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Kill Bill


Six things I like about "Kill Bill (Volume 1)":
(From November 2003)

1. This is the first Quentin Tarantino movie I've ever wanted to see more than once. The others were clever and entertaining, but once you'd seen them once, you had the whole story.

2. It clearly takes place in an alternate universe, but you only learn that bit by bit. It's a different world from ours, both in large things (no police, obviously) to small (airplane seats have special storage slots so that passengers can store their samurai swords). I like movies which take place in a world slightly, subtly different from this one, like "eXistenZ." That's often a lot more interesting than movies with rocket ships and computer-generated monsters.

3. Uma Thurman. No performance in a movie like this will ever be nominated for an Oscar (hope I'm wrong), but it should be. Roger Ebert has pointed out that acting in a movie like this is, in some ways, a lot more difficult than acting in yet another "Sundance thumb-sucker." The reason is that there are no real characters in a movie like this, just action figures and genre stereotypes. If actors are going to create characters who seem like real people, they have to do all the work themselves, as Uma Thurman does here.

4. It continues a very interesting progression for Tarantino movies, which has never been commented on in anything I've read. His first movie, "Reservoir Dogs," was entirely about men. His second, "Pulp Fiction," was mostly about men, but there were a few women characters. "Jackie Brown" had a lot of men, but it was a woman who drove the plot. And "Kill Bill" is, of course, mostly about women.

5. There is a reason for the unreality of the characters that's beyond Tarantino's famous enthusiasm for various types of trashy movies. This is a puzzle film, as I think of them. "eXistenZ" was a puzzle film, and so was "The Ninth Gate." A puzzle film is a movie where it's really ideas which are the main thing. Characters and plot are secondary, and the traditional Hollywood rules of good guys and bad guys, and getting you to identify with the protagonist, and so on don't apply.

The "Ninth Gate" is really a movie about choices, and about how the Devil would work (if he were real). "eXistenZ" has quite a bit to say about reality, games, movies and sex, as I mentioned in my review. The "Matrix" movies are basically puzzle movies, too, which is probably why the creators thought it was okay to have such clunky dialogue and one-dimensional characters. Apparently their extensive reading never included George Bernard Shaw.

If "Kill Bill" is a puzzle movie, what is it about? Well, more will be clear after the second half comes out (I assume, or at least I hope), but for now there are two very clear threads at least. One thing which was pointed out in the current (Nov/Dec 03) issue of "Film Comment" is how much of the movie is about trying to belong to a culture that is foreign to you. Tarantino has been criticized repeated for his use of Black slang, especially how many times the word "nigger" appears in his films. Well, this is alluded to early in "Kill Bill" when Vernita Green mutters to herself, "I should have been motherfuckin' Black Mamba," a code name which instead belonged to Uma Thurman's character, Beatrix Kiddo.

But where this theme is really explored is in relation to Japanese culture. O-Ren Ishii, another of Beatrix' targets, becomes the boss of all crime in Tokyo despite being only half Japanese. At the first meeting of the crime council after she becomes its head, she asserts with great finality that this subject is off-limits. Later she mocks Beatrix for being a silly Caucasian girl playing with a Samurai sword. By the end of their fight, she apologizes for this insult, and, for this half of the movie, that apology is pretty much the climax. Beatrix has asserted her right to be part of the Japanese culture, first by her mastery of the language and then by her mastery of the weapon.

The other main theme which is visible so far is the idea of a woman taking revenge for being abused. Not only was Beatrix nearly murdered on her wedding day, she was pregnant at the time, and her husband and all the members of the wedding party were killed, but when she was in a coma for four years, a hospital orderly pimped out her unconscious body for $75 a pop.

The beginning of the movie asserts (quoting Star Trek, of course, not Les Liasons Dangereuses) that revenge is a dish best served cold, but Beatrix is not cold when she takes her revenge on Buck, the orderly. His truck, which she steals, says "Pussy Wagon" across the back in big letters, and, as she drives around in the Pussy Wagon, getting her revenge on "the cunts who did this to me, and the dick responsible," it's easy to see that she's changed the original meaning of "Pussy Wagon" pretty completely.

Each of the major female characters (Beatrix, O-Ren, Go Go and Vernita) has a persona of traditional non-threatening femininity (respectively, air-headed tourist, traditional Japanese okusan, simpering schoolgirl, and mom) which she adopts when it suits her. This cover is then dropped when it's time to get violent (or at least serious), usually very suddenly.

6. I think there's a big surprise coming in Volume 2 (at least one), something which will show the first part in a different light. Just a guess, but I think that's one reason the movie was split into two parts.


Six thoughts about "Kill Bill (Volume 2)":
(From November 2004)

1. If you think of Volume 2 as a sequel (as opposed to the second half of a two-part movie), it's a pretty gutsy one, since it is quite different from the first one, and its virtues are very different from the first one.

The first movie was visual, kinetic and very violent. This one is verbal, quiet and intimate (and occasionally very violent, of course). With the exception of the opening (the flashback to the wedding rehearsal massacre), none of the scenes have more than three characters in them, and many have only two.

There is also a lot more dialogue than in Volume I (except for the "Man from Okinawa" scene, and the "no subject will be taboo" scene). There's some wonderful humor (even now, saying "gargantuan" or "you should listen to this, 'cause this concerns you" makes me laugh), and some terrific performances.

In the first movie there's no way to calculate exactly how many people Beatrix kills (probably 25-50). In the second one, she kills exactly one (Bill, of course).

On the other hand, if you think of "Kill Bill" as a single 247-minute revenge movie delivered in two parts, then it is very well structured. If it is ever released as a single feature (and I understand it will be), I would go see it.

2. I predicted that something was going to be revealed about the plot in the second half which would change the way we looked at the first half. I was wrong, but only because I included the word "plot." The plot (apart from how Tarantino jumps back and forth in time) is very straightforward:

Beatrix Kiddo, a professional killer, finds out she's pregnant. She tries to go straight and get married to somebody who doesn't know about her past. Her former associates track her down and kill everybody in the wedding party. Beatrix survives, however, and is in a coma for four years. When she recovers, she resolves to kill her former associates, one at a time. She does.

