crust of Hollywood, it should be mentioned that The Player spares absolutely nobody. Even writers are portrayed as pretentious, failed artists who cannot reconcile the fact that Hollywood is a machine that produces content that might accidentally stumble into being art; folks perpetually screaming into a void about quality, grit, and realism in a sausage factory.

Ten years after the alumnus of the New Hollywood movement had mostly become for-hire workhorses in an industry overtaken by corporations and accountants, the Hollywood in The Player is bursting at the seams with buzzy soothsayers who spend their days reducing movies down to one sentence and twisting them in the lights of various movie stars to see just how much money could be made with the right alignment. They’re able to pinpoint what makes money and what doesn’t by dispassionately rattling off a litany of attributes necessary for a film to be successful as if it were second nature.

Due to its extensive roster of incredible cameos, The Player also now functions as a Hollywood graveyard in perpetual motion, both literally and figuratively. On one hand, each year seems to bring the end of one of the many faces seen on the margins or in the cast of The Player and, as of this writing, the light of the seemingly indestructible star that was Dean Stockwell is the most recent to go dark. Julia Roberts, a fresh-faced talent when cameras rolled on this film is now a long-time vet, replaced many times over by Americans Sweetheart. Bruce Willis, such an A-list action star that his name and appearance is a running gag in the film, is now relegated to tongue-in-cheek action films for the AARP set. The specific brand of Hollywood that was in flux in 1992 is, in the waning days of 2021, a thing of the past.

And, of course, no conversation about The Player can occur without the mention of its breathtaking, staggeringly choreographed, eight and a half minute opening shot. To give some kind of measure to the difficulty in getting the shot from its opening image to ending on a cryptic postcard message that is read by the audience between two slats in a set of Venetian blinds, pulling it off in one take is like diving off the edge of the Grand Canyon in the hopes that you’ll stick the landing in an area with the circumference of a shot glass. And the self reflexive nature of the shot is stunning. Buck Henry shows up in the shot to pitch The Graduate Part II just as a conversation about Julian Temple’s long take in Absolute Beginners is referenced; Henry himself having participated in Temple’s “one-take” piece in Aria, an omnibus film from 1987 to which Altman also contributed. This is a movie about movies and, moreover, Altman always wants you to be aware of that. Before the action even begins and the first onscreen credit is witnessed, Altman allows his voice and the slate marker to be heard and witnessed, all in front of a tapestry of a filmmaker in action. We’re always looking through the looking glass that’s three panes deep.

And what we see is Hollywood as a poisonous food chain perpetually getting fatter, more desensitized, sleazier, and more desperate as the times change. “Movies… now more than ever” is the motto of Griffin’s studio that’s on the hamster wheel that will inevitably break down and will likely someday be swallowed by a giant whale. What more imagination can be expected from a place where decisions are made by a guy who, when told of a movie idea about a planet with two suns, automatically wants to know who plays the sons?

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: VINCENT & THEO (1990)

August 31, 2021August 31, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo begins amid an industrial clang of a score by Gabriel Yared over a vibrant smear of colored oil paints which suddenly shifts to a Christie’s auction in which Vincent Van Gough’s 1888 still life, “Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers,” is going up for sale, climbing higher and higher in value as ridiculous amounts of money are outbid by even more ridiculous amounts. As the auction’s image gives way to a disheveled Vincent (Tim Roth coming in like a force of nature), crumpled up on a bed like a graying wet newspaper and awaiting a chewing out by his more responsible and nattily dressed brother, Theo (Paul Rhys perfectly camped out on the edge of an emotional outburst), the audience is given a sense of how much people are paying for pain and debasement when they’re investing in a Van Gough. For the disparity between a pauper’s life of misery and anguish and the revered saint of post-impressionistic art whose works can now fetch the price of a small island state is a vast one, indeed.

But Vincent & Theo isn’t about the raving mad Vincent Van Gough, although it has plenty of that. As Altman’s film is a two-hander and there is as much Theo as there is Vincent, it is a full examination of co-dependency and masculine love, almost becoming the California Split of painter biopics. But it’s also making a comment on the very tenuous and special relationship between the crazy, hedonistic, and unchained artist and the very real, very tangible world of dollars and cents that have to be considered which generally takes a cooler and more centered head to navigate. How in the wild world do these two things exist in a relationship?

I don’t know but it sounds an awful lot like the relationship between a producer and a director which is why Robert Altman seems so keen on this project. It’s a meditation about the heavy conflict between creation for sanity and curation for profit which dogged Altman almost throughout his entire career. While his work mostly settled on American culture and dotted the entire map like a beautiful quilt, Altman’s Vincent & Theo is decidedly outside the confines of the United States and, in terms of laying all of his out in chronological order, predates everything else in his canon, setting itself out to be an origin story of the independent artist guided by a mad spirit that cannot be defined.

Smartly written by Julian Mitchell, the story of Vincent & Theo is bracketed between Vincent’s desire to become a painter and his suicide, with his brother Theo, an art exhibitor and dealer, always playing the shadow side of the narrative coin. If 3 Women is Altman’s most Lynchian film, Vincent & Theo is almost Cronenbergian in its vision of intertwined beings who can hardly thrive without each other’s influence on the other. And while this dichotomous relationship certainly didn’t originate with Vincent and Theo Van Gough, Altman directs it like it did. By utilizing bold and rich colors to express mood and setting, time and place, Vincent & Theo is front-loaded with a crisp and stately style that feels very controlled while still registering as Altmanesque, preceding the brilliantly shaggy Masterpiece Theater approach taken with Gosford Park a decade later.

