Brewster McCloud
Imagine a movie smarter than its audience. What kind of film would that be? If by smarter we mean that the technical aspects are part of an industrial trade foreign to most viewers, then nearly all motion pictures are smarter than nearly all motion picture watchers. On the other hand, if by smarter we mean that a grasp of the subject matter or content is beyond the reach of the people who buy their tickets, then I would conclude that the cinema in question is a filmed lecture delivered by Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. What I suspect we really mean when we say that a film is over the head of its audience is that the powers of imagination have exceeded that to which the common moviegoer is accustomed. The film is, to coin a phrase, out of the viewer's comfort zone.
Stanley Kubrick, for all his genius, did not make movies over the heads of his audience for the simple reason that his films invariably had some character with whom the audience was inclined or coerced into identifying. For all his esoterica, Woody Allen has always been a man of the people, albeit, one with a richer reading list but one who still values the audience response, at least when he does not curl his lips against it, neither approach having the luxury of being supercilious. You could argue that some foreign filmmakers were artful beyond the routine pale, but once again, whether one means Truffaut, Godard, Kurosawa, or Bunuel, the intent to challenge the audience remains a priority over deliberately alienating the paying (or pirating) public.
In order for any film to lay legitimate claim to being beyond the general perception levels, the assertion must be based in a coalescing of the director and writer's imaginations. What the film is about, what happens in it, the motivations of the characters, their dreads and desires, the way the film looks in a darkened theatre, the sounds the audience will scarcely recall yet will have nonetheless experienced, the primordial cave pictures that continue to mesmerize the masses--Dammit, it isn't easy being Robert Altman, as he would be the first to tell you if he hadn't passed away at precisely the proper time.
Brewster McCloud, the film that is the subject of today's analytic dissection, teems and spills over with imagination, from the repetition of the movie's title during the opening credits sequence to the naming names close-out at the end and everywhere in between, this film radiates the power of its creator's mind and since that mind did belong to one Robert Altman then that fact in and of itself should and would be enough to at the very least get our attention if not send half the glee club out to take courses in genuflecting and the odd and occasional curtsy.
But if you balk at enjoying a film solely on the basis of the reputation of its director, the good news of the day is that Brewster McCloud--neglected in its own time--is one of those films about which it is infinitely appropriate to quip, "Mighty fine film, indeed, that one." The cast was pulled from most of the same director's crew on M*A*S*H, minus Gould and Sutherland, meaning that, yes, we do get the sensational Sally Kellerman and yes we do get the unbelievably comic Rene Auberjonois as the bird-man narrator.
Bird-man, do I say? Indeed, I do say. The film is about flying. Whether the vignette pertains to the Stacey Keach character who is a nasty relative of Wilbur and Orville or to sex as a metaphor, flying is the subject and Bud Cort (Boone from M*A*S*H) aims to learn. This is really just a great science fiction film, if you must know, and even though I don't think it was ever recognized as such, the plot could just as easily have come from Philip K. Dick or even Leigh Brackett.
There were probably more stupid movies released in 1970 than any other year to that point in the history of film. There were also more unheralded classics, such as the three we've already peeked at this new year (The Magic Christian, The Boys in the Band, and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, in case you've forgotten). Brewster McCloud (even the character's name works) falls into that category as well. Altman moves the scenes around his characters to the extent that sometimes it appears that the people are standing still and the camera is doing all the acting. Even there this is no accident. Even there this is brilliance at work and woe unto the sad fool who fails to learn to fly right along with the owlish Brewster, a character who fails to draw in the audience, which is probably why the movie tanked on release. People prefer characterization over story-line and technique. I suppose that is proper enough. We should, however, remember that film as a thing, as a craft, is a visual medium and as such it has a responsibility that supersedes the banality of a theatrical plot and rich, subtle characterization. A good film tells a story. A great film brings the audience in and lets them discover the story.
Stanley Kubrick, for all his genius, did not make movies over the heads of his audience for the simple reason that his films invariably had some character with whom the audience was inclined or coerced into identifying. For all his esoterica, Woody Allen has always been a man of the people, albeit, one with a richer reading list but one who still values the audience response, at least when he does not curl his lips against it, neither approach having the luxury of being supercilious. You could argue that some foreign filmmakers were artful beyond the routine pale, but once again, whether one means Truffaut, Godard, Kurosawa, or Bunuel, the intent to challenge the audience remains a priority over deliberately alienating the paying (or pirating) public.
In order for any film to lay legitimate claim to being beyond the general perception levels, the assertion must be based in a coalescing of the director and writer's imaginations. What the film is about, what happens in it, the motivations of the characters, their dreads and desires, the way the film looks in a darkened theatre, the sounds the audience will scarcely recall yet will have nonetheless experienced, the primordial cave pictures that continue to mesmerize the masses--Dammit, it isn't easy being Robert Altman, as he would be the first to tell you if he hadn't passed away at precisely the proper time.
Brewster McCloud, the film that is the subject of today's analytic dissection, teems and spills over with imagination, from the repetition of the movie's title during the opening credits sequence to the naming names close-out at the end and everywhere in between, this film radiates the power of its creator's mind and since that mind did belong to one Robert Altman then that fact in and of itself should and would be enough to at the very least get our attention if not send half the glee club out to take courses in genuflecting and the odd and occasional curtsy.
But if you balk at enjoying a film solely on the basis of the reputation of its director, the good news of the day is that Brewster McCloud--neglected in its own time--is one of those films about which it is infinitely appropriate to quip, "Mighty fine film, indeed, that one." The cast was pulled from most of the same director's crew on M*A*S*H, minus Gould and Sutherland, meaning that, yes, we do get the sensational Sally Kellerman and yes we do get the unbelievably comic Rene Auberjonois as the bird-man narrator.
Bird-man, do I say? Indeed, I do say. The film is about flying. Whether the vignette pertains to the Stacey Keach character who is a nasty relative of Wilbur and Orville or to sex as a metaphor, flying is the subject and Bud Cort (Boone from M*A*S*H) aims to learn. This is really just a great science fiction film, if you must know, and even though I don't think it was ever recognized as such, the plot could just as easily have come from Philip K. Dick or even Leigh Brackett.