That's about it, but that summary leaves out everything good about the movies, and it certainly leaves out what the movies are about. There are no plot revelations in Volume 2, but there is a big fat theme revelation, and it was worth waiting for.

Last November, I explained my interpretation of what the first movie was about. The second one is about motherhood. Beatrix gets pregnant (by her "murdering bastard" boss Bill) and she thinks this means everything has to change. A mother can't go jetting around the world killing people for money, can she?

Of course she can. Beatrix is wrong, as Bill points out, and her mistake sets the whole thing in motion. Motherhood doesn't replace everything else in your life, everything you enjoy and live for and are good at, or at least it shouldn't (and, ultimately, it won't).

I'm on an email list for Tori Amos fans, and after her daughter Natashya Lorien was born, some people on the list were saying, "oh, Tori won't be able to tour anymore (or she won't want to), she's a mother now."

But why should having a child mean you have to give up being a musician, or a lawyer, or an actress, or an investment banker, or a killer?

(Besides, at around the time that Tori's daughter was born, David Bowie had a child also, and nobody on www.davidbowie.com was saying that he shouldn't ever tour anymore because of little Alexandria Zahra. So, it's obvious that there's a bit of a double standard in operation here.)

With this in mind, it's interesting to go back and watch Volume 1 after having seen and thought about Volume 2. In the "Showdown at House of Blue Leaves" section, there's a moment when you can tell that Beatrix is "in the zone," like a basketball player whose shots are all falling, or a pitcher who's throwing the ball exactly where he wants every time. This is what she does better than anybody else in the world, and, as Bill forces her to admit, it's what she loves.

At the end of the movie, both when she leaves the final murder scene and during the credits, she's carrying her daughter, but she's also still got her Hanzo sword. This is not "she's got her revenge, and now she lays down her weapon to raise her child." She's going to raise her child, but she's not going to give up doing what she loves.

Which is pretty much the moral of the movie.

3. One danger in a movie like this (a series of confrontations and fight scenes) is that it can seem like the point is for each fight scene to top the one before. Tarantino wisely doesn't do this. When you think, "hey, he'll never top what just happened," he takes things in a different direction, a different style, a different point, so that "can he top this?" isn't the issue.

In the "climactic" confrontation between Bill and Beatrix, for example, the whole fight lasts less than twenty seconds, and they are both sitting down throughout, but it's not at all unsatisfying. And, for those who thought it was "too easy," I'll just point out that in the last scenes Bill drinks quite a bit, and he is obviously fairly sloshed by the time he and Beatrix are sitting outside together. If you were going to face the greatest warrior in the world, would you be trying to get a buzz before the fight? Not if you expected to win, you wouldn't.

4. With a movie like this, you have to suspend disbelief, of course, and you have to accept the rules of an alternate universe. You have to be able to buy into some characters with really strong but fairly simple emotions, but not to let that emotional involvement distract you from the director giving you some Really Cool Bits to look at and listen to.

The original Really Cool Bits director was Alfred Hitchcock. As one critic put it, he was such a fetishist that he figured out how to turn the audience into fetishists, too. He would have understood the very careful way various elements are combined to produce some really great moments in this movie.

And Sir Alfred would have understood something else about Kill Bill, too, which is the strange feeling of watching a movie where the strongest emotional relationship is not between any of the characters, but between the director and the lead actress. Many people have picked up on Tarantino's comparison of his relationship with Uma Thurman to von Sternberg's relationship with Marlene Dietrich, but for a somewhat more recent example, see the movies where Hitchcock directed Grace Kelly.

What Thurman brings to "Kill Bill," in addition to providing a focus for the director's (ahem) enthusiasm, is that she obviously decided to play all this foolishness as if it really matters, as if these are all real people, and as if Beatrix is a real woman who has lost her baby, who has just been nearly murdered on her wedding day by the father of that baby.

Somehow, at least in my opinion, all of this manages to work, but I don't think I'd recommend it as a blueprint for how to make a good movie.

5. Orson Welles pointed out that the best thing which can happen to an actor is if you don't appear in Act 1, but everybody in Act 1 talks about your character. As soon as you appear in Act 2, the audience will think you're great because they've just heard you talked about for an hour. This doesn't always work (see "Apocalypse Now"), but it can work if the actor (and the writing, of course) lives up to the expectations, and David Carradine does. He plays Bill, who appeared in the first half only as a voice and as a hand fondling a sword, and as boots walking across a wooden floor before putting a bullet in Beatrix' head.

Bill appears for real in Volume 2, and you see what a bastard he is, but you see a lot more, including why Beatrix was in love with him. A great part and a great performance.

6. The Credits.

Tarantino loves actors, and he features them superbly in the closing credits. There are two complete sets of actor credits, one after the other, both including the entire cast of both movies. The first is set to a ferocious version of "Malaguena Salerosa" by Robert Rodriguez' band Chingon, and it showcases every performer perfectly, including a full acting credit for Yuen Wo-ping's fight team, which is richly deserved.


Two things I didn't like so much about "Kill Bill":

1. In Volume 1, during the "Showdown at House of Blue Leaves" section, first Beatrix and then Johnny Mo "run" up through the air to the balcony. Very "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," but not really right for this movie, which otherwise carefully treads the border between "extremely unlikely" and "absolutely impossible" without stepping over it.

2. In Volume 2, during the final conversation between Beatrix and Bill, he refers to her as a "natural born killer." In the context of the point he is making this is true, but obviously it's Tarantino's attempt to reclaim the phrase from Oliver Stone (Tarantino wrote the original story for "Natural Born Killers." and he hated the final result). I can understand the impulse, but I'm sorry. NBK is a phenomenon in a much larger world than the one Quentin Tarantino inhabits, and there's no way for him to make it his again.


My favorite "Kill Bill" theory:

O-Ren Ishii gets a whole section of the movie about her "origin" and early life. This doesn't seem so odd at the time, this is the sort of movie where all the characters might get origin stories. But they don't, even though some of them (Beatrix and Bill, for example) are more central to the story.