Vincent & Theo, helped in no small way by Jean Lepine’s ravishing cinematography, does a marvelous job recreating some of Van Gough’s landscapes, subjects, and locations such as the hangout that was immortalized in “The Night Cafe” or the many number of rustic and vast fields touched golden by the bright and boisterous sunlight. Initially made for British television and composed of four 50 minute episodes that function like the seasons, the construction of the narrative, always creating a give and take between the two characters and showing yin and yang contrasts, is nothing short of breathtaking. In one scene, Vincent and his prostitute model/companion, Sien (Jip Wijngaarden), finalize their living arrangements with each other and in the next, Theo and Marie (Anne Canovas) discuss the same, followed by a monologue in which Theo reminisces about a painting he saw in which he wanted to enter and never leave. Cut to the following scene where Sien’s young daughter literally steps into the staging area of a panorama to micturate; both fulfilling Theo’s wish to enter a painting and also subverting it by pissing all over it. The staid domesticity of the syphilitic Theo and Marie is contrasted with the rawer, gritty poverty-laden life of Vincent and Sien with both men ultimately achieving the same result as both are eventually left alone and slathered in oils as if they were forever destined to the same fate. This goes on until the film begins to examine the relationship between Vincent and Paul Gaugin (Wladimir Yordanoff) who acts as a spiritual relation in the absence of Theo, married and in Paris, his own health slowly deteriorating. The relationship between Gaugin is volatile and competitive instead of nurturing and supportive, which causes a rapidity in Vincent’s mental decline which parallels Theo’s physical one. The madness that inhabited Vincent manifests itself in Theo in the films closing moments as, spiraling toward a death that would occur only the following year of his brother’s, voids his gallery of all commercial artwork and covers it, almost pathologically, with nothing Vincent’s work.

After spending a decade in the wilderness crafting mostly small, intimate adaptations of stage plays, with both Tanner ‘88 and Vincent & Theo, the latter of which had been edited down by an hour and released in theaters in November of 1990 to very positive notices, Robert Altman entered the new decade with two of his most ambitious and successful projects since the late 70’s under his belt. But during that period in which Altman had kept a lower profile and focused on the more intimate tasks at hand, Hollywood was beginning to reckon with smaller, independent studios encroaching on their territory and allowing inroads for newer, fresher talent. When all of this came to a head in 1989 with Steven Soderbergh’s modest sex, lies, and videotape which became THE story at the Cannes Film Festival by winning the Palme d’Or and emerging a small financial bonanza as it earned $24 million domestically against a $1.2 million production budget, the future of cinema was given a breath of fresh air. As it looked to be 1968 all over again, Hollywood again tapped the vein of the new blood who were all too eager to get their foot in the door and this push gave us the aforementioned Soderbergh, Whit Stillman, Quentin Tarantino, and Altman acolyte Paul Thomas Anderson.

“Do you always have to go so far on principle, Theo? Or does it come to you naturally?” is the first line of scripted dialogue in Vincent & Theo. It goes mostly unanswered by Vincent. But as the Hollywood tides turned and Altman’s mid-career artistic peaks were occurring at just the right time for someone to give the old master (who, by that point, had become a patron saint to the new class of filmmakers) a chance to get back into the majors, Altman would definitely give it an answer in his next endeavor.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: TANNER ‘88 (1988)

August 17, 2021August 17, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Even with questionable projects like Quintet and A Perfect Couple finding their ways into theaters in 1979 only to find his fortunes crater in 1980 with the underperforming Popeye and the mostly never-released HealtH, it would still appear that, on paper at least, Robert Altman’s sojourn away from the multiplexes from 1988 to 1992 was the absolute bottom of his long and illustrious career. For during this period he worked exclusively on projects envisioned for the small screen. Some of these were good as was the case with his adaptation of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial,and some of these were the direct opposite of good as was the case with Basements, his adaptation of twin Harold Pinter pieces, “The Dumb Waiter” and “The Room.” But even on wobbly legs that could only be glimpsed in the living rooms across America, from this stretch of time also sprung Tanner ‘88, Altman’s absolute crowning achievement of the 1980’s and one of the greatest and most significant works of his entire career. If Altman’s Nashville is the greatest film about America, Tanner ‘88 is the greatest work about American politics.

Written by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau and directed by Altman (and advised by future Clinton advisor, Sydney Blumenthal), Tanner ‘88 was a wildly creative and incalculably influential eleven-episode miniseries that spans the course of six hours and was broadcast on HBO between February 15th and August 22nd in 1988. Fluctuating between the real-time cable news drama of the very real Democratic presidential primary of that year and the bustling, fictional world of Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy), liberal idealist and one-time Michigan congressman now thrust into the maelstrom of a presidential campaign, Tanner ‘88 dissected American politics with skilled precision, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction as Tanner and his dysfunctional campaign intermixed with real pols and press all the way up to the Michael Dukakis/Lloyd Bentsen-coronated convention in Atlanta.

By running a clear-intentioned but befuddled antique of a candidate in Jack Tanner, Altman was able to get in there to document American politics on the cusp of a new age of information; 24 hour cable news working overtime to numb the minds of many voters, causing them to tune out due to over-saturation. In doing so, Altman sends up the technical bugs that plague on-the-fly productions that occur in politics and live television such as roving optical titles that sometimes shuffled between multiple names before landing on the correct person who’s doing a shoot interview and miscommunications galore despite sitting atop a bank of telephones. Tanner ‘88’s shot-on-video foundation (lensed by longtime Altman camera operator, Jean Lepine) has all the artistic greyscale of a Gregory Dark porn from the same period but it doesn’t damage Tanner ‘88 in the slightest. Instead, it appropriately gives the piece an immediacy, underlying its theme of authenticity and emboldening its independent spirit while still retaining Altman’s busy and impeccable onscreen choreography.