There were probably more stupid movies released in 1970 than any other year to that point in the history of film. There were also more unheralded classics, such as the three we've already peeked at this new year (The Magic Christian, The Boys in the Band, and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, in case you've forgotten). Brewster McCloud (even the character's name works) falls into that category as well. Altman moves the scenes around his characters to the extent that sometimes it appears that the people are standing still and the camera is doing all the acting. Even there this is no accident. Even there this is brilliance at work and woe unto the sad fool who fails to learn to fly right along with the owlish Brewster, a character who fails to draw in the audience, which is probably why the movie tanked on release. People prefer characterization over story-line and technique. I suppose that is proper enough. We should, however, remember that film as a thing, as a craft, is a visual medium and as such it has a responsibility that supersedes the banality of a theatrical plot and rich, subtle characterization. A good film tells a story. A great film brings the audience in and lets them discover the story.
3 Women
If one function of film is to inform our dreams, then fairness requires dreams to fulfill our movies. The 1977 Robert Altman film 3 Women succeeds.
Altman has a dream and on his way to the airport stops at 20th Century to see Alan Ladd Jr., who green-lights the project in time for the director to catch his flight. After all, this was Robert Altman and Fox did owe a debt of gratitude to cinema and certainly it didn't matter much that there was no script at this point. Who needed a script when the ending was still unformed?
Has anyone ever told you that your dreams did not make sense or that they were not logical? You'd probably laugh at anyone who dared say such a thing because what you'd been discussing was ephemera, intangible, a series of images which the brain has conjured out of all the senses presented to it, reconstructed in a way that does not rely upon logic for its value. 3 Women, just like our dreams, does have a kind of logic, but it isn't the kind in which we move through in our awakened periods, although, as with our dreams, it often accentuates the most intriguing aspects of what we call our own personal reality.
If we are regular movie-goers in 1977, we recognize Sissy Spacek from the previous year's Carrie, a film heavy with dream sequences. From the instant we set eyes upon her character Pinky, we suspect that something is not quite right with the young lady, that something about her does not quite fit, and that just possibly we should not trust what we see. Today she begins her first day of work helping old folks at a physical therapy facility in what feels like an area east of Los Angeles, out in the desert. That she is much younger than those for whom she is responsible is no coincidence since Pinky acknowledges nothing about her own parents, as becomes quite clear later in the film. The spa surroundings are the kind of places where cowboy films of Wyatt Earp have been shot right alongside miniature golf courses.
Pinky meets Mildred, played by Shelley Duvall. We recognize Ms. Duvall from any number of earlier Altman creations and we notice right away that she too fails to fit in with the people around her, whether they are her coworkers or her neighbors. Millie is assigned to show Pinky the ropes, probably because the boss suspects they will get along, or else as punishment for both of them being just a bit unusual. Indeed, Millie spends a good bit of the movie having conversations with people who do very little to acknowledge her existence. Adding to their sense of unease, neither Milly nor Pinky have much in the way of a background and this is deliberate. When a character enters our dream, we do not have time to evaluate that person's history. Instead we make quick and disjointed impressions of the person and that is all we can do with the characters in this movie. Maybe Millie is a weird duck and maybe the weirdness is really everyone else.
Also working in the spa are two female twins, neither of whom contributes much to the narrative other than being so aloof that we simply dislike them in general and even feel a small sense of relief when one of the coworkers tells Pinky, "We don't like the twins."
Far and away the most disjointed character in the movie is Willie Hart, played to near silent perfection by Janice Rule. Willie creates sand paintings on swimming pools and elsewhere and she is with child until the last few minutes of the film. She is married to a retired stunt man who used to work in cowboy pictures.
For all intents and purposes, these three women could all be different aspects of one another and when it turns out that Pinky's "real" name is Mildred, we are not terribly surprised, although we are properly disturbed, just as we are troubled by the rhyme of the name Willie. These three women have suffered damages and they continue to suffer them, on and on until the women seem to merge into a single unit, be it a nuclear family, a Manson Family, or a single person with three personas.
To say more about the story would be to risk divulging the narrow and winding plot. However, it pulls on me to say that dream-work in this picture is very much impressionistic, in the artistic sense of the word, a facet that is not uncommon in much of Altman's work. The Long Goodbye was rife with extended sequences that not only felt dreamy but which even drifted away from the Raymond Chandler novel enough to be their own reaction to having read the book. Even given the soft and deadly punch from the brilliant, instinctive acting of the three principals in this motion picture, the real performance remains the movie itself, at once loping along with all the time in the world just as it abruptly shifts to tense alignments that rustle the pulse. If you were to only view one Robert Altman film, it should be Nashville. If you have the luxury of two, the second must be 3 Women.
Altman has a dream and on his way to the airport stops at 20th Century to see Alan Ladd Jr., who green-lights the project in time for the director to catch his flight. After all, this was Robert Altman and Fox did owe a debt of gratitude to cinema and certainly it didn't matter much that there was no script at this point. Who needed a script when the ending was still unformed?
Has anyone ever told you that your dreams did not make sense or that they were not logical? You'd probably laugh at anyone who dared say such a thing because what you'd been discussing was ephemera, intangible, a series of images which the brain has conjured out of all the senses presented to it, reconstructed in a way that does not rely upon logic for its value. 3 Women, just like our dreams, does have a kind of logic, but it isn't the kind in which we move through in our awakened periods, although, as with our dreams, it often accentuates the most intriguing aspects of what we call our own personal reality.
If we are regular movie-goers in 1977, we recognize Sissy Spacek from the previous year's Carrie, a film heavy with dream sequences. From the instant we set eyes upon her character Pinky, we suspect that something is not quite right with the young lady, that something about her does not quite fit, and that just possibly we should not trust what we see. Today she begins her first day of work helping old folks at a physical therapy facility in what feels like an area east of Los Angeles, out in the desert. That she is much younger than those for whom she is responsible is no coincidence since Pinky acknowledges nothing about her own parents, as becomes quite clear later in the film. The spa surroundings are the kind of places where cowboy films of Wyatt Earp have been shot right alongside miniature golf courses.