So, why does O-Ren get an origin story? Is it just because Tarantino wanted to do an anime sequence? Well, that's one theory, but I found a different theory online that I like a lot better.

When O-Ren's parents are killed, there is a character in the room, an assassin who works for the mob boss who kills her mother. He is tall and lean, with a shock of straight hair, wearing a suit, carrying a sword which looks an awful lot like a Hanzo sword, and he kills O-Ren's father, but she never sees his face because she's hiding under the bed.

What if that guy is Bill? Hattori Hanzo's former student who betrayed Hanzo's teachings by going to work for a yakuza boss. Who knows full well when O-ren comes to work for him later on that he killed her father and she doesn't know it because she never saw his face from under the bed. That guy would really be a bastard, wouldn't he?

One final thought. Don't rule out a "Kill Bill Volume 3" someday. There are three major characters left alive at the end of Volume 2 who have great reason to seek vengeance on Beatrix at some point.

Kill Bill
(2002)

Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino,
based on the character The Bride, created by Q & U
 
Cast:
Beatrix Kiddo : Uma Thurman
Bill : David Carradine
O-Ren Ishii : Lucy Liu
Vernita Green : Vivica A. Fox
Budd : Michael Madsen
Elle Driver : Daryl Hannah
Earl McGraw & Esteban Vihaio : Michael Parks
Johnny Mo & Pai Mei : Gordon Liu
Nikki Bell : Ambrosia Kelley
Edgar McGraw : James Parks
Buck : Michael Bowen
Trucker : Jonathan Loughran
Hattori Hanzo : Sonny Chiba
Bald Guy : Kenji Ohba
Sofie Fatale : Julie Dreyfus
Gogo Yubari : Chiaki Kuriyama
The 5,6,7,8's as themselves
Proprietor: Yuki Kazamatsuri
Charlie Brown : Sakichi Satô
The Yuen Wo-Ping Fight Team as The Crazy 88's
Reverend Harmony : Bo Svenson
Mrs. Harmony : Jeannie Epper
Tommy Plympton : Chris Nelson
Rufus : Samuel L. Jackson
Larry Gomez : Larry Bishop
Karen : Helen Kim

and introducing
Perla Haney-Jardine as B.B.

Add comment November 14th, 2004

Dr. T and the Women

"Women are incapable of being bad luck by themselves. It's men who make them that way. Women, by nature, are saints. They're sacred, and should be treated that way."

– Dr. Sullivan Travis

Robert Altman's movies often begin in chaos. The camera moves, characters pass by, snatches of conversation are heard, and we seldom learn anywhere near as much as we want to, but almost always enough to make us curious. The beginning of "Dr. T and the Women" is masterful, as the camera moves in and out and around and through the waiting room and examining rooms of Dr. Sullivan Travis, a very upscale gynecologist in Dallas, Texas.

Robert Altman's movies often begin in chaos, and usually they coalesce, though not always. "Dr. T and the Women" is precarious until the very end. I think that ultimately it does work, though there is a sudden element of magical realism at the end which is neither appropriate nor necessary.

However, I can certainly understand people who think this movie doesn't work. What I don't agree with, though, is the argument that it's sexist. In talking about "King Lear," Orson Welles said that someone like Lear, a "man's man" who lives with his knights (his Queen is long dead), totally clueless about women, was clearly, in Shakespeare's eyes, a real loser.

Altman has taken this idea one step further, showing us a man who is surrounded by women on all sides (his family is all female, his staff is all female, and, of course, so are his patients) but is still as totally wrong about them as Lear. When Dr. T is out hunting with his buddies, the only time we see him with men, he comes off as an authority on the subject of women, sagely giving them the wisdom I've quoted above. It reminded me of "The Philadelphia Story," with all those disagreements about whether Tracy Lord was like a goddess, or more like a queen.

Another director might have thrown a wink at the audience, to make sure we realize that he knows what horseshit this all is, but (as I've said before) Altman always prefers to assume that his audience is paying attention and thinking for themselves.

Admittedly, most of Dr. T's patients (all idle upper-class women) are pampered and foolish and bitchy and vain, but the point is that Dr. T encourages and enables all of this. He books repeated appointments for women who have nothing wrong with them (thereby clogging his calendar and delaying the appointments of the few patients with actual ailments). He and his staff flatter all of his patients constantly. He indulges his patients in every way, most hilariously in the scene where he allows a woman to smoke while he examines her.

The ultimate result of all this is shown with Dr. T.'s wife, Kate, who basically reverts to being a child because for years he's treated her like one. He wants to give her everything, shield her from things that are unpleasant or troubling, flatter and adore her, never thinking that this might not be what she wants or needs at all. She is hospitalized after she takes off all her clothes and cavorts in a mall fountain, and her doctor explains to Dr. T that she is suffering from Hestia Complex.

Hestia Complex (which does not really exist, as far as I can tell) is something that supposedly happens to women who are loved too much, but Dr. T doesn't understand how he could have caused this, or why he's not being allowed to see his wife.

The other element in Dr. T's crisis is that he meets Bree Davis, the new golf pro at his club. A former member of the pro tour, she's pretty and intelligent and funny, and they hit it off right away.

And this is where Dr. T's cluelessness becomes impossible to ignore. Bree seduces him on their first date, and he immediately begins operating under the assumption that they're in love (he doesn't seem particularly worried about the ethics of the situation, either). As time goes on, he starts to make more assumptions about their relationship, completely ignoring all the realities of the situation:

1) He's a married man, devoted to his wife,

2) his wife is institutionalized,

3) Bree is a professional athlete, just taking a break from the pro tour, and

4) her seduction of him is as brisk and efficient as any you're likely to see, in or out of the movies.

In addition, this expert on women is oblivious to the fact that his nurse is desperately in love with him, he's oblivious (as far as we can tell) to that fact that his sister-in-law (who's living with him, along with her three daughters) is a lush, and he's oblivious to the fact that his daughter, who's about to be married, is gay and in love with her maid of honor.

