McCabe & Mrs. Miller

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) is one of those movies people talk about with such reverence and enthusiasm that when you actually watch it, you may be surprised by how underwhelmed you feel. I can't say that I hated the movie, and believe me, I was sure that I would hate it. Actually, there are a few things in McCabe that are quite well-done, especially the tense, unnervingly quiet showdown which takes place in the last twenty minutes or so of the film. But I found much of the movie only moderately interesting.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a frontier movie, directed by Robert Altman and written by Altman and Brian McKay. (They adapted it from the novel, McCabe, by Edmund Naughton.) I kept wondering why they bothered to change the name to include Mrs. Miller, who's a madam played by Julie Christie. And although part of the film is about Constance Miller opening up a well-to-do house of prostitution with her business partner John McCabe (played by Warren Beatty), her character comes off as second-tier by the end of the picture.

Perhaps it's the spare dialogue and the film's overall rustic aesthetic quality. In a way, everybody is second-tier in a story like this, because ultimately it's just as much about the location, the Northwest in 1902 and how damned hard it was to live there. I will say this for Altman: he certainly knows how to deromanticize a genre. He did it to the film noir in The Long Goodbye, to the comedy in M*A*S*H*, and to the American country music scene in Nashville. That is partly why Altman's 1970's films are so highly regarded: They represented all that the new cinema had to offer at its peak, which is to say they both critiqued and re-invented the old genres that perhaps had become stale and trite to audiences. (I don't mean to suggest that that's all Altman's films did, but I must admit that many of them have more than a little disdain for their ancestry.)

I tried to imagine what it would have been like to see this movie upon its initial theatrical release over forty years ago. The seemingly sudden changes in American movies was both exciting and unsettling, depending on whom you asked. And they were changing just as surely and as rapidly and as intensely as American culture had changed, almost erupting in a kind of frenzied maelstrom. No one quite new what was going on, but I think many movie-lovers felt an incredible relief: the dust which had settled was not only being shaken off, but the whole damned floor was being ripped out, and it seemed like there weren't yet any new ground rules. So for someone like Robert Altman, whose work thrived on a kind of austere yet rich naturalism, this was lovely timing. It didn't last very long, but for a while Altman was one of the darling auteurs of American film, and even if every new and exciting idea wasn't a diamond, the fact that new and exciting ideas were being thought up and turned into feature films at all was revolutionary.

Forty years later, McCabe & Mrs. Miller still has power in it. In some ways, it's less dated than ever. But I also felt unaffected by the movie. I didn't have much interest in the characters or the world they were creating, and while I appreciated being shown just how unappealing a rustic township is to create, I found myself yearning for the maudlin insincerity of The Long Goodbye, or even the tender-hearted tendrils of Nashville. Altman's work has always been something of an uphill battle for me. I remember being totally mystified by Cookie's Fortune, which I rented in 1999 because I love Julianne Moore's acting, and then utterly perturbed by the quasi-mystery Gosford Park in 2001. (I was expecting Agatha Christie, and then I had to turn on the subtitles because the thick English accents were so difficult to understand.) As of right now, I'd still put The Long Goodbye as the best of Altman's movies that I've seen.

If someone were to remake McCabe & Mrs. Miller today, I'd want that great hipster folk band Fleet Foxes, with its rich, textured sounds, to do the music. McCabe is a Fleet Foxes kind of movie. That opening scene of Warren Beatty traveling to the flop house with the lilting, sorrowful Leonard Cohen song keeping time is quite magical in its own way, just as magical as the snow falling upon the burgeoning little town of Presbyterian Church (a comical name that for some reason made me think of the Canadian city of Medicine Hat). Yes, there is something to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, although I'm not entirely sure what it is.

With Rene Auberjonois, John Schrenk, Keith Carradine, and Shelley Duvall.

Nashville

Readers familiar with Christopher Guest's mock documentary A Mighty Wind (2003) will find a kindred spirit in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), a sort of character mosaic of Nashville life. It has more guts and honesty than A Mighty Wind, though. It's ironic and funny, but it also treats its subjects with a much deeper care for the  tragic futility of their pursuits. Altman depicts the city as an eclectic--or maybe just eccentric--mixture of a countrified Hollywood and a evangelicized D.C. It's the kind of place where its celebrities exercise their vices on Saturday and sing solos in church on Sunday. The cast, which is gargantuan, reportedly did a lot of its own musical material, lending an improvisational quality to the movie. But it goes on forever.

The movie doesn't wallow in the despair of its characters, all of whom are pretty depressed (subconsciously if not openly), it just forces us to watch as they collapse in front of fans or put on a happy face to make it through another performance or interview or party, or whatever the occasion is. Nashville might not feel as relevant to today's reality TV audience. The has-been celebrities with their narcissism on constant display make complete buffoons of themselves on a regular basis. In Nashville, no one is trying to look foolish. Everyone's hanging on to their dignity like it's a tattered old coat, the only one they have left.

You do feel for some of the characters, and when you're not feeling very involved, which is about half of the time. (The movie is 160 minutes), there's always the music to pull you back in. Somehow, the music makes the movie make sense. One of Altman's earlier films, The Long Goodbye, had a wonderfully distant, decayed mood to it, but it also seemed rambling and at times uninvolving. It captured the sort of ugly truth of 1940's film noir, which may have been cynical, but carried a sort of mythology about it that being a private eye was glamorous. Altman got through to audiences the reality of the job, via Elliott Gould's deadpan, madly dogged Phillip Marlowe.