Pinky meets Mildred, played by Shelley Duvall. We recognize Ms. Duvall from any number of earlier Altman creations and we notice right away that she too fails to fit in with the people around her, whether they are her coworkers or her neighbors. Millie is assigned to show Pinky the ropes, probably because the boss suspects they will get along, or else as punishment for both of them being just a bit unusual. Indeed, Millie spends a good bit of the movie having conversations with people who do very little to acknowledge her existence. Adding to their sense of unease, neither Milly nor Pinky have much in the way of a background and this is deliberate. When a character enters our dream, we do not have time to evaluate that person's history. Instead we make quick and disjointed impressions of the person and that is all we can do with the characters in this movie. Maybe Millie is a weird duck and maybe the weirdness is really everyone else.
Also working in the spa are two female twins, neither of whom contributes much to the narrative other than being so aloof that we simply dislike them in general and even feel a small sense of relief when one of the coworkers tells Pinky, "We don't like the twins."
Far and away the most disjointed character in the movie is Willie Hart, played to near silent perfection by Janice Rule. Willie creates sand paintings on swimming pools and elsewhere and she is with child until the last few minutes of the film. She is married to a retired stunt man who used to work in cowboy pictures.
For all intents and purposes, these three women could all be different aspects of one another and when it turns out that Pinky's "real" name is Mildred, we are not terribly surprised, although we are properly disturbed, just as we are troubled by the rhyme of the name Willie. These three women have suffered damages and they continue to suffer them, on and on until the women seem to merge into a single unit, be it a nuclear family, a Manson Family, or a single person with three personas.
To say more about the story would be to risk divulging the narrow and winding plot. However, it pulls on me to say that dream-work in this picture is very much impressionistic, in the artistic sense of the word, a facet that is not uncommon in much of Altman's work. The Long Goodbye was rife with extended sequences that not only felt dreamy but which even drifted away from the Raymond Chandler novel enough to be their own reaction to having read the book. Even given the soft and deadly punch from the brilliant, instinctive acting of the three principals in this motion picture, the real performance remains the movie itself, at once loping along with all the time in the world just as it abruptly shifts to tense alignments that rustle the pulse. If you were to only view one Robert Altman film, it should be Nashville. If you have the luxury of two, the second must be 3 Women.
Pret a Porter
Even the duds that director Robert Altman created have a lot going for them, so it must be admitted from the outset that Ready to Wear (1994) fails to be all bad. Because of the enormity of the excellent cast, one gets the initial impression that this fashioned show of a fashion show may be a Nineties version of Nashville. And in a way it is. I mean, we have all kinds of famous clothing designers displaying their wares or wears, we have a reporter (played by Kim Bassinger) who steals every scene and who we just know will crumble in the end, we have Cher who, as the Elliott Gould of the 1990s, makes an appearance for the purposes of gentle sarcasm, and we have a loosely strung-together story-line that isn't particularly the point.
So what's the problem?
The damned thing isn't very interesting. That's the only problem with this movie.
The film begins strong enough, with a French title, Pret-a-Porter and the words "A Robert Altman Film" in Russian letters at the beginning. We get to see Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. We get Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts. We get Forest Whitaker. Sadly, that is all we get. The ending is so contrived that even if it was supposed to insult us by being obvious in advance it still doesn't work because by the time we get there we no longer have any reason to care.
It has been claimed by more erudite writers than myself that Altman had a tendency to alternate successes with failures and that even his failures were worth watching. That is almost true.
The biggest problem with this film is the script. Altman and Barbara Shulgasser simply don't know what to do with their most potentially interesting characters. The fashion guru who dies early on has zero personality, even though most of the people in the movie claim he was a rotten person. It might have been nice to have understood why this was so. Tracey Ullman, Linda Hunt and Sally Kellerman, as the editors of fashion magazines, come off as vastly more dull than even those occupations would suggest. And the character of the in-demand photographer Milo, played by Stephen Rea, is simply stupid, even his snideness not worth the bother.
The talents of all the actors mentioned above are thoroughly wasted here unless it is somehow supposed to be interesting that Anne Eisenhower (Julia Roberts) is fascinating because she gets amorous when she drinks alcohol, or that Joe Flynn, a sportswriter played by Tim Robbins, is intriguing because his luggage gets stolen and he can't do much about it because his French is so bad.
No, this is a colossal mess of a film, one that by its very existence besmirches the well-earned reputation of all those involved as being the brilliant directors, writers and actors that they certainly are. Genius is maligned here.
So what's the problem?
The damned thing isn't very interesting. That's the only problem with this movie.
The film begins strong enough, with a French title, Pret-a-Porter and the words "A Robert Altman Film" in Russian letters at the beginning. We get to see Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. We get Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts. We get Forest Whitaker. Sadly, that is all we get. The ending is so contrived that even if it was supposed to insult us by being obvious in advance it still doesn't work because by the time we get there we no longer have any reason to care.
It has been claimed by more erudite writers than myself that Altman had a tendency to alternate successes with failures and that even his failures were worth watching. That is almost true.
The biggest problem with this film is the script. Altman and Barbara Shulgasser simply don't know what to do with their most potentially interesting characters. The fashion guru who dies early on has zero personality, even though most of the people in the movie claim he was a rotten person. It might have been nice to have understood why this was so. Tracey Ullman, Linda Hunt and Sally Kellerman, as the editors of fashion magazines, come off as vastly more dull than even those occupations would suggest. And the character of the in-demand photographer Milo, played by Stephen Rea, is simply stupid, even his snideness not worth the bother.
The talents of all the actors mentioned above are thoroughly wasted here unless it is somehow supposed to be interesting that Anne Eisenhower (Julia Roberts) is fascinating because she gets amorous when she drinks alcohol, or that Joe Flynn, a sportswriter played by Tim Robbins, is intriguing because his luggage gets stolen and he can't do much about it because his French is so bad.
No, this is a colossal mess of a film, one that by its very existence besmirches the well-earned reputation of all those involved as being the brilliant directors, writers and actors that they certainly are. Genius is maligned here.