All of these threads come together at the end of the picture, along with some unnecessarily apocalyptic weather, to put Dr. T face to face with two things. He realizes that women may not actually want the smothering devotion he calls love (he offers it to Bree, describing his vision of their life together in detail, and she quite reasonably asks, "why would I want that?"). And he realizes, or remembers, that his original motivation to become a doctor may have been for some reason other than providing flattery and pampering to the wives of Dallas' elite.

I won't reveal the final scene, except to say that I think it works (once you get past the phony "magical realism" transitional device, which is every bit as silly as the frogs in "Magnolia"), and to report that there was applause in the theater where I saw the film.

I thought Richard Gere's performance was excellent, though I admit that I don't have much to compare it to, since this is the first film I've seen him in since "Days of Heaven." Altman uses Gere's movie star looks and demeanor just as he has in the past with Paul Newman. Outside of Gere and Helen Hunt, nobody in the cast has a whole lot to do. This is not a multi-character fugue like Nashville or "Short Cuts." All the characters are basically only there because of how they relate to Dr. T.

The best performance in the picture, besides Gere himself, is Shelley Long, who plays Dr. T's adoring nurse Carolyn. I usually don't care for Long all that much, but once again Altman has taken somebody we know mostly from television and figured out exactly what they could do best in a movie. She gets more laughs around the edges of many scenes than any of the other actors do when they're center stage.

Altman has used Lyle Lovett in minor roles in several films, but this time Lovett doesn't appear on screen but instead provides the soundtrack, and it's very good. The music (by Lovett and his Large Band) is light and mostly understated, subtly telling us how to take certain scenes. For example, it's really the music which makes sure we see Kate's dip in the fountain as sad rather than funny. Also, Lovett's songs "You've Been So Good Up To Now" and "She's Already Made Up Her Mind" run through Bree's seduction of Dr. T, commenting on the action without being at all redundant.

There are two things which keep this from being in the first rank of recent Altman films. One is the ending, which is flawed, as I said. The other is that its concerns are so narrow. It has one basic theme, one story to tell and one point to make, and this makes it pretty thin compared to Cookie's Fortune and, especially, Kansas City. But still, it's worth seeing.

Dr. T: Do I make you happy?

Bree: I'm a very happy person.

Dr. T and the Women
(2000)

Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Annie Rapp
 
Cast:
Dr. Sullivan Travis : Richard Gere
Bree Davis : Helen Hunt
Kate Travis : Farrah Fawcett
Peggy : Laura Dern
Carolyn : Shelley Long
Connie : Tara Reid
Dee Dee : Kate Hudson
Marilyn : Liv Tyler
Harlan : Robert Hays
Bill : Matt Malloy
Eli : Andy Richter
Dr. Harper : Lee Grant

November 14th, 2004

Cookie’s Fortune

In the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, people's golf games were forever being interrupted by the annoying realities of war. In Holly Springs, conducting a rigorous homicide investigation is okay, as long as it doesn't interfere too much with the fishing.

Deputy Lester Boyle: He had nothing to do with it, alright? He's innocent. You can trust me on that one.

Eddie "The Expert" Pitts: And what makes you so sure of that, Lester?

Deputy Lester Boyle: Because I've fished with him.

Between 1969 and 1976 Robert Altman directed more first-class movies than any other American director has ever made in that amount of time. The result is that I keep going to see his pictures, even though some of the recent ones have sucked. This one doesn't suck even a little, in fact it's a hoot. Loose and funny and warm (Altman's movies started to go downhill when he started to show contempt for his characters), featuring some terrific performances.

This movie takes place in Holly Springs, a dozy little southern town where a sign in the liquor store proudly proclaims that, "on this site in 1897, nothing happened." Which seems to be true of most days in this century, too.

Everybody in Holly Springs knows everybody else. Everybody knows Cookie, who's well-off and eccentric, pining after her dead husband Buck in their big old house. Everybody known Willis, who looks after the house for her, and who likes to take a drink or two down at Theo's (almost as much as he likes fishing). Everybody knows that Cookie has two nieces, Camille, who's the local martinet of good taste and culture, and Cora, who's sweet but a bit dim.

Cookie can't stand Camille or Cora, but she is quite fond of Cora's daughter, Emma. Emma is Holly Springs' "bad girl," though most of the wickedness we see involved her extremely individual style of driving and parking. She's just arrived back in town in the van she lives in, with some facial bruises which are never explained.

Everybody knows about Cookie and Willis and Camille and Cora and Emma. And then one day Cookie is found dead of a gunshot wound and Willis is arrested. Like the 4077th MASH, Holly Springs is a very functional society which has evolved its own rules and systems, and even though the evidence compels the police to arrest Willis, nobody thinks he actually did it. In fact, some of the best scenes take place at the jail, where the door of Willis' cell is never closed (let alone locked).

Emma is furious, completely convinced that Willis is innocent, and she's somewhat frustrated that nobody pays much attention to her arguments, because they all think he's innocent, too. So, in solidarity, she moves into his cell with him, which is also convenient for her to conduct periodic fevered couplings with Jason, her former beau, who is now a deputy. Typically, they go to great lengths to hide what they're doing from Willis, who just lies on his bunk and smiles, not fooled for a minute.

Meanwhile, Camille and Cora move right into Cookie's house, cheerfully taking down all the yellow tape that marks it as a crime scene, as they prepare for the performance of "Salome" that the town church is putting on for Easter. Camille is running the entire production, of course, even to the extent of revising the text and giving herself a co-writing credit with Oscar Wilde.

This is pretty much Altman's manifesto against people who give a damn about what other people think, and it's great. And, as in "M*A*S*H," the good, cool, relaxed people way outnumber the weird, uptight, self-righteous people, which is a nice way of looking at things.

