Short Cuts
Robert Altman, USA, 1993, 188 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
Late 'poet of the dispossessed' Raymond Carver would never have opened one of his brief, pithy stories with an image as bold as Malathion helicopters hovering above the urban sprawl of Los Angeles like something out of Apocalypse Now. But then neither would Carver have transposed his characters from the Pacific Northwest to the West Coast, nor blurred the lot in an intricate web of relation and coincidence. In doing just that, Robert Altman and co-writer Frank Barhydt have taken nine stories and one poem, blending what the director calls "Carver soup". 22 characters in search of a plot.
The venerable director, who spiced his 1992 return-to-form picture The Player with tens of cameos from Hollywood's great and good, takes another large cast here but meshes the parallel lives together in tragi-comic interchanges and frantic cuts to brew this formidable mosaic of modern life. Rather like his 1975 epic Nashville, this not only works but works superbly, testament both to the skill of 69-year-old Altman and his performers.
Example: doctor Matthew Modine argues with his artist wife, Julianne Moore before dinner with Fred Ward and Anne Archer. A day before, Ward has discovered the body of a murdered girl in the river he is fishing with his friends. Modine is treating the son of TV pundit Bruce Davison and his wife, Andie McDowell, knocked down in the street by Lily Tomlin's alcoholic waitress. On and on.
The entire cast were rewarded jointly at last year's Venice Festival where the film itself took a coveted Golden Lion, confirmation of the calibre of ensemble playing here, even from non-actor musicians Tom Waits, Lyle Lovett and Huey Lewis. Singling out particular players is therefore tangibly unfair, but Modine, Jennifer Jason Leigh (changing nappies while giving good phone-sex), and Tim Robbins' comic-fascist motorcycle cop are all outstanding.
Only jazzer Annie Ross and cellist daughter Lori Singer strike a potential false-note; coincidentally in the only piece not culled from Carver. Sensibly Altman doesn't linger, and any bumps are smoothed out by the effective use of Ross' songs as a useful narrative linking device.
Again with un-Carverish emphasis an earthquake bookends the movie with those helicopters; less of a statement, more of a convenient leaving point. Far from slavish recreation of Carver, Short Cuts owes him its small, banal frights and lack of resolution. A film of character, not incident, there is a refreshingly blunt, unglamorous, un-Hollywood approach to these people: they fart, urinate, wander around unselfconsciously naked with an honesty mistaken in some quarters for misogyny. Misanthropy would be nearer the mark.
The Great American Novel, claimed the customarily acerbic Gore Vidal, has turned out to be a film, and one that even at three hours plus wastes not a minute. Altman has not made better: raw, bitterly funny, and a joy from end to end.