The Gingerbread Man
Now I'll tell you straight up that you're probably not going to like Kenneth Branagh in the role of Rick Macgruder, the well-heeled lawyer drawn from the screenplay by John Grisham. But we need a white fish bearded guy in the starring role so that we can better appreciate the more predictable characterizations delivered by Robert Downey, who plays Clyde, the lecherous and lovable drunk private detective, and Darryl Hannah, who plays the fetching legal assistant Lois. Their parts may have been predictable, but that doesn't make them a waste of time; far from it. You see, nothing is what it seems in this movie and so you just never can tell who is who and what is what. And that's a good thing, especially coming from Altman. The plot of this film has more twists than a West Virginia highway and takes place during the horrendous hurricane Geraldo, a storm the attorneys in the movie are too preoccupied with themselves over to even acknowledge. As usual, the visuals of the metaphoric storm come across as poetry and great poetry at that. So Grisham gets credit for a great story and Altman gets credit for making sure the story is well-presented (although it isn't really crazy, something we always appreciated and sort of expected from the legendary and late director). But it's the acting of Embeth Davidtz as Mallory Doss and Robert Duvall as her father Dixon who take this movie places it would otherwise never go. Davidtz goes beyond convincing and into some creepy land where one simply inhabits the character. We're never quite comfortable with her and it kind of makes us happy when it turns out our suspicions are justified. But Duvall--my God! He plays a kookie Manson type fanatic and manages to pull in our sympathy through sheer charisma, something that's pretty hard to fake, even in the movies.
The Player
Rather than attempt a redundant scene-by-scene analysis of Robert Altman's The Player (1992) here on Hollywood Eats Its Children Night at Philropost, it might be better to talk about the relevance of this motion picture outside the motion picture industry. Granted, there are not usually quite as many celebrities in the day-to-day world in which most of us move--and having encountered several celebrities myself, I can assure you that your daily existence is usually enhanced without their presences. Still, as Ray Davies of The Kinks once opined, "Everybody's a dreamer, everybody's a star, and everybody's in movies, it doesn't matter who you are." To the extent that we all play some series of roles throughout our walks and runs across this madly spinning orb, we really are all actors, as well as agents, lawyers, writers, directors, editors, cinematographers, golf cart drivers, mail delivery boys and so on.
The difference, to the extent that there is a difference, is probably in the pace. After all, we may only accomplish two hours and four minutes of work in an eight hour work day, but the rapidity of the action comes a bit slower than in any filmmaker's dreams. Yet the confusion we often experience, especially as the new kid in the office, or the industry, is perfectly replicated in many Altman movies--and especially in the deservingly-celebrated opening eight minute sequence that kicks off this brilliant film. Telephones ring, one-sided conversations are heard, some essential personnel quickly chastise novices on the inadequacies of their training, conversations wind in and out of doorways about names that are spoken with such reverence that we simply know the persons referenced are vital, identities are mistaken, big shots are approached unceremoniously by would-be up-and-comers, underlings get run over by nonentities, and we come into the most important meeting of the day only to discover that our pen is out of ink and the battery on our laptop didn't get recharged over night.
Quiet on the set.
Scene one. Take ten. Marker.
and action!
Joel Levinson's office.
I'm sorry. He's not in yet.
May I take a message?
Mr. Levy, I'll tell him you called.
Never say that.
He's either in conference, in a meeting.
He's always in.
Who was that?
Larry Levy.
Was there anything in the trades this morning?
I don't know. The mail's late.
Go get them. Now!
I want them back here before he arrives.
Griffin, hi. Adam Simon.
We weren't supposed to meet until next week.
I didn't know we were.
I wanted to plant a seed in your head.
I'm booked up.
Picture this.
It's a planet in the far future with two suns.
Who plays the sons?
No, suns. Large solar discs.
Run this idea by Bonnie Sherow.
The pictures they make these days are all MTV. Cut cut cut cut.
The opening shot of Touch of Evil was six and a half minutes long.
Six and a half minutes?
Three or four, anyway.
He set up the whole picture with that one tracking shot.
My father was key grip on that shot.
What about Absolute Beginners? That was an extraordinary shot.
Never heard of it.
It's an English film.
It doesn't really matter that this dialogue, taken from the opening sequence of The Player, was spoken by no less than six different actors. What does matter is that we do not know who Larry Levy is or why he is calling Joel Levinson. We may never have seen or even heard of either A Touch of Evil or Absolute Beginners. We may not know what a tracking shot is or if we are actually watching one now--we aren't, at least not specifically, although it is one long uncut sequence that goes on for another seven minutes. What we do know is something about the apparent importance of some of the speakers. We know that this guy Griffin--played by Tim Robbins--is a big deal. We know that because a fellow dressed not nearly as well approaches Griffin before the latter even gets out of his Range Rover. We know that Levinson must be someone important because he has an office to which he has evidently not yet arrived and that he has a secretary or assistant or someone who answers his phone calls, plus he also has someone else standing by in case the person who answers his calls says something inappropriate.
We also know that our sense of confusion is only matched by our sense of intrigue. This is, after all, Hollywood. And Hollywood is where reality comes to die.
It is also a town with its share of vampires. I'm convinced that the real reason we keep getting all these Breaking Wind Vampire Movies is because the company town that makes them is telling a little inside joke on itself. Matter of fact, if you're a wannabe screenwriter who hopes to make it big in Hollywood, you should create a scenario with a soulless villain who charms all his victims specifically because he is so lacking in humanity. Think of Tony Montana in the remake of Scarface. Think of John Belushi in Animal House. Think of the Michael Douglas character in Fatal Attraction. Now, just for fun, image all three of these films overlapping. Hey, I think you've got something there--as long as your script has heart in the right places.
The vampire in The Player is June Gudmundsdottir (pronounced, approximately, "Good man's daughter"), played by Greta Scacchi. She is the girlfriend of the screenwriter Griffin kills. She is also an artist who deliberately never finishes any of her paintings, who doesn't go to movies ("Life's too short"), and who likes words but not "complete sentences."