As my old man was the executive director of the Oklahoma Democratic Party in 1976 and worked for many governors and twice as many gubernatorial campaigns so a whole lot of Tanner ‘88 registers with me as authentic, most especially Pamala Reed’s TJ Cavanaugh, erstwhile campaign manager of the Tanner operation. I have known so many folks just like her; hardened political professionals who have to constantly see one election cycle in the future to stay employed. Likewise, famous are stories like the New Hampshire couple in the opening episode; people who politicians chase for photo ops as the kind of salt of the earth individuals with whom one wants to be photographed around the kitchen table but, in reality, are political starfuckers who collect autographs and Polaroids of the various candidates who drift through their kitchen.

In terms of 1988, Jack Tanner predicts Bill Clinton by about four years. Hell, if not for Clinton’s more folksy backstory and a lasting marriage, there’s not much that separates Jack from the 42nd President. In some ways, Tanner is to Clinton what Monty Python’s Brian is to Jesus Christ. Only a single presidential cycle separates them but that cycle makes the world of difference. For Tanner is a candidate for the wrong era. Clinton would have been much more politically cynical about cutting a commercial that was surreptitiously shot from under a glass coffee table or taking advantage of a private pain for political advantage. What Tanner ‘88 gets to the heart of is how decent and flawed people with true convictions and a desire to act on behalf of the public good can be completely shut out by the decision-making process where it counts because of a media environment that feels like a foreign land where one can’t quite see all the cannibals and the want to crack through the facade of “making great television” is an absolute fool’s errand.

What Altman couldn’t have known is the funhouse mirror Tanner ‘88 creates in both his career and in American politics. Already disillusioned with eight straight years of Reagan which, to folks like Altman, was a more refined and dangerous and disingenuous Richard Nixon for the worn-out Boomer generation, he looks at a landscape rendered unrecognizable by the the ever blurring line that separates celebrity and politics and how the poisonous tabloid luridness seeped into our national bones. By pinpointing this moment in time in 1988 with the inevitable election of then-Vice President George H. W. Bush (which was like building an extra room onto the previous eight years), Altman both recalls the political seeds in 1975’s Nashville but also sets up his penultimate effort, Tanner on Tanner, where America finds herself staring down the next four years of another Bush administration in the absolute death throes of a media landscape that took root in 1988.

The best way to absorb Tanner ‘88 is via the Criterion Collection’s 2004 DVD release (also featured on their streaming channel) the production of which coincided with the production of Altman’s Tanner on Tanner. In the Criterion set, each episode is bumpered with then-new introductions by the characters in the Tanner universe as they ruminated on the campaign’s failure and the sorry state of American politics that had gone rapidly downhill since the congressman’s ill-fated run during those halcyon days of the wheezing and waning Reagan administration. Now, almost 20 years after Tanner on Tanner, what seems recognizable in the world of campaigning is mostly bittersweet and nostalgic as more primitive forms of campaigning and decorum have been smashed to bits by social media and candidates fully immersed in demagoguery.

Also, framing Tanner ‘88 in the hindsight of 2004 creates a nifty, if tragic, historical window as we were then looking to avoid sliding into a second term of the ruinous George W. Bush administration. But in ‘04, as was the case in ‘88, we failed in our dodge and had to sit through four miserable years before Americans saw their hopes rise and lives flourish for eight more. In 2021, almost twenty years after the retrospection of 2004, Joe Biden, a supporting name on the crowded 1988 trail but never seen in Tanner ‘88, is now the very real President of the United States that are truly no longer all that united seeing that a good 15% of the population thinks his presidency is, in fact, a creation of the media.

Tanner ‘88 was highly influential on Steven Soderbergh’s K Street, a similar premium-channel series from 2004 in which a fictionally constructed world of political advisors collided with our very real political system. That show achieved about a week’s worth of heavy ink for the scripted part of the show, notably strategist James Carville’s feeding a line to Gov. Howard Dean, bleeding itself into an actual primary debate among the Democratic candidates which landed in Dean’s favor. I recalled this moment while watching a scene in Tanner ‘88 in which the then-recently dispatched Bruce Babbitt advises Tanner as they walk along the shores of the Potomac. Babbitt, a popular but boring governor of Arizona who was one of the first to drop out of the race in 1988, seems to understand the uphill battle ahead for bland but effective policy-makers like himself. His breakdown of the message to politicians? “I’m going to talk to you straight about our future and how Americans can get together and start solving problems instead of living in this kind of silver screen age of unreality.”

I think about that quote a lot these days.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: BEYOND THERAPY (1987)

July 29, 2021July 30, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Beyond Therapy is bad. And I don’t mean that it’s a weaker Robert Altman effort or that it’s bad of kind. I mean to say that it’s a bad movie that I could scarcely dislike more even if it had been written and directed by Henry Jaglom, a major/minor talent I love and cherish as much as I do getting paper cuts on my balls. Whatever pleasant vibes may radiate off of the film’s innocuous and airy promotional artwork that hints at a comedy of manners among a star-studded cast is a goddamn pack of rotten lies.

