Robert Altman, RIP

Most of the obituaries of Robert Altman, who died November 21, emphasized the extent to which the stylistic innovations he introduced have entered the cinematic mainstream. One of the oddities of his career is that a filmmaker could prove so influential while many of his major, and most characteristic, works are deeply flawed.

Altman was the first major American director to exploit advances in sound recording technology in order to use multilayered soundtracks dense with overlapping dialogue, a departure from the less naturalistic Hollywood tradition of conversations in which one actor speaks, then another. He also pioneered the use of crowded long-shots and sprawling, cluttered storylines, of the sort now familiar through films like “Crash” and “Babel.” Altman resisted both the confines of the studio system (forming his own production company, Lion’s Gate Films, in 1975) and those of classical narrative structures.

Yet if this liberated him from the sterile unities of predictable Hollywood plotlines, it too often allowed him to give vent to a self-indulgence that was not far from the surface. His first box-office success, 1970’s “M.A.S.H,” depicted the antics of surgeons in a Korean War field hospital in a picaresque manner, with a number of delightful set pieces against a backdrop of dark humour and considerable gore, the crowded frame and overlapping conversations nicely mirroring the chaos of war. Yet in its latter half it tailed off into pointlessness, bogging down in a no-holds-barred football game that had little to do with anything else in the film.

Altman’s admirers generally cite 1975’s “Nashville” as his greatest film. It presents the intersecting stories of two dozen characters, ranging from campaign operatives to country music performers, over the course of a presidential primary, with a demagogic and unseen candidate lurking in the background. “Nashville” provided memorable star turns for members of Altman’s evolving repertory company, such as Shelley Duvall, Lily Tomlin, and Keith Carradine. His popularity as an “actor’s director” stemmed in part from his willingness to give performers considerable latitude in shaping their characters, and use of their improvised material in the final product.

Yet in “Nashville” above all, the individual performances never cohere into a meaningful whole, and the slack-jointed plot is little help. The final scene, in which an attempted assassination gives way to an impromptu sing-along, is less a denouement to what has come before than an arbitrary closure imposed after the allotted three hours have run their course. Altman allowed cast members to write and perform their own songs; of these, Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” is probably the only one that has not vanished completely down the memory hole.

Altman fell out of favour with audiences and, to some extent, critics, after “Nashville.” His heavy-handed revisionist Western of 1976, “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” was popular with neither. Nor was his 1979 post-apocalyptic science fiction opus, “Quintet”, which was visually striking but had an almost incomprehensible plot, with Paul Newman participating in a bizarre game of murder in a frozen city. A lifeless and logy 1980 musical of “Popeye” fell short of commercial expectations and was almost universally panned.

His commercial and critical rehabilitation was incremental, through a series of modestly budgeted adaptations of plays in the 1980s, and 1992’s well-received Hollywood satire “The Player.” In 1996 he evoked the scene of his depression-era youth in “Kansas City”, which was well-reviewed but played to smaller audiences than it deserved. His comeback was secure when both audiences and critics welcomed 2001’s “Gosford Park”, which differed from his previous work in its British setting, and allowed him to refract the conventions of the country-house murder mystery through the prism of class. Last year’s “A Prairie Home Companion” was also well-received, but this adaptation of Garrison Keilor’s radio program and toothless satiric pieces was not considered one of his major works. For better or worse