If you've been paying attention to your life, you have met this particular vampire before, although I believe that technically the appropriate term is succubus. June is a dreamlike character, nonetheless real, who feels nothing substantial as she lures Griffin into becoming even more of an asshole than he is when we first meet him. She's the kind of person who never has any particular ideas of her own, doesn't actually contribute to a conversation but instead asks all sorts of questions that get you to reveal far too much about yourself, never overtly draws conclusions, and ultimately leads you to your doom--a doom dressed up as salvation--while you scratch your head trying to figure out what the hell you really see in her.
Hello. Is David Kahane there?
David! I'm sorry. I forgot. He's gone out. Who's this?
This is Griffin Mill.
Oh, the dead man.
What did you say?
Oh, nothing.
About me being a dead man?
Just a nickname David has for you.
I see. That's a funny nickname. I suppose your husband doesn't like me very much.
I don't have a husband.
I suppose David doesn't like me very much.
David's gone to the cinema.
When will he be back?
When the film's over, I presume.
I could tell you a million other things about The Player, including the fact that it operates on multiple levels which include a movie within a movie within a movie. What you need to know, however, is that this is satire of a high order, satire less about the movie industry than about the life industry. No other Hollywood eats its own picture, including Swimming With Sharks, trains its guns on life--Your Life--with as much contrived precision as The Player. Hell, it even has a happy ending.
The difference, to the extent that there is a difference, is probably in the pace. After all, we may only accomplish two hours and four minutes of work in an eight hour work day, but the rapidity of the action comes a bit slower than in any filmmaker's dreams. Yet the confusion we often experience, especially as the new kid in the office, or the industry, is perfectly replicated in many Altman movies--and especially in the deservingly-celebrated opening eight minute sequence that kicks off this brilliant film. Telephones ring, one-sided conversations are heard, some essential personnel quickly chastise novices on the inadequacies of their training, conversations wind in and out of doorways about names that are spoken with such reverence that we simply know the persons referenced are vital, identities are mistaken, big shots are approached unceremoniously by would-be up-and-comers, underlings get run over by nonentities, and we come into the most important meeting of the day only to discover that our pen is out of ink and the battery on our laptop didn't get recharged over night.
Quiet on the set.
Scene one. Take ten. Marker.
and action!
Joel Levinson's office.
I'm sorry. He's not in yet.
May I take a message?
Mr. Levy, I'll tell him you called.
Never say that.
He's either in conference, in a meeting.
He's always in.
Who was that?
Larry Levy.
Was there anything in the trades this morning?
I don't know. The mail's late.
Go get them. Now!
I want them back here before he arrives.
Griffin, hi. Adam Simon.
We weren't supposed to meet until next week.
I didn't know we were.
I wanted to plant a seed in your head.
I'm booked up.
Picture this.
It's a planet in the far future with two suns.
Who plays the sons?
No, suns. Large solar discs.
Run this idea by Bonnie Sherow.
The pictures they make these days are all MTV. Cut cut cut cut.
The opening shot of Touch of Evil was six and a half minutes long.
Six and a half minutes?
Three or four, anyway.
He set up the whole picture with that one tracking shot.
My father was key grip on that shot.
What about Absolute Beginners? That was an extraordinary shot.
Never heard of it.
It's an English film.
It doesn't really matter that this dialogue, taken from the opening sequence of The Player, was spoken by no less than six different actors. What does matter is that we do not know who Larry Levy is or why he is calling Joel Levinson. We may never have seen or even heard of either A Touch of Evil or Absolute Beginners. We may not know what a tracking shot is or if we are actually watching one now--we aren't, at least not specifically, although it is one long uncut sequence that goes on for another seven minutes. What we do know is something about the apparent importance of some of the speakers. We know that this guy Griffin--played by Tim Robbins--is a big deal. We know that because a fellow dressed not nearly as well approaches Griffin before the latter even gets out of his Range Rover. We know that Levinson must be someone important because he has an office to which he has evidently not yet arrived and that he has a secretary or assistant or someone who answers his phone calls, plus he also has someone else standing by in case the person who answers his calls says something inappropriate.
We also know that our sense of confusion is only matched by our sense of intrigue. This is, after all, Hollywood. And Hollywood is where reality comes to die.
It is also a town with its share of vampires. I'm convinced that the real reason we keep getting all these Breaking Wind Vampire Movies is because the company town that makes them is telling a little inside joke on itself. Matter of fact, if you're a wannabe screenwriter who hopes to make it big in Hollywood, you should create a scenario with a soulless villain who charms all his victims specifically because he is so lacking in humanity. Think of Tony Montana in the remake of Scarface. Think of John Belushi in Animal House. Think of the Michael Douglas character in Fatal Attraction. Now, just for fun, image all three of these films overlapping. Hey, I think you've got something there--as long as your script has heart in the right places.
The vampire in The Player is June Gudmundsdottir (pronounced, approximately, "Good man's daughter"), played by Greta Scacchi. She is the girlfriend of the screenwriter Griffin kills. She is also an artist who deliberately never finishes any of her paintings, who doesn't go to movies ("Life's too short"), and who likes words but not "complete sentences."
If you've been paying attention to your life, you have met this particular vampire before, although I believe that technically the appropriate term is succubus. June is a dreamlike character, nonetheless real, who feels nothing substantial as she lures Griffin into becoming even more of an asshole than he is when we first meet him. She's the kind of person who never has any particular ideas of her own, doesn't actually contribute to a conversation but instead asks all sorts of questions that get you to reveal far too much about yourself, never overtly draws conclusions, and ultimately leads you to your doom--a doom dressed up as salvation--while you scratch your head trying to figure out what the hell you really see in her.
Hello. Is David Kahane there?
David! I'm sorry. I forgot. He's gone out. Who's this?
This is Griffin Mill.
Oh, the dead man.
What did you say?
Oh, nothing.
About me being a dead man?
Just a nickname David has for you.
I see. That's a funny nickname. I suppose your husband doesn't like me very much.
I don't have a husband.
I suppose David doesn't like me very much.
David's gone to the cinema.
When will he be back?
When the film's over, I presume.
I could tell you a million other things about The Player, including the fact that it operates on multiple levels which include a movie within a movie within a movie. What you need to know, however, is that this is satire of a high order, satire less about the movie industry than about the life industry. No other Hollywood eats its own picture, including Swimming With Sharks, trains its guns on life--Your Life--with as much contrived precision as The Player. Hell, it even has a happy ending.