The last in Altman’s feature adaptations of stage plays, Beyond Therapy is a story about, I think, sexual fluidity, self-acceptance, and the (disproven) utter worthlessness of therapy. I say “I think” not because I don’t know; it’s just that Altman’s busy style and overlapping dialogue does a grave disservice to the film and it barely registers as anything other than a cacophonous vortex of shouting, goofy accents, performative emoting, and Julie Hagerty.

Disguising itself as a polyamorous and pansexual Woody Allen comedy, Robert Altman’s Beyond Therapy avoids amusing like the plague in favor of buying unfunny by the barrel and spraying the whole movie with it. Adapted from co-writer Christopher Durang’s off-Broadway play, Beyond Therapy concerns itself with Bruce (Jeff Goldblum) a bisexual who meets Prudence (Julie Hagerty) after she answers a magazine ad Bruce has placed much to the chagrin of his live-in boyfriend, Bob (Christopher Guest) and his mother (Geneviève Page). Most of this chaos plays out in a French restaurant in which mirrored deceptions and partner swapping seems to be happening on the margins and also in the offices of Charlotte (Glenda Jackson) and Stuart (Tom Conti), two therapists who treat Bruce and Prudence, respectively, and, coincidentally, sneak off to have sex with each other at twenty after the hour.

Beyond Therapy feels like it’s being helpful as this kind of subject matter (in America, at least) was something that, in 1987, was still mostly assigned to very serious dramas and was considered pretty provocative but, alas, it’s ultimately too confused to work retrospectively. I mean, the idea that Jeff Goldblum’s fluidity somehow throws the world off of its sexual axis is borderline insulting, even for a farce such as this. In fact, this is a film in which the whole idea of bisexuality is a foreign one; as if it resides in a world governed by its extremes. If it’s trying to state the fact that most everyone lies somewhere between the polar extremes on the sexual spectrum (which in 1987 would have been classified more as an “argument”), it’s not doing it in a particularly good or charming way. And where the film ends on a positive and healthy note where everyone more or less celebrates their most honest and open sexual desires replete with straight and gay couplings (and at least one ménage a trois), Altman wheezes his way to the finish line feeling far too out of shape to even attempt to get into the mix, let alone direct it.

One of the problems with Beyond Therapy is the film’s frenetic pace which flattens out any real enjoyment of it. The cramped set of the French restaurant overstuffed with peripheral characters feels so constricted that Altman’s usually graceful choreography is off by two beats as visual gags don’t register and anything that might come off as clever is completely crushed and has the life choked out of it. Altman loved the French and it’s not difficult to understand why given their undying love for him and his work. But his comedies with French twists feel cold in a way that, if you’re not on Altman’s specific wavelength about the French and French culture, it’ll all seem like inside baseball and hard to gauge. What I do know is that much of it is not funny. And, on the whole, Beyond Therapy feels more like a French farce about sexually neurotic New Yorkers than it does an American film dealing with sexual hang-ups. I guess that tracks since this film was shot in Paris masquerading as New York.

This is a situation in which I think 90% of the cast is wonderful, just not when they’re occupying the same screen space with this material. Jeff Goldblum is very good as he delivers his usual dexterous brand of frazzle but Christopher Guest is utterly wonderful, providing the prototype for Zack Galifianakis’s twin brother Seth from Between Two Ferns. Julie Hagerty, on the other hand, is a ball of nervous energy who, despite being incredible in Lost in America and Airplane, is forced to play a character who is mostly shrill, unappealing, and doesn’t get enough water thrown on her during the course of the film. Glenda Jackson is great but she’s lost in the material which does her a great disservice, and Tom Conti is mildly amusing as the malapropism-prone therapist who actually revels in his tendency to ejaculate prematurely and who feels that sex that lasts longer than five minutes is unnatural.

If not for his bit in the opera-omnibus Aria (which, frankly, is just ok), 1987 would have represented Altman’s career nadir. He retreated back into the world of television and would not be seen in the cinemas again for another five years. Of course, he would continue to deliver masterworks on the small screen and his comeback in the multiplexes would prove to be one of the most confounding, against-the-odds stories in Hollywood history. But those triumphs should be shared for another day and should get no closer than five thousand yards of Beyond Therapy, a film only preferable to A Perfect Couple due to the sense that, at the conclusion of the former, everyone is moving in a healthier direction and is doing so with a complete lack of live performances from Keepin’ ‘Em Off the Streets.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: FOOL FOR LOVE (1986)

July 20, 2021July 20, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

I find myself experiencing deja vu as I sit to write this because I feel like I’ve visited this viewpoint before with an old review of John Cassavetes’s Love Streams. No, I’m not talking about the similarities between that film and Robert Altman’s Fool For Love (especially their big reveals halfway through their respective stories). Instead, I’m talking specifically about having talked about the Cannon Group, Inc., a fledgling studio that was purchased on the cheap by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus in 1979, thriving during the mid-eighties by cranking out utter garbage like Over the Top and any one of the ball-busting Missing In Action pictures.

But Cannon was also a studio that was hungry for prestige pictures and marquee directors and would give those vaunted filmmakers quite a bit of latitude to bring their projects to fruition. The aforementioned Cassavetes picture couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for him, Andrei Konchalovsky managed to get both Runaway Train and Shy People produced under the Cannon flag, and Robert Altman found a safe haven with the studio after MGM stuck O.C. and Stiggs on a shelf upon that film’s completion and where it would sit for two straight years before finding its way into a release pipeline.

Instead of going hog wild with Cannon’s purse strings, Altman settled on adapting Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, yet another filmed play for Altman which, O.C. and Stiggs aside, had been his cinematic bread and butter in the 80’s. After a decade of mostly wide-canvas ensemble pieces with busy soundtracks and a thousand other details with which to keep up, Altman found an almost peaceful place of reflection and freedom with those films that relied on one location and only a small handful of players.