Gould shows up here in a cameo as himself, schmoozing with a country music star named Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), who's like a much shorter combination of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. He's absolutely ridiculous, and yet he's worshiped by his devoted fans as though he's the King of Nashville. His wife (played well by Barbara Baxley) is a shriveled up booze-bag with a booming, wailing, siren of a voice. She's hysterically funny. She's so obsessed with the Kennedys that she goes to mass on Sundays, and her boozing seems to be rooted in a sense of loss for the "Camelot" dynasty.

Nashville was highly praised when it came out in 1975, and perhaps the exciting promise of the actors involved with it, and the hipness that was associated with liking Robert Altman's films, contributed to its success with critics. As a musical--much of the film features original country songs performed by many of the actors playing musicians--it's one of the most authentic of its genre. In fact, this might be the truest sense of what a musical is, realistically. The realism of the music business is a picture of diminishing ideals and increasing profits.

I think Altman comes close to importing into the 1970s the mood that F. Scott Fitzgerald created about the 1920s. Fitzgerald wrote about how the American Dream was really something corrupt, decayed, and desperate. This is a movie about trying to please the world in the midst of corruption, decay, and death. Physical death to be sure, but also a kind of inner personal destruction. Ronee Blakley comes off very well as Barbara Jean, a beautiful country singer, genuinely in love with her fans, who's losing it and can't accept the reality. She keeps having mysterious health scares in public, and Altman paints her as a tragic figure. She's absolutely beautiful when she sings.

Another character, a reporter for the BBC named Opal (Geraldine Chaplin), is truly voyeuristic in her fascination with America (she's apparently doing research for a documentary on Nashville's music scene). Opal makes a frighteningly funny observation about a car crash that happens early in the movie: that crash, she says, is inherently American. It's fast, violent, brutal, and deadening. Altman underlines this later with a scene of the reporter talking into a recorder while she wanders about a demolition center. The cars are mangled and in some cases unrecognizable, and she even compares the reddening rust to dried blood stains.

Lily Tomlin also makes an impression as a mild-mannered housewife who sings in the choir of a black church. Tomlin has such a wonderful comic energy. When she laughs, it seems to erupt out of her and fill up the room. We see this in a movie she did several years later called The Late Show. It's here too, but mitigated by her character's sense of unhappiness. There's a wonderful scene where she watches Keith Carradine's character perform the song, "I'm Easy." Paul Lohmann's camera closes in on her sad face, which seems torn between the guilt of following her desires and the guilt of letting them slip away for morality's sake. Quite a wonderful paradox of inner-conflict. Tomlin was nominated for an Oscar.

The music is admittedly wonderful--even though I'm not crazy about country music. It's very much alive, and I guess that's why Nashville was so celebrated. It's surely a movie about that seemingly brief, magical moment of vitality in a person's sad march toward unhappiness, corruption, and death. It may be the most readily accessible theme in Altman's work as a director, too. As an epic, it's much more honest and heartfelt than a Gone With the Wind or a Giant. As a character study, the movie is pulled in so many different directions you feel at a loss to identify with many of them. It's a testament to the acting and the editing (credited to Dennis Hill and Sidney Levin) that the characters do come through most of the time.

With Ned Beatty, David Arkin, Timothy Brown, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan Nichols, Dave Peel, Gwen Welles,

The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye (1973) At first glance this belated film noir, a tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the novel by Raymond Chandler, seems like an inferior installment in a long tradition of hard-boiled detective thrillers. It doesn’t go for the swaggering style of its 1940s ancestors. It’s pre-Chinatown and The Late Show, and those two mysteries echo this one’s detached, hardened tone. Elliott Gould is not Humphrey Bogart, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
I wasn’t thrilled by Gould’s incessant mumblings to himself, whether or not this is a nuance of character Gould was going for or just a learned acting trait, but what I think Gould did well for the character of private eye Philip Marlowe was to give him a sense of isolation from the world. The camera seems distant from him too, making the viewer not so much a Dr. Watson type tag-along as a curious bystander, a voyeur tripping along at Marlowe’s heals as he pursues a handful of loose ends with a dull pair of scissors.
In a 1940’s film noir there is a sense of moral obligation supported by society. A 1970’s Philip Marlowe seems to be stubbornly clinging to that moral obligation (without knowing why) in spite of a society that has grown rampantly apathetic around him. Marlowe lives in an odd-looking apartment complex hoisted high over Los Angeles, his neighbors a handful of dippy young flower girls baking brownies with weed. His one friend is a glorified acquaintance whose behavior at the beginning of the film gets Marlowe into more trouble than he bargains for, with an insane author, his young, seemingly tortured wife, and an easily unhinged gambler who’s trying to collect a load of cash with which Marlowe’s friend has absconded to Mexico.
The best image from the film occurs near the end, of Marlowe walking alone in Mexico, on a dirt road lined with trees, Spanish guitars playing as if looming overhead. It reminded me that private eyes have always walked alone. Years ago there was a chance, a tease at some kind of romantic link to normalcy. Now, a sobering realization that Philip Marlowe must take all these roads alone to do his moral duty (which turns out to be ironic in this film). ★★★