Nashville
A mere two years following the release and universal acclaim of the movie Nashville (1975), director Robert Altman told an audience of movie critics and presumed aficionados that we as a society had only scratched the surface of the imaginative possibilities of motion pictures. I have only one other time been so simultaneously floored and elevated by a remark spoken by someone in the movie business and that was when Sean Penn said that movies were too important to be mere "entertainment" and that if people wanted entertainment they should get two hookers and an eight ball.
Rarely do people integrally involved in any given business demonstrate such remarkable insight into their own enterprise. Altman had the right idea and Penn had the right sense of indignation.
Here were the preeminent director and the finest actor of their respective generations telling us that we needn't be all that impressed with what we were seeing because the players in question would one day be exposed for all their evident limitations once the system evolved a bit.
I cannot completely agree with the presumed modesty of either assertion, however conceited the wording. But about the validity of the sentiments I have not the slightest doubt.
Just think about Altman's prediction in its context. He had releasedNashville two years earlier, a movie with a twenty-four person cast that existed as a true ensemble, where some of the cameo performances were performed either for free or for scale because the actors were just that honored to be involved in the project, where people such as Henry Gibson and Karen Black wrote the lyrics and music for the songs they would be performing, where Lily Tomlin was tasked with playing the mother of two deaf children, where Jeff Goldblum's character was forbidden to speak--in short, where everyone had to create their roles in the most extreme and literal sense of that term--and here's Altman saying that his medium was still in its infancy, that with the proper stoking of imagination we would one day witness movies that would make his feel trivial by comparison.
We certainly have not evolved far since the time of his remark. Even with a brief flirtation with "independent" film production, the fact remains that most filmmakers are constrained to go for the artistic line drive rather than risk striking out while aiming for a creative home run. Some people still try, as the recent critical success of 7 Psychopathsbears out. Yet there are one thousand Breaking Dawn/Red Dawn/Dawn Go Away I'm No Good For You vomit festivals to every work of genuine merit.
And that's strange because I think it would be much easier to make something good than something so typical.
There's a fascinating exchange in Altman's movie The Player where the vunderkind offers the opinion that the studios can save money by not hiring writers. All they have to do is apply newspaper headlines to the process and the scripts will write themselves. Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) quips, "I was just thinking, if we could get rid of the actors and directors, you really might have something."
Even though Mill intends that as a devastating rejoinder to the pompous idiot he is addressing, in a way that is kind of what Altman does do in his movies. Sure, he litters them with stars, but when you have twenty to thirty stars in a movie, there are no stars because no one can upstage anyone else.
Executing that working philosophy exemplifies taking movies where they had heretofore never gone. So what's the next step? It's been forty odd years. You'd think we'd have something better to show for it than that fucking Avatar. Is it possible to make a "real" movie--meaning one that people like that is smart and imaginatively innovative?
It used to happen all the time. That period of time was called the first half of the 1970s. I'll go far out on a fragile limb here and even opine that very little of significance has happened cinematically since the release ofJaws in 1975. The crystallization of the blockbuster drove a stake through the heart of creativity in contemporary filmmaking. Obviously, some exceptions have presented themselves, but those exceptions were almost exclusively committed by directors who had established their cache prior to 1975. Kurosawa, Coppola, Kubrick, Godard, Woody Allen and Robert Altman: those are the fellows who exhibited the most post-Jaws imagination and each of them had made a well-deserved reputation for doing what he does best before 1975. You can even throw Scorsese into that mix if that makes things more palpable.
Technology has played the largest role in the de-emphasis of creative imagination--just as it always has. When movie production evolved from silent to talkies, everyone thought that the quality of films would de facto rocket through the stratosphere and yet it was years before any "new" movie surpassed Birth of a Nation, City Lights, or Metropolis.
This same working philosophy applies in endeavors unrelated to movie making. I had an interesting conversation this very day with a man quite knowledgeable about various aspects of internet marketing. This tremendously nice person was able to bandy about all the terminology in a pleasant and cogent manner, making his business needs quite clear to me in a brief period of time. At first I sort of rolled back in my seat, marveling at his mastery of some fairly complex concepts. And then I was struck out of the blue sky by how he had not managed to integrate what he knew into anything useful, much less enjoyable. While I am not interested in picking on my new friend, I have to admit that in the end I was nonplussed. He has the same goals that most people have: he wants to use the internet to make a lot of money or to at least make a reasoned shot at it. To accomplish this, he has obviously attended his share of webinars and consulted with all manner of charlatan and scalawag. And while he dazzled me with his fluency in the usage of Search Engine Optimization, keyword niches and anchor text, I have to confess that what I would have preferred to have heard him say was: "I'd like you to build a website that accomplishes its purpose in a way that no other website has ever been used before. I'd like it to be aesthetically appealing, yet persuasive through its use of the medium itself, rather than with an emphasis on simulating organic processes." That would have been a fun conversation.
There's nothing inherently stultifying about technological changes. The problem arises when we enter an Alvin Toffler type of fascination with gadgetry and lose sight of what it is that people actually want. Some folks in the ironically titled entertainment industry are too busy generating false needs for the audiences to suffer than to put effort into using their real imaginations to tell a story or stories in a way that is fresh. Sequels, pre-quels, remakes, franchises: these are the money words that Hollywood loves. Why bother thinking when all we have to do is throw Bruce Willis into a movie and give him a bazooka?
Even two directors I like--Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino--often take the hard-easy way out by wallowing their audiences in ponds of violence rather than considering that there are things more ghastly than the reality of physical pain or more glorious than the reflection of an exposed breast in the gleam of a sword.
So, yes, we are still waiting for Altman's prediction. Despite all the evidence of the last forty years to the contrary, we remain optimistic. With all the great minds around, how can we fail?
Rarely do people integrally involved in any given business demonstrate such remarkable insight into their own enterprise. Altman had the right idea and Penn had the right sense of indignation.
Here were the preeminent director and the finest actor of their respective generations telling us that we needn't be all that impressed with what we were seeing because the players in question would one day be exposed for all their evident limitations once the system evolved a bit.