With its limited cast and setting, Fool for Love was perfect material for Altman in 1986. Not so much because this kind of material had become his metier over the past few years but also specifically because it’s a piece that takes place in the outer reaches of the soul where past hurts and unrequited feelings can vacation and have too many drinks, creating a kind of combustible inner turmoil. For all of the ups and downs and the demons that Altman seemed to wrestle with throughout his career, Fool for Love comes off downright therapeutic to him.

Fool for Love takes its time before revealing itself. Instead of hitting the ground running with expository dialogue between the players, it favors a dreamy mood where the dusk settles on the El Royale Motel, a horseshoe bungalow monument of desolation set on the edge of nowhere that looks like it’s mere weeks from becoming overrun with a post-apocalyptic motorcycle gang to be used as a hideout. The film doesn’t want to show its hand too early so it luxuriates in a great deal of visual flourishes and sparse small-talk while its seemingly rote and simple story of a broken love-affair plays out in front of us, Sandy Rogers’s songs mixing into the soundtrack to counterbalance the visuals as if Altman is crafting a gorgeous, long-form C&W music video.

The film’s deliberate pace is a hallmark of Sam Shepard’s work. As Shepard’s cowboys are men folded into the wrong time, they always seem like they’ve been snatched out of their time and dropped into the present day, kind of like a bewildered Peckinpah anti-hero who has to take his time to get his bearings. Drifting into the El Royale in his pickup and loaded horse trailer comes Eddie (Shepard), sometime cowboy and sometime stuntman, is in search of May (Kim Basinger), a sad, broken desert flower of lost love for whom the motel serves as both a place of employment and a refugee camp. At first, she deliberately avoids him even when Altman telegraphs that these two people are connected and avoidance is all but impossible. But he soon sees her from a distance and charges back to the motel to either rescue her, reconcile his feelings, or be resolved to reality lest the world explode around him. In the end, he achieves a degree of all three.

As this is not really a two-hander, there are a couple of other characters that inhabit the world of Fool for Love. In a bit of casting that can’t help but feel like an inspiration from the Wim Wenders-directed/Shepard-penned Paris, Texas, Harry Dean Stanton portrays a rambling man at the end of his life; a drifting, rudderless soul lording over both a literal and metaphoric trash heap in his twilight years whose life work was pissing away stability in favor of instant gratification. Randy Quaid pops up in the film’s final third as the civilized “man” who, in Shepard’s world, is worth examination in contrast to the self-governing “guy” and their verbal tug-of-war explores the subject of masculinity and its contextual, shifting definition.

Of all of Altman’s 80’s efforts, Fool for Love is among one of his bravest. It uses Shepard’s familiar and warm cowboy iconography to tell a tale that feels downright European. This clash of styles is what was at the soul of Sam Shepard’s work and persona. For he was a cowboy who nonetheless mingled with rock stars, was awarded more Obies than anyone else, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his florid and haunting words that articulated the split within the soul that can put folks into emotional spaces that are neither here nor there. Here, he shows why he was so good at interpreting his own material as he almost personifies the characters he creates. Then still wrestling with all of the cover-girl baggage that kept her from being taken seriously, Kim Basinger’s May is dishtowel dirty and quarter beer gorgeous and looks like someone you’d pick up in the back of Gilley’s. Though she rounds off her g’s while leaning into her twang a little too hard, Basinger is utterly terrific and gives one of the best performances of her career as the heartsick victim of cruel circumstances.

And, not for nothing, but Fool for Love is one of Altman’s most visually gorgeous films. While the majority of it takes place at night, the opening moment’s desert sundown is both ethereally beautiful and hauntingly portentous. The inner horseshoe of the motel is bathed in soft neon amid a cold blue outer rim creating a true geography; the motel of the mind and the junkyard of the soul courtesy of cinematographer Pierre Mingot’s careful framing and clever lighting. This is a piece populated by damaged people amid a dazzling and poetic detritus heap on the edge of the galaxy, almost like a science fiction film populated with truck stop queens and urban cowboys.

As humans, we all reside in a similar, congenial off-road memory motel. And, like the location in the film, it’s one that looks perfectly functional from the front and, honestly, perhaps it is. But behind it generally sits a heap of baggage and junk we all haul around from the past, some of it half-remembered and some of it fanciful myth-making. Understanding this, Altman’s work is full of characters who will add new wounds to established scar tissue if they think the self-deception will be less painful than the truth they would have to admit, creating more and more material for the junk pile. But, word to the wise, absolutely NEVER think that heap is too cleverly hidden from view nor something that won’t explode if exposed to the the right confluence of elements. If Fool for Love understands anything outside how to doom a film’s commercial prospects by being saddled with a one-sheet that makes the film look like Tender Mercies II: Tender Mercies Gets Laid, it’s most definitely that.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: O.C. AND STIGGS (1985)

July 7, 2021July 7, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

After Ronald Regan scored a dominating win and a second term in office, there had to be some kind of numbness that was felt by those who knew Reagan was an intellectual lightweight but yet somehow, almost despite himself, remained vastly popular. What, they thought, can’t people see, or, more scarily, do they even care? It was probably the latter for Reagan hustled in a kind of hyper-capitalism that ran on credit and deregulation which forced everything to continue to be “bigger and better.” And while this excited those consumers who could afford to see the middle class take a squeeze, it also caused more and more people to fall through the cracks and stumble into the margins where they no longer became part of society but part of a conversation that had some kind of re-beautification scheme baked into it so those people could be further marginalized and forgotten.