Cookie's Fortune
(1999)

Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Annie Rapp
 
Cast:
Camille Dixon : Glenn Close
Cora Duvall : Julianne Moore
Willis Richland : Charles Dutton
Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt : Patricia Neal
Emma Duvall : Liv Tyler
Jason Brown : Chris O'Donnell
Manny Hood : Lyle Lovett
Lester Boyle : Ned Beatty
Otis Tucker : Courtney B. Vance
Jack Palmer : Donald Moffat
Billy Cox : Danny Darst
Eddie "The Expert" Pitts : Matt Malloy

November 14th, 2004

The Player

Robert A. Heinlein once wrote a story called "He Built a Crooked House." In this story, a house constructed in four dimensions* falls in on itself (California earthquake), and the result is a small box of a house, obviously only one room, but when you go inside the whole eight-room house is there. But any exit to the outside world just leads to another part of the house. There is no way to get out.

Robert Altman's "The Player" is the opposite. It looks like an ordinary house, with all the usual rooms, but if you try to go in the front door, you end up in the back yard. If you try to go in through the garage door, you find yourself coming out of the basement. There's no way to get in, because there is no inside. It's all surface.

The first clue, the one that sets everything up, is the long tracking shot that opens the movie. The camera moves around and around a studio lot, following different conversations, looking in windows where various writers are pitching various (mostly inane) ideas for movies.

All well and good, but the tip-off is that it calls attention to itself. First, in one of the conversations we overhear, one character is complaining to another that there are no long shots in movies anymore. It's all cut-cut-cut. Then he goes on to remember great long shots in the past, including (of course) the long tracking shot that opens Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil."

The whole movie is like that. You can't miss anything, Altman points at everything of any significance. It's like an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, where if someone is crying someone else will hold up a sign saying, "Sad, isn't it?"

The characters are all two-dimensional at best. None of them even need names, except as a convenience. They could just be called The Player, The Aspiring Player, The Idealistic Victim, The Self-Involved Writer, etc. And none of them have any really likable qualities, so there's no risk of the audience getting particularly emotionally involved with anyone.

(BTW, movie reviewers who talk about the writer who dies being victimized by the studio system are betraying their own prejudices (reviewers are writers, after all): the guy is a nitwit and his idea for a movie is narcissistic and inane.)

I could go on, but I would start to give the idea that this is a pan. I heartily recommend people see this movie, I just want to give some idea of what to expect.

The movie is Altman's movie about Hollywood, but not in the obvious way that "SOB" is Blake Edward's. I love "SOB," but the "Hollywood director gets back at Hollywood by making movie showing director screwed by system" thing was a pretty straightforward response. Altman is after a much subtler joke, and he carries it off wonderfully.

This is a bad movie (by any ordinary standards, including the standard we expect from the director of classics like Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller). But that's the point. He made a Successful Hollywood Movie, every bit as inane as the Bruce Willis/Julia Roberts blockbuster that he shows us the finale of. And it has been, of course, very successful. He is telling us that the Altman Victimized by Hollywood thing was wrong. He could have made this movie at any time. Unlike "SOB," this is not a bitter movie, because Altman is not bitter. He's been playing his game, by his own rules, and he's won.

I only wonder one thing. This movie means Altman will have a much bigger budget and more clout when he directs his next movie. I wonder if he has had something specific in mind.

-------------------
* Explanation on request

The Player
(1992)

Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Michael Tolkin
 
Cast:
Griffin Mill : Tim Robbins
June Gudmundsdottir : Greta Scacchi
Walter Stuckel : Fred Ward
Detective Susan Avery : Whoopi Goldberg
Larry Levy : Peter Gallagher
Joel Levison : Brion James
Bonnie Sherow : Cynthia Stevenson
David Kahane : Vincent D'Onofrio
Andy Civella : Dean Stockwell
Tom Oakley : Richard E. Grant
Larry Levy : Sydney Pollack
Detective DeLongpre : Lyle Lovett

Add comment November 14th, 2004

Nashville

Nashville is the story of twenty-four characters in the country music capital over four days during a presidential campaign. Most of the characters are involved with the music business in one way or another, and those run the gamut from Winifred, who impulsively leaves her music-hating husband to try to reinvent herself as "a country music singer, or a star," to the king and queen of country music, Haven Hamilton and Barbara Jean.

The characters are all in the same place only at the beginning and the end of the film. In between, they come and go and run into each other in all different combinations.

The movie opens (after a couple of preliminary vignettes, including introducing the sound trucks of independent Presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker, which thread through the film like the PA announcements in M*A*S*H) in a recording studio where Haven Hamilton is recording his ponderous Bicentennial anthem, "200 Years" (the stirring chorus is "we must be doing something right to last two hundred years"). In the smaller studio next door, Linnea Reese records with a Black gospel choir.

Pretty much all the rest of the characters are at the airport soon after that, and from there all the characters head off in their various directions, coming together again only at the end, at the huge Hal Philip Walker rally.

Nashville and Washington

Politics and music are the movie's two most obvious concerns, as Walker's advance man John Triplette moves to sign up talent both for a late-night smoker with local businessmen, and for the rally at Nashville's Parthenon. Robert Altman took a lot of flack after the movie was released, for making fun of country music and country musicians, and his response was that the movie wasn't about Nashville, it was about Washington.

I see the point he was trying to make, but I don't think this is true, nor is it the answer to the question.

The answer to the question of whether he's mocking the music or not is right there in the soundtrack. On one hand, there's Haven Hamilton, with his garish white outfits, his unctuous manner, his fatuous and self-revealing songs, and his croaking voice. As a character, he's almost more of a politician than an entertainer.

But on the other hand, there's Barbara Jean. Her songs are wonderful and Ronee Blakley, the actress who plays her, sings the hell out of them. I don't think anybody could see how Barbara Jean is treated by her husband and manager, Barnett, and then hear her sing "Careless Disrespect" and think the movie or Altman is mocking her. And, it's immediately after she sings that song at Opryland that she breaks down on stage.

The truth is, Nashville is no major statement on politics and government. It is very much concerned with power, but mostly with other kinds of power. I saw Nashville when it was released, and I saw it again a month ago (and many times in between) and in a quarter century my opinion has remained the same. What this movie is about, more than anything else, is the women.