I cannot completely agree with the presumed modesty of either assertion, however conceited the wording. But about the validity of the sentiments I have not the slightest doubt.
Just think about Altman's prediction in its context. He had releasedNashville two years earlier, a movie with a twenty-four person cast that existed as a true ensemble, where some of the cameo performances were performed either for free or for scale because the actors were just that honored to be involved in the project, where people such as Henry Gibson and Karen Black wrote the lyrics and music for the songs they would be performing, where Lily Tomlin was tasked with playing the mother of two deaf children, where Jeff Goldblum's character was forbidden to speak--in short, where everyone had to create their roles in the most extreme and literal sense of that term--and here's Altman saying that his medium was still in its infancy, that with the proper stoking of imagination we would one day witness movies that would make his feel trivial by comparison.
We certainly have not evolved far since the time of his remark. Even with a brief flirtation with "independent" film production, the fact remains that most filmmakers are constrained to go for the artistic line drive rather than risk striking out while aiming for a creative home run. Some people still try, as the recent critical success of 7 Psychopathsbears out. Yet there are one thousand Breaking Dawn/Red Dawn/Dawn Go Away I'm No Good For You vomit festivals to every work of genuine merit.
And that's strange because I think it would be much easier to make something good than something so typical.
There's a fascinating exchange in Altman's movie The Player where the vunderkind offers the opinion that the studios can save money by not hiring writers. All they have to do is apply newspaper headlines to the process and the scripts will write themselves. Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) quips, "I was just thinking, if we could get rid of the actors and directors, you really might have something."
Even though Mill intends that as a devastating rejoinder to the pompous idiot he is addressing, in a way that is kind of what Altman does do in his movies. Sure, he litters them with stars, but when you have twenty to thirty stars in a movie, there are no stars because no one can upstage anyone else.
Executing that working philosophy exemplifies taking movies where they had heretofore never gone. So what's the next step? It's been forty odd years. You'd think we'd have something better to show for it than that fucking Avatar. Is it possible to make a "real" movie--meaning one that people like that is smart and imaginatively innovative?
It used to happen all the time. That period of time was called the first half of the 1970s. I'll go far out on a fragile limb here and even opine that very little of significance has happened cinematically since the release ofJaws in 1975. The crystallization of the blockbuster drove a stake through the heart of creativity in contemporary filmmaking. Obviously, some exceptions have presented themselves, but those exceptions were almost exclusively committed by directors who had established their cache prior to 1975. Kurosawa, Coppola, Kubrick, Godard, Woody Allen and Robert Altman: those are the fellows who exhibited the most post-Jaws imagination and each of them had made a well-deserved reputation for doing what he does best before 1975. You can even throw Scorsese into that mix if that makes things more palpable.
Technology has played the largest role in the de-emphasis of creative imagination--just as it always has. When movie production evolved from silent to talkies, everyone thought that the quality of films would de facto rocket through the stratosphere and yet it was years before any "new" movie surpassed Birth of a Nation, City Lights, or Metropolis.
This same working philosophy applies in endeavors unrelated to movie making. I had an interesting conversation this very day with a man quite knowledgeable about various aspects of internet marketing. This tremendously nice person was able to bandy about all the terminology in a pleasant and cogent manner, making his business needs quite clear to me in a brief period of time. At first I sort of rolled back in my seat, marveling at his mastery of some fairly complex concepts. And then I was struck out of the blue sky by how he had not managed to integrate what he knew into anything useful, much less enjoyable. While I am not interested in picking on my new friend, I have to admit that in the end I was nonplussed. He has the same goals that most people have: he wants to use the internet to make a lot of money or to at least make a reasoned shot at it. To accomplish this, he has obviously attended his share of webinars and consulted with all manner of charlatan and scalawag. And while he dazzled me with his fluency in the usage of Search Engine Optimization, keyword niches and anchor text, I have to confess that what I would have preferred to have heard him say was: "I'd like you to build a website that accomplishes its purpose in a way that no other website has ever been used before. I'd like it to be aesthetically appealing, yet persuasive through its use of the medium itself, rather than with an emphasis on simulating organic processes." That would have been a fun conversation.
There's nothing inherently stultifying about technological changes. The problem arises when we enter an Alvin Toffler type of fascination with gadgetry and lose sight of what it is that people actually want. Some folks in the ironically titled entertainment industry are too busy generating false needs for the audiences to suffer than to put effort into using their real imaginations to tell a story or stories in a way that is fresh. Sequels, pre-quels, remakes, franchises: these are the money words that Hollywood loves. Why bother thinking when all we have to do is throw Bruce Willis into a movie and give him a bazooka?
Even two directors I like--Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino--often take the hard-easy way out by wallowing their audiences in ponds of violence rather than considering that there are things more ghastly than the reality of physical pain or more glorious than the reflection of an exposed breast in the gleam of a sword.
So, yes, we are still waiting for Altman's prediction. Despite all the evidence of the last forty years to the contrary, we remain optimistic. With all the great minds around, how can we fail?
Gosford Park
Anyone who thinks much about movies will eventually find that there is one director with whom he connects better than any other. Often this connection has more to do with sensibility than specific technique or auteur theory. Stanley Kubrick, for instance, was a masterful craftsman who could busy up the screen with more psychological manipulation than anybody in history, and while it is possible to marvel at that accomplishment, I've always found his point of view of humanity to be a bit cold. Jean-Luc Godard continues to make some of the most visually stunning films I've ever seen and even his relative duds are capable of whacking me upside the head with their majesty and splendor. Even Woody Allen, who may not necessarily be that great of a human being, has made more than his share of troubling, beautiful romances and for years he has wavered in stature as my second favorite director. But when it comes to the one person who gets it right for me, there can be nobody who comes close to Robert Altman.
The driving force behind any formidable talent is always ego and with ego comes de facto the occasional success. In Altman's case, there were lots of those successes. But the redoubling of this ego-success drive can also lead to some disasters, or at least lapses in judgment. This is certainly true of this director, as anyone who has watched Thieves Like Us, Ready to Wear, or O.C. and Stiggs can attest. The thing about the failures of a genius like Altman is that even they are at least interesting. We can forgive these digressions from perfection because of the glory of movies such as MASH, Brewster McCloud, The Long Goodbye, The Player, and his two finest films, Nashville and 3 Women.