Somehow and someway, Robert Altman decided to put all of this and other sundry sentiments of anti-Reaganism into a big screen adaptation of the summer adventures of a couple of teenage characters who had graced the pages of National Lampoon throughout the early eighties. The result was 1985’s O.C. and Stiggs, a film that sat on the shelves until 1987 and one that is generally considered Altman’s worst effort by people who, I suppose, have never heard of or seen Beyond Therapy or A Perfect Couple. While it’s never going to be confused with top-shelf Robert Altman, O.C. and Stiggs remains a delightfully sly film with more on its mind than most of its teen-sex brethren. And, honestly, who gives a flying fuck if Altman forgot to add the sex when he’s having such a gas using his ONE major studio film of the 80’s to gleefully torch the foundation of what every decent American should despise? Altman deserved a medal, not jeers and castigation, for this move.

The plot of O.C. and Stiggs is pretty episodic and random; it’s basically a recounting of the crazy summer that our two characters had as their senior year lurks on the horizon. For O.C. (Daniel Jenkins), it’s a bittersweet memory as he will soon be moving to Arkansas for his final year of high school as the grandfather he has been living with has had his retirement insurance cancelled and is going to have to stay in a nursing home. For Stiggs (Neill Barry), it was just another summer where he can torture the wealthy Schwab family and upend societal convention if only for the attention that he is not getting in his own dysfunctional and overcrowded home.

As much as Popeye was to some extent just McCabe & Mrs. Miller reconfigured for kids, O.C. and Stiggs is basically “I Was a Teenage Hawkeye and Trapper John” where all of the pranks, jokes, and misdeeds have been rerouted from military authority and are now at the expense of the Schwabs, a clan of nouveau riche straights whose patriarch (Paul Dooley) is the insurance king in a community where the words loud, bigoted, tacky, gaudy would be appropriate descriptors. Altman’s rendering of Scottsdale, Arizona, makes it look like the new American frontier; a community of inhabitants in a place not meant to be inhabited, replete with artificial wave pools and other stupid attractions. It’s a baking, sweltering enclave that is an absolute hell, 100% Barry Goldwater territory; the exact type of place where Hal Phillip Walker (Thomas Hal Phillips), Nashville’s third-party presidential candidate, is making a bid for the U.S. Senate ten years after the events of that film.

So it’s a teen sex comedy where the sex is substituted with a giant rod up the ass of the shallow crassness, racial cruelty, and the individualistic, selfish pursuits that had run amok in the back nine of the Reagan Era. And wherever Reaganism failed, O.C. and Stiggs exploits. The homeless, Vietnam vets, decorum, capitalism, and silly charities all get a full inspection as the characters of O.C. and Stiggs are the perpetual progressive irritants in a dead suburbia becoming even more zombiefied. Wherever society decides to stagnate to the detriment of some, the two are there to make sure everyone’s boats are lifted.

So does this really sound like a teen sex comedy at all? The film’s connection to National Lampoon is crucial given M*A*S*H’s contribution to what Roger Ebert used to call the “slob comedy” which was made famous with 1978’s National Lampoon’s Animal House. So this is Altman closing a chapter by bringing it full circle with a certain poignancy and sadness. Unlike other similar films of the day, both O.C. and Stiggs have deep grievances that have some emotional truth. O.C. is hurt by the Schwab Insurance Company which has cancelled his grandfather’s retirement insurance and Stiggs is damaged by a philandering father and a sense of being completely unseen in a busy cacophony of a family (very reminiscent of The Boy’s situation in That Cold Day in the Park). These are kids whose adventures are more stimulated by what their elders have wreaked than it is about chasing girls. “What you boys need is some pussy,” says Melvin Van Peebles’s Wino Bob, in a jive on Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback persona. He knows what it’s like to want to put your foot in the Man’s ass and here are two white kids who have some shared enemies and who want to do just that. But there is a wistfulness to Bob’s sentiment as it’s just too bad that change is left to the young who are the only ones with the energy to do anything when they should be asked little more than to go out and enjoy their lives.

With some nice references to Apocalypse Now, The Pink Panther, The Last Picture Show, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,Altman hasn’t been this referential since Brewster McCloud, itself referenced in O.C. and Stiggs via the jokey vanity plates and a very pointed scene dealing with a lot of bird shit. Additionally the inclusion of King Sunny Adae and his African Beats sets the film apart as one of the commercial aims of films like this was to pack the film with as many hot new artists as possible if only to create a separate revenue stream for the concurrently released soundtrack album. Here, the music of King Sunny Adae acts as pure joy and a great equalizer, one of the few things that seems to bring joy to everyone who hears it. And special mention has to be given to both Jane Curtain, who nails her role as the perpetually soused matriarch of the Schwab family (every member of which being too oblivious to notice is also a nice touch), and the radiant Cynthia Nixon, object of O.C.’s desire.

Of course, not everything in the film works like gangbusters. Sometimes the film has a difficult time mixing Altman’s style with the kind of two handed teen comedy that the movie sort-of kind-of wants to be. Sometimes it’s at ill at ease with itself and there are moments where Altman makes big miscalculations as to what the audience will find amusing by throwing unnecessary and goofy sound effects onto the soundtrack. Additionally, the film also shows the tell tale signs of over-editing; like the shapeless story was given the slightest bit of a plot only in the editing room leaving even more of this film on the editing room floor.