Mr. A. and the Women

Every time I see it, there are three parts which hit me the hardest. The first takes place in Barbara Jean's hospital room. Her public appearance earlier that day at the airport, planned to celebrate her return to Nashville after treatment at a center for burns (this is never explained) ended with her collapsing. All day the hospital room was full of family, friends, well-wishers and hangers-on, but now it's just her and Barnett. Barbara Jean had been supposed to sing at the Grand Old Opry that night, but instead she and Barnett listen on the radio as Connie White, her hated rival, fills in for her.

Barbara Jean throws a tantrum when Barnett won't turn the radio off, and it escalates when he tells her he needs to go to see Connie and Haven and the rest later on, so he can thank Connie personally from Barbara Jean.

When she subsides into tears, Barnett demands to know if she's going to have another nervous breakdown, and then tells her that she'd better shape up, because he won't stand for her having another breakdown.

Barnett: Have I ever told you how to sing a song?
Barbara Jean (quietly): no.
Barnett: Then don't you tell me how to run your life. I've been doing pretty good with it.

He then pressures her into wishing him a cheerful goodbye, and after he's gone, she calls after him plaintively.

It's a harrowing scene, all the more so because there's no physical violence, and in fact she yells much more than he does and is more physically aggressive. But Barnett can afford to be quiet and wait for her to blow off her anger, because he's in charge and they both know it.

Barnett does get a little bit of a comeuppance at the club, where both Haven Hamilton and Connie White completely ignore him. Without Barbara Jean at his side, he's just another functionary, no more important than Delbert Reese, Haven's lawyer. Nobody pays much attention to Del except to make fun of his obtuseness.

The scene in the hospital room is incredible, and we feel Barbara Jean's desire to have the radio turned off, because we've seen the show at the Grand Old Opry, which ran the gamut from bland (Tommy Brown) to phony (Haven Hamilton, singing a song about marital fidelity as his mistress watches from a bench on the rear of the stage) to completely plastic (Connie White).

Keep a-goin'

The next killer scene is Barbara Jean's breakdown on stage at Opryland. Rushed into doing a performance pretty much the minute she was released from the hospital (you don't have to read very far between the lines to see how much of a pattern this is), she sings a couple of songs, then becomes disoriented, telling a long and increasingly pointless anecdote (though the subtext of the anecdote is that she's been "singing for her supper" since she was a pretty young girl) until Barnett comes out and leads her off the stage.

The film was made with a script, by Joan Tewkesbury, but the actors brought a lot to it. There's quite a bit of improvisation, and several key scenes were written by the actors. Barbara Jean's breakdown is one of those, and (as in many of the scenes) Altman set up a few different cameras, started them rolling and told Ronee Blakley to begin. The first time he (or the other actors) ever heard or saw the scene was when she was performing it for the cameras.

In addition, most of the songs were written or co-written by the actors. And, to the delight of all the musicians in the audience, there is no dubbing or lip-syncing. All the music was recorded live.

The real climax of the movie is two scenes which cut back and forth near the end. One is at the smoker that John Triplette and Del Reese have set up. A group of local Nashville businessmen have got together to donate money to Hal Philip Walker, and for their entertainment they'll get to see a stripper. The only problem is that nobody has bothered to tell the "stripper" exactly what she's being paid to do. She's Sueleen Gay, a majestically untalented singer who has absolutely no idea that she's no good (she's sort of the Ed Wood of country music).

When Sueleen begins to realize that these men want more from her than her terrible original songs and her off-key Barbara Jean covers, she initially refuses to strip, but then Triplette, who will say anything to anybody to get what he wants, takes her aside, praises her talent, and says that if she goes ahead with the striptease, he'll give her her big break and let her sing at the Parthenon rally the next day with her idol Barbara Jean.

Altman doesn't throw any winks to the audience about what a lie this is. By this point he doesn't have to. And so, Sueleen goes through with the striptease, even making a sad little flourish out of pulling out the sweat socks she'd stuffed into her bra and tossing them into the crowd.

The scene ends with Del Reese driving her home and clumsily propositioning her on her doorstep, until he's driven off by the arrival of Sueleen's somewhat-boyfriend Wade. Sueleen tells Wade what she had to do, but then she fervently reasserts her belief in her talent, and in the inevitability of her triumph. Nobody learns any big life lessons in this film.

Yes, I do

Meanwhile, while Delbert is being rebuffed, his wife is being seduced. Throughout the film, folk/rock singer Tom Frank (who is in Nashville secretly recording a solo album that the rest of his group knows nothing about) has been seducing every woman he can get his hands on. Most of the liaisons are casual, including groupie LA Joan and "Opal from the BBC," but one is more intense, since the woman is his bandmate Mary, and she's actually in love with him (and not with the third member of their trio, her husband Bill).

But Mary only says "I love you" to Tom when he's safely asleep, and in any case his attention isn't on her, it's on Linnea Reese, who he met at a recording studio. We've seen him call her a couple of times, obviously trying to set up an assignation with her, and at first she rebuffed him, but then the third time she has indicated that she's willing to come see him perform.

The scene at the club is one of those situations where the intensity is only apparent to the musicians and those around them, and is only obliquely seen by the audience. Bill and Mary are there, along with their limo driver and Opal, who is supposed to be interviewing them but is mostly talking about herself. LA Joan is there also, as is Wade.

A lot of things are going on at once. Linnea is attempting to be inconspicuous at a rear table, but Wade immediately starts to make friendly overtures. Meanwhile, Opal is attempting to drop casual hints that she's been having an affair with Tom (or, really, a one-night stand), oblivious to the fact that (for different reasons) Bill and Mary aren't really fascinated (or surprised) by this information.

Meanwhile, Tom is called up to the stage to do a number, and (after doing a song with Bill and Mary) he sings "I'm Easy," which is, in its way, as unintentionally self-revealing as Haven Hamilton's songs. As Mary could tell you, he's anything but easy.

But he's not singing to her, he's singing to Linnea, though both Opal and LA Joan seem willing to think he's singing to or about them. Mary is wise to him, though. She looks around the club, knowing that he's working on somebody, trying to figure out who it is.

