Tribute to Robert Altman - Part Two

Coming out of the ether after a hectic but happy holiday and new year, I now complete my two-part tribute to the late director Robert Altman, who, with immeasurable grace and class, helped us re-launch the restored Avon Theatre just three years ago.

A review of Altman’s filmography reflects an artist unafraid to place his idiosyncratic stamp on a variety of vehicles, with the result ranging from outright triumph to noble misfire. In the former category, I nominate the following titles spanning from the late seventies to the early nineties.
3 Women (1977) - Shy Texas gal Pinky Rose (Spacek) has just relocated to a small North Carolina town, where she takes a job working at a rehab center for the elderly. After befriending garrulous co-worker Millie Lammoreaux (Duvall), the two move in together. Over time, Pinky becomes obsessively attached to Millie, whom she idolizes. But Millie’s dalliance with Edgar (Robert Fortier), a former TV stunt man, threatens to turn Pinky’s world inside out. This moody, dreamlike drama of psychological obsession was one of Altman’s finest films of the 1970s, owing mostly to his two female leads, whose performances are surreal and strangely touching. Altman, who based his script on an actual dream, focuses heavily on atmosphere and symbolic visual imagery, but he allows his actors—especially Duvall, as the chattering Millie—plenty of room to unravel their weird Southern personas. Vague, provocative, and awash in a hazy blue-and-yellow palette, “3 Women” is a bewitching tale of naiveté and emotional distress.
Secret Honor (1984)- Shortly after his resignation following the Watergate scandal, former U.S. president Richard M. Nixon (Hall) sits alone in his private study late at night, dictating his memoirs, with a bottle of Chivas close at hand. Downing a few drinks, then a few more, Nixon rants bitterly about Khruschev and Kissinger, Castro and the Kennedys, revisiting his past glories and failures while attempting to rehabilitate his tainted image. A filmed adaptation of Philip Baker Hall’s tour de force one-man show, Altman’s “Secret Honor” presents Nixon as a blustering paranoid-obsessive consumed by rage and a crippling insecurity, but also as a man with deep regrets about his life and legacy. Hall is haunting as the broken, isolated former leader, and Altman’s unique visual sensibility lends a restrained but effective cinematic quality to the single-actor, single-setting environment. Disturbing and poignant, “Secret Honor” is a complex look at a misguided, misunderstood, and ultimately, quite pathetic figure.
Vincent and Theo (1990)- Dark, complex film delves into the fraught relationship between artist Vincent Van Gogh ( Tim Roth) and younger brother Theo (Paul Rhys), a struggling art dealer who single-handedly supports his penniless, eccentric older brother for most of Vincent’s life, sacrificing his own happiness and fulfillment. The long-suffering Theo spends his time either selling inferior art work to rich dilettantes, pushing his brother’s work to a dismissive public, or struggling to keep Vincent from descending into madness. There exist several worthy films on the character and work of Van Gogh, this now revered artist who ironically sold only one painting during his lifetime. But only Altman’s entry probes the mysterious, mystical connection between the brothers, whereby Vincent’s tormented genius acts on Theo like some invisible magnet, drawing him into a caretaker role, while making him keenly aware of his own relative ordinariness. Altman evokes a rich sense of period, and elicits winning performances all around (most notably, a juicy turn by Jean-Pierre Cassel as a pompous art patron). The two leads shine as well, particularly the intense, mesmerizing Roth in an Oscar-caliber portrayal. At the end credits, this unsung film leaves us sensing the immense frustration of ill-timed brilliance.
The Player (1992)- Studio executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) has a comfortable, if hectic, life as a Hollywood green-lighter, listening to pitches for bad sequels and misbegotten action flicks while schmoozing with a who’s who of silver-screen luminaries. Mill’s cushy life begins to unravel, however, when he starts receiving anonymous death threats. Spooked and frustrated by the harassment, Mill has a fateful parking-lot confrontation late one night with pushy screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio) that leads him to the brink of ruination. No one has an eye for human behavior like Altman, and this caustic satire of back-stabbing power brokers and anxious movers and shakers in La-La Land really soars, thanks to a brilliant script by Michael Tolkin, adapted from his own novel. Robbins is creepily understated as a put-upon exec, the drifting center of a sprawling cast that includes Greta Scacchi as a painter and Buck Henry, Dean Stockwell, Fred Ward, and Peter Gallagher, all incarnating various types of preening, unctious “players” in Hollywood. Watch for cameos by A-list celebrities too numerous to mention, and too much fun to give away.
Short Cuts (1993)- In the director’s ambitious follow-up to “Player”, featuring a decidedly different side to the City of Angels, myriad lives criss-cross and intertwine in a sprawling ensemble drama adapted from Raymond Carver stories. As various couples bicker and struggle with love, sex, marriage, and alcohol, three friends on a fishing trip (Fred Ward, Buck Henry, and Huey Lewis) find a woman’s dead body but decide not to report it, an aging philanderer (Jack Lemmon) confesses his infidelities while his grandson lies comatose after an auto accident, and a birthday-cake baker (Lyle Lovett) seethes with anger over a trivial slight. The inspired match-up of Carver and Altman makes for movie magic in “Cuts,” a character-driven comedy/drama that wrings a lot of emotional truth from its engaging, ever-proliferating storylines, much like the director’s previous film quilt, “Nashville.” And you’d be hard-pressed to find a quirkier, more accomplished cast, including Tim Robbins, Frances McDormand, Julianne Moore, Lily Tomlin, Matthew Modine, Andie McDowell and Bruce Davison, who inject humanity and eccentricity into their roles with effortless naturalism. The film is long at just over three hours, but “Short Cuts” is such an enthralling (and constantly varying) slice of life that you hardly feel the time passing.