But considering the states of both Altman’s career and the subgenre he was inverting with O.C. & Stiggs, there is far more to celebrate here than to dismiss and the film’s continued life as a punchline thanks to people who should know better is borderline irresponsible. For all of the things Altman called out as a threat to our society in Nashville have brought in a return on their investment ten years later thus beginning the slow, poisonous crawl to our sorry state today. This is no better realized than in the character of Pat Coletti (the always incredible Martin Mull), a lazy and affable millionaire whose geographical proximity to the Schwabs makes him their almost polar opposite. Rich, insulated, and bored, Coletti’s brand of capitalism is an open, creative, and almost lax approach to making money which proves to be more inclusive and has a more balanced entrepreneurial spirit. So if O.C. And Stiggs is the final word in the slob comedy and not at all a teen sex comedy, Coletti and all of the adult characters represent the bitter end of the first half of their lives. While they’re all victims of Reaganism, they’re all choosing their own specific misery as they sink into inert middle-age, a place where most people no longer know how to grow but only know how to expand. And the choices they make speak volumes about their characters.

While Paul Dooley’s racist, conspiracy theory, doomsday prepper character looks like a first step toward MAGA right in the red, white, and blue middle of Reagan’s America, a retrospective view of O.C. and Stiggs shows how shockingly on the nose Altman was about all of it and how, perhaps, some of the criticism was from people who just didn’t want to believe it. I suppose if you had your head in the sand, this film would look incredibly silly. But, gosh, all of those American flags and “Don’t Tread on Me” signs papering cookie-cutter stucco homes that magically popped up in the middle of the Arizona desert to get away from… something? I’d say that, despite the inherent silliness in a so-called teen sex comedy being “Exhibit A” to prove a larger point, MAGA was less a phenomenon that sprung forth in 2016 and that it was there all along.

“This is real!” O.C. screams at Dennis Hopper during the film’s climax as the former is handed a grenade to be used to get out of Schwab’s doomsday room.

“Everything gets to be sooner or later,” Hopper replies.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: SECRET HONOR (1984)

June 21, 2021June 21, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Locked behind security gates with cameras that pepper his estate like so many rose bushes, an exhausted Richard Nixon slowly retreats to his private study with a package in his hand. He first moves toward the fireplace where he pours a brandy and sits as the portrait of George Washington looms above him. Nah… no time for this. Nixon is on a mission and only Chivas Regal is going to do the trick. After pouring a fresh one, he changes into his smoking jacket and moves slowly to the box as if we’re watching a weird pantomime of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. However, that illusion is broken when the box opens and we see a fully loaded revolver. The stage is now set. For if a gun is introduced in the first act, as the old adage goes, it has to go off on the third. Richard Nixon is going down and for the next 90 minutes (actually 80 as it takes him a bit to conquer simple technology), he’s going to plead his case into a tape recorder for anyone who would want to listen.

Shot on the stage at the University of Michigan where director Robert Altman was employed as a theater professor, Secret Honor is the filmmaker stripped down to the studs and it stand as one of his most triumphant cinematic achievements of the 1980’s. Where his previous two adaptations of the stage plays Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Streamers, each reduced the size of both location and cast, Secret Honor is nothing more than 90 minutes of Richard Nixon (Philip Baker Hall in a roaring, commanding, and mesmerizing performance that put him on the map) bouncing off the the wood paneled walls of the study in the cocoon that is Nixon’s post-presidency compound.

Secret Honor isn’t a true tale, mind you and the opening crawl ensures that this is clearly understood. But this isn’t a dark political parable soaked in Greek tragedy and writ large across a 2.35:1 Panavision frame as Oliver Stone’s Nixon would prove to be ten years later. Instead, Richard Nixon is a sole, solitary, and pitiful creature whose tastefully decorated study acts as the prison of his own mind, squeezed into a 1.33:1 frame meant for television broadcasts of the time. Richard Nixon has a story to tell but to let it out would ironically destroy American’s faith in democracy.

So it’s a little surprising that Richard Nixon, dark prince at the center of the malignant rot that began to eat away at America in the late sixties, is presented as sympathetically as he is here. Like Oliver Stone’s film, Secret Honor reflects Richard Nixon as a stone cold zero who used politics and power to make himself a winner. This is underlined in Sharpie by the fact that Nixon didn’t run for office because he wanted to make a difference; he ran for office because a cabal of California businessmen ran him for office. Nixon was never a person with any true core principles, just an insatiable thirst to show those Ivy League punks and east coast intellectuals that he was no loser.

The Richard Nixon of Secret Honor is bathed in paranoid grievances built out of a horrific inferiority complex and the film tries to unspool his pathology in a way to mirror the Reagan Era, then in a bid for a second term. Oliver Stone would suggest that had Nixon not been impeached, Ronald Reagan would have never happened and I can’t help but wonder if Altman felt the same. Watching it in 2021, it’s hard not see Nixon, the dark historical figure who so rattled cognizant Americans, as little more than quaint in the rear view mirror of time but also as someone whose greasy heart of darkness led to the misdirected populism of the Reagan Revolution, itself a one-way slide leading directly to the Trump era. And while the conspiracy theories put forth in Secret Honor have nothing on the kind of stuff Oliver Stone would cook up later, they still point to an America run by a shadow government that’s in bed with numerous Asian governments to help facilitate the heroin trade. Wild stuff, for sure. But how different is it than the United States’s cozy involvement with dictatorial, South American regimes amid the cocaine wars of the 80’s?