And the seduction works, the next thing we see is Tom and Linnea in bed together. Tom is obviously somewhat taken with her, for the first time we see him actually talk to a woman he's in bed with. She teaches him the sign language for "I love you" and for "I'm glad I met you," and he's actually honest enough to use the latter rather than the former.

But then he wants her to stay, and she gets up to leave anyway, and suddenly it's pretty obvious that she's been doing this on her terms, and that for once Tom isn't in charge. He picks up the phone to call his girlfriend in New York, before Linnea has even left the room, but he doesn't succeed in convincing her to come down to Nashville to visit him, and suddenly it seems like Tom Frank is surrounded by women who have figured him out. For someone like him, that's probably the final circle of hell.

So, in each scene, the power has not been quite where the characters thought it was. The men organizing the smoker thought they were getting a stripper, a professional, and instead they got an aspiring singer who they had to lie to in order to get her to humiliate herself. In the other scene, the nearly saintly Linnea (wife of a no-good husband, gospel singer with a Black choir, mother of two deaf children who will never hear their mother sing) has turned out to be quite an efficient adulterer, nothing like the pigeon that Tom Frank thought he was pursuing. The shift in each case is subtle, but the combined effect of the two scenes is tremendous, and each involves a women being exploited (or, for a moment, not being exploited) by men.

After these two scenes, and the two with Barbara Jean that I talked about before, the actual "climax" of the film almost comes as a little bit of a letdown.

Let me be the 1 (one)

The movie is full of wonderful women who have ended up with men who clearly don't deserve them. Barbara Jean and Barnett, Linnea and Delbert Reese, and poor Mary, who's got two of them (Bill and Tom). And the dynamics in each case are very different, and each is also very typical. Linnea is the wife of a pretty successful lawyer, so she can occupy herself with her disabled children (significantly, she understands sign language, but her husband doesn't), her music, and religion. In fact, I suspect that's pretty much what's possible for her to occupy her time with.

Barbara Jean's story is the opposite, on the surface, because she's the breadwinner, the (one assumes) sole asset of "Barnett Enterprises," but of course it's Barnett who runs everything. In point of fact, Barbara Jean has fewer options than Linnea does, and it doesn't take much to imagine that various kinds of breakdowns are (consciously or not) the only way she has of asserting any control over her own life.

Mary is younger and obviously has more options. She sees her husband and her lover pretty clearly, but we're not shown what decisions she's going to make. At the Parthenon rally, she's with Tom (and Bill, amusingly, is with LA Joan), but when the trouble starts, Bill grabs Mary to get her to safety.

But, fortunately, the movie is not all good women and not-so-good men. LA Joan is a shallow groupie, Opal is a nut, Lady Pearl (Haven Hamilton's mistress) is a harridan, and Connie White is a complete phony.

As for the men, Wade's patience with Sueleen is amazing, Mr. Green's entire life seems to revolve around caring for his dying wife, and even Haven Hamilton comes off better than you'd expect at the end. When the crisis comes, he thinks about everybody else, about keeping the situation from getting worse, before he thinks about himself.

Nashville II

Nashville haunts Altman a bit, I think, because it did represent his peak, not only creatively, but in terms of his clout and respect in Hollywood. It was right after Nashville that he was scheduled to direct Ragtime, before being booted off the project in favor of Milos Forman after the producers got a look at Buffalo Bill and the Indians (but that's another story). For years he wanted to make a sequel to Nashville, the only time he has ever wanted to direct a sequel to one of his pictures, as far as I know. And what was Short Cuts but an attempt to do another Nashville, only (for most of it) less satisfying and much more mean-spirited.

I can think of a few movies in recent years that were obviously strongly influenced by Nashville (Lone Star, for one) and I think we have to regard Magnolia as a deliberate homage, since not only is it very similar in structure, but it shares not one but two cast members: Henry Gibson and Michael Murphy.

The July 2000 issue of Premiere Magazine contained a wonderful article about Nashville in honor of its 25th anniversary, including interviews with almost all of the surviving cast members, Joan Tewkesbury and Robert Altman. They reminisce about the making of the film, telling some wonderful stories, including confirming a belief that I've held for a long time, which is that "Opal from the BBC" is a complete phony, and that the reason she can never locate her cameraman is that she doesn't have one. She's not making a documentary for anybody, let alone for the BBC.

So, overall, it's a fascinating slice of twenty-four individual lives over three days. Two people die, but nobody else (as far as we can tell) has been changed in any major way. But we've seen a lot, both big and small, about how life was in the United States in 1975, and now, as well.

Nashville
(1975)

Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Joan Tewkesbury
 
Cast:
Norman : David Arkin
Lady Pearl : Barbara Baxley
Delbert Reese : Ned Beatty
Connie White : Karen Black
Barbara Jean : Ronee Blakley
Tommy Brown : Timothy Brown
Tom Frank : Keith Carradine
Opal : Geraldine Chaplin
Wade Cooley : Robert DoQui
LA Joan (Martha) : Shelley Duvall
Barnett : Alan Garfield
Haven Hamilton : Henry Gibson
PFC Glenn Kelly : Scott Glenn
Tricycle Man : Jeff Goldblum
Winifred (Albuquerque) : Barbara Harris
Kenny Fraiser : David Hayward
John Triplette : Michael Murphy
Bill : Allan Nicholls
Bud Hamilton : Dave Peel
Mary : Christina Raines
Star : Bert Remsen
Linnea Reese : Lily Tomlin
Sueleen Gay : Gwen Welles
Mr. Green : Keenan Wynn

Add comment November 14th, 2004

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

If you held a gun to my head (and I would prefer that you didn't), and demanded to know my favorite film of all time, I would say "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," by Robert Altman, which I first saw when it was released in 1971. The packaging on the video I just bought says it's a "Western," but that's only true in the broadest sense of the term.

I've been reading a book called "The Films of Robert Altman" by Alan Karp, and one of the interesting points he raises is that Altman's films are often about dreamers and realists, and the dreamers often die or go mad, and the realists almost always survive.