With the exception of the latter film, Altman was at his best when he developed the panoramic cast of characters whose lives were never subordinated to the plot. In fact, you could argue that MASH, Brewsterand Nashville did not have any plot whatsoever, at least in the common sense of the word. You could even argue that plot would have gotten in the way of the story in those movies. That concern on someone's part for a cohesive storyline is what damaged some of his otherwise remarkable films, including McCabe & Mrs Miller, California Split, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians.
Plot almost gets in the way of Gosford Park (2001). Happily, we are saved from that perdition because in this murder mystery, the guy who gets killed is hated by almost everyone in the movie. Set in November 1932, Gosford Park takes place in an "Upstairs, Downstairs" type of English mansion and the film's forty-some major characters are nicely divided between the hoi polloi and the servants, except that there are impostors afoot everywhere and one is never certain who are the wealthy and who are the servile. The whole fact of the murder itself is nothing more than a concession, a contrived device to move the people along a bit, as is evidenced by the fact that at least half the characters have a reasonable motive to have killed the master of the castle and no one is much disturbed that he was actually killed twice, once by poison and once by stabbing, and by two different murderers. Altman himself even remarked that he hoped people would see this movie more than once so that they could enjoy it the second or third time without having to worry about whodunit. That actually makes tremendous sense because there is simply no way that the first third of the film will make sense to you on a single viewing. But that's actually a good thing in this case because that also happens to be the way life is. Picture yourself as a character in this movie. You're at a party the night before the big pheasant hunt. You know the host and the misses, of course. Maybe you know a couple other people from previous outings. But most of the people are strange to you. You haven't much of an idea what the hell the Hollywood producer is going on about with his long distance calls. You don't know why the handsome actor keeps playing the piano and singing boring songs. You wonder at the servant who claims to be from Scotland and yet feigns every accent imaginable except a Scottish one. You try to figure out why table knives keep disappearing. You stare in amazement at the young whelp who keeps bleating about being ruined in the market, or the player who attempts to convince you that no matter what kind of employee you're looking for, he is the best. Then, by the next morning, after too brief a night of sleeping, you begin to pull things together. Still, certain statements made earlier are now forgotten, though you know you wish you could remember them because they might be revelatory, especially after the murder.
None of this even addresses the beauty of the gold and brown hues that sparkle and dampen throughout the filming. None of this addresses the magnitude of the talent in front of the camera, most of these players being unknown to American audiences, except for Clive Owen and the guy who played the head of NBC in "Seinfeld." None of this approaches the subject that by the end of this movie you will very much care for all of these people, these people who so confused you at the beginning. Just like in the real world.
Gosford Park is a beautiful place to visit. It is worth a second run, and likely a third.
The driving force behind any formidable talent is always ego and with ego comes de facto the occasional success. In Altman's case, there were lots of those successes. But the redoubling of this ego-success drive can also lead to some disasters, or at least lapses in judgment. This is certainly true of this director, as anyone who has watched Thieves Like Us, Ready to Wear, or O.C. and Stiggs can attest. The thing about the failures of a genius like Altman is that even they are at least interesting. We can forgive these digressions from perfection because of the glory of movies such as MASH, Brewster McCloud, The Long Goodbye, The Player, and his two finest films, Nashville and 3 Women.
With the exception of the latter film, Altman was at his best when he developed the panoramic cast of characters whose lives were never subordinated to the plot. In fact, you could argue that MASH, Brewsterand Nashville did not have any plot whatsoever, at least in the common sense of the word. You could even argue that plot would have gotten in the way of the story in those movies. That concern on someone's part for a cohesive storyline is what damaged some of his otherwise remarkable films, including McCabe & Mrs Miller, California Split, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians.
Plot almost gets in the way of Gosford Park (2001). Happily, we are saved from that perdition because in this murder mystery, the guy who gets killed is hated by almost everyone in the movie. Set in November 1932, Gosford Park takes place in an "Upstairs, Downstairs" type of English mansion and the film's forty-some major characters are nicely divided between the hoi polloi and the servants, except that there are impostors afoot everywhere and one is never certain who are the wealthy and who are the servile. The whole fact of the murder itself is nothing more than a concession, a contrived device to move the people along a bit, as is evidenced by the fact that at least half the characters have a reasonable motive to have killed the master of the castle and no one is much disturbed that he was actually killed twice, once by poison and once by stabbing, and by two different murderers. Altman himself even remarked that he hoped people would see this movie more than once so that they could enjoy it the second or third time without having to worry about whodunit. That actually makes tremendous sense because there is simply no way that the first third of the film will make sense to you on a single viewing. But that's actually a good thing in this case because that also happens to be the way life is. Picture yourself as a character in this movie. You're at a party the night before the big pheasant hunt. You know the host and the misses, of course. Maybe you know a couple other people from previous outings. But most of the people are strange to you. You haven't much of an idea what the hell the Hollywood producer is going on about with his long distance calls. You don't know why the handsome actor keeps playing the piano and singing boring songs. You wonder at the servant who claims to be from Scotland and yet feigns every accent imaginable except a Scottish one. You try to figure out why table knives keep disappearing. You stare in amazement at the young whelp who keeps bleating about being ruined in the market, or the player who attempts to convince you that no matter what kind of employee you're looking for, he is the best. Then, by the next morning, after too brief a night of sleeping, you begin to pull things together. Still, certain statements made earlier are now forgotten, though you know you wish you could remember them because they might be revelatory, especially after the murder.
None of this even addresses the beauty of the gold and brown hues that sparkle and dampen throughout the filming. None of this addresses the magnitude of the talent in front of the camera, most of these players being unknown to American audiences, except for Clive Owen and the guy who played the head of NBC in "Seinfeld." None of this approaches the subject that by the end of this movie you will very much care for all of these people, these people who so confused you at the beginning. Just like in the real world.
Gosford Park is a beautiful place to visit. It is worth a second run, and likely a third.