Richard Nixon, more than any other President before Donald Trump, infused American politics with a dark sense of personal grievance. Unlike Trump, though, there was little in Nixon’s life that was handed to him without some kind of stark price tag. Like Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and Biden, Nixon truly came from nothing. The illness of his older brother, Harold, kept him out of Harvard and forced him to go to Whittier College. While pursuing his studies, he was firmly rejected by the schools’ various sports teams and upper crust societies. His future wife, Pat, balked at marrying him but he wore her down by driving her around on her dates with other men. Nixon was a pitiful and loathsome creature who would not take “no” for an answer and for whom every victory had to come at the utter destruction of his enemies all the while using self-pity and cheap political maneuvers to manipulate politicians of his same political party who otherwise loathed him.

Secret Honor shows a Nixon who ultimately found America rotten to the core. “Second rate mobsters and their PR guys,” he bemoans. And, soaked in booze and with his own self-loathing ego in full rage by the end of the film, he chillingly predicts a perpetual Nixon. You’ll never get someone like that down. It’s the American way, after all. And ultimately, he redeems himself by not killing himself and declaring a comeback. Fuck ‘em. As the credits roll over a mindless drone of “FOUR MORE YEARS!” there is little doubt that the dark scream is less about Richard Nixon and about the inevitable further downslide into Reagan’s mourning in America.

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: STREAMERS (1983)

June 17, 2021June 17, 2021 by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

After the critical success of his cinematic adaptation of Ed Graczyk‘s Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Robert Altman set his sights Streamers, the last in playwright David Rabe’s trilogy of pieces surrounding the Vietnam war. Self-financed and shot on the quick in Dallas, Streamers almost means to be the y-chromosome mirror of the distaff 5 & Dime, jumping right into the center of a drab Army barrack in 1965 that doubles as a Petri dish of different corners of masculinity, either real, imagined, or put on. Like 5 & Dime, the tensions between the characters in Streamers are mostly sexual, though a strong dose of racial politics is thrown into the pot, causing it to be more explosive, even if it results in a less engaging and satisfying film.

To be sure, mirroring is crucial throughout Altman’s filmography but it becomes incredibly important during his 80’s period where he was able to get layers and dimensions in limited settings by raising the dramatic stakes and casting his characters off one another. This often leads the characters to either look at themselves in the past or, more importantly, see themselves as they really are in the present. This was driven home quite literally with a mirror prop in 5 & Dime but it’s just as prevalent here as Streamers is about a group of trapped men as they await their deployment to Vietnam. Billy (Matthew Modine) and Roger (David Alan Grier) are pals who bounce off of each other quite well but their friendship is stressed just by the fact that one is black and one is white. Across the room bunks Richie (Michael Lichtenstein), an openly gay soldier who senses a certain uncertainty in Billy, who reacts to Richie’s provocations in ways that causes the audience to sense the uncertainty, as well. Added to this mix is the combustible Carlyle (Michael Wright), three months into his service and already on the brink of a psychotic collapse, and the perpetually soused Cokes (George Dzundza) and Rooney (Guy Boyd), commanding officers damaged by so much carnage seen in World War II, Korea, and now Vietnam, that all they can do is stay drunk and wait for death to take away the pain.

Despite Rabe being a downmarket Harold Pinter when it came to making opaque observations, and a certain archness to some of the performances in the film, there is a great deal that works in Streamers. In choosing the material, Altman certainly was able to save a few bucks due to its appropriately stripped-down and uncluttered set (this was probably the easiest paycheck production designer Wolf Kroeger ever earned) which adds to the heavy pall of ennui and almost maddening claustrophobia. Additionally, cinematographer Pierre Mingot’s fluid camera refuses to be nailed down in the third row and, instead, floats alongside the bunks and up their metal railings mostly acting as an observer of listeners rather than an optical mechanism, revealing more about the characters than if they were center-framed delivering a monologue.

And as barren and solitary a set that it is, the barrack functions as both pinball machine and narrow hallway of time. Much of the dynamism occurs when Carlyle saunters into the room and bounces off each and every character as if they were bumpers, all the while Cokes and Rooney are always perched at the end of the barrack, segregated further, representing the destiny of each and every one of these men that will survive the dehumanizing machine of war.

The majority of the performances, too, are aces and spot on. Modine and Grier display an uncomfortable rapport that is much different than the unease felt whenever either are dealing with the absolutely excellent Lichtenstein. Each character’s baggage gets tossed on top of the other until the whole thing collapses when the weight of Carlyle is added. A swaggering mix of rage, sadness, menace, and down-low vulnerability, his character is the wild card who drags the ugly truth out of all of the other characters. But as played by Michael Wright, the character becomes the most boorish and stage-bound; a dynamic performance full of rage and emotion but played to the back row and lacking in the subtleties befitting a screen performance. As it sits, he’s definitely the focus of attention whenever he’s on the screen but the audience ends up spending too much time watching him chew his way through whatever scenery there is. This, by the way, is not on Wright, who would go on to do amazing work on Oz, but, instead, it’s on Altman who had a responsibility to calibrate his actors to match the size and scope of the material. Though tackling the material for the big screen can’t be seen as anything but brave in 1983, it appears that, with Wright, Altman caught a fish too big for the boat in which he was sailing.

Earlier, the word “trapped” was used to describe the situation of the men and it is used both figuratively and literally as Streamers is best approached as a a work about men who are trapped. They are trapped in the service, trapped in a war, trapped in their own minds, trapped in bodies that are failing, trapped in bodies that are responding in ways that upset them, or trapped in a socioeconomic nightmare not of their making. For all the talk and introspection, when the credits roll, the men will have made choices and will be trapped even further. Same as it ever was.