Obviously, this isn't that unusual a way of looking at the world, but what makes Altman's approach unusual is that he has no sentimentality in his view of the dreamers, and, while in most cases he favors them over the realists, there are movies from throughout his career (from "M*A*S*H" to Cookie's Fortune) where he clearly prefers the realists.

The best story he's ever told about a dreamer and a realist, though, is the story of John McCabe (once known as "Pudgy") and Mrs. Constance Miller.

John McCabe is a gambler, and at first he comes to the tiny town of Presbyterian Church to fleece some of the local citizens at games of chance. Presbyterian Church is still being built, the population is almost entirely male, and McCabe very quickly realizes what they want more than poker is women, so he decides to open a whorehouse. This is the best idea he has in the whole movie, and very soon he's one of the leading citizens of the town, such as it is, despite his inexperience in running a whorehouse.

Then comes Mrs. Miller, who proposes a partnership. His ambition and capital, combined with her expertise, because, as she says when they meet, "I'm an 'ore, and I know an awful lot about 'orin'." So, he takes her on as a partner, but he still doesn't understand how vital she is to his success, referring to her as "little lady" and trying to keep her away from their finances, which she obviously understands far better than he does.

They also become lovers, though, until the very end, she always insists that he pay her usual fee (which is the unheard of sum of $5.00). This allows both of them to pretend that they don't care for each other as much as they do.

As Altman has said, many of the elements of this story are very familiar from other, more traditional, Westerns. The gunfighter and gambler, the hooker with a heart of gold (more or less), the frontier town, the men sent to kill the hero. With these elements mostly familiar to the audience, Altman was free to concentrate a lot of his attention on the characters around the periphery.

In fact, we see the birth and growth of a whole town. There's Sheehan, who owns the only other saloon in town. McCabe mocks him throughout the movie, but he is ultimately much smarter than McCabe. And Ida, who comes to town to be Bart Coyle's mail order bride, and who, when Bart is killed, sees pretty quickly what her only other option is. The scene where her eyes connect with Mrs. Miller's at Bart's funeral is priceless.

We see the way the Chinese part of the town is so completely segregated that the only white person who ever goes there is Mrs. Miller (in search of opium), and we never see any Chinese people in the main part of town at all. We see the way the men of Presbyterian Church, obviously bored, seize on McCabe's arrival to speculate endlessly about his supposed "big rep" as a gunfighter, and whether or not he's really "the man who shot Bill Roundtree," though none of them has any idea who Bill Roundtree was. And there's the lawyer from the nearby town of Bearpaw who fills McCabe's head with political nonsense just when McCabe most needs to be thinking clearly. Throughout the movie, Altman shows us the pastor who's building the church that gives the town its name, but at the end we see inside (McCabe has climbed up into the steeple to spy on his pursuers) and it looks like a lumber storeroom. It's obvious that no services have ever been held there, and nobody in the town has noticed the lack.

The movie is full of these small threads, little parts of the life of the town.

The most interesting decision Altman made was to move the traditional elements of the Western forward in time, into the beginning of the twentieth century. The West he shows us is no longer all that Wild, capitalism is now what drives everything. The hooker is a businesswomen, the gambler would like to be a businessman, and the three killers are employees of a large corporation. (The character called "Cowboy," on the other hand, is a complete doofus.)

In both the Long Goodbye and "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," the hero is both a success and a failure according to the rules of the genre. This is why regarding Altman as an anti-genre director, one whose interest in Westerns, or detective pictures, is just to deconstruct them, is too simple.

Philip Marlowe is a buffoon and a dreamer, but he does solve the mystery. John McCabe is self-important and not too bright, but he does manage to kill all three of the gunmen who have been sent to kill him. Actually, McCabe is fairly creditable as a man of action. Where he's out of his depth is as a man of business.

McCabe doesn't really understand business, all he understands is gambling, which he's obviously good at. But when two men come to town from the company Harrison Shaughnessy, intent on buying him out, he tries to jack up their bid like they're facing him across a poker table (it doesn't help that he's drunk, either), and they leave town in disgust just as he thinks he's getting the upper hand.

Mrs. Miller tries to explain the realities of the situation to him, that Harrison Shaughnessy will first try to buy him out, but then will move very quickly to Plan B, which is to kill him, but he doesn't get it even then. He only gets it when three hired killers come to town and immediately one of them kills one of McCabe's most enthusiastic customers, for no other reason than that he can.

The irony of all this is that, without meaning to, Mrs. Miller has helped seal her lover's doom. First by helping him be such a success that Harrison Shaughnessy would even be interested in buying him out, and also because one reason McCabe is so stubborn about making this deal on his terms is that he has to prove to her, once and for all, that he knows what he's doing.

Not that she's in any way to blame for what happens, but without her, the whole enterprise might easily have collapsed, and McCabe would have simply saddled up his horse and gone off to the next town to play more poker. In the movie's final shot, the camera focusing directly into Constance Miller's eye as she lies on a bed in an opium den, drawing on a pipe, you wonder about the different feelings she's having to numb right at that moment.

The soundtrack consists of three songs from Leonard Cohen's first album ("The Stranger Song," "Winter Lady," and "Sisters of Mercy"), and they weave through the action of the film so beautifully that if I hear even a fragment of any of them I immediately begin seeing the movie in my head. I don't think it's possible to use music more effectively in a movie.


McCabe & Mrs. Miller
(1971)

Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman and Brian McKay
 
Cast:
John McCabe : Warren Beatty
Constance Miller : Julie Christie
Sheehan : Rene Auberjonois
Smalley : John Schuck
Elliot : Corey Fischer
Bart Coyle : Bert Remsen
Ida Coyle : Shelley Duvall
Cowboy : Keith Carradine
Eugene Sears : Michael Murphy
Ernie Hollander : Antony Holland
Butler : Hugh Millais
Kid : Manfred Schulz
Breed : Jace Van Der Veen
Clement Samuels : William Devane

3 comments November 14th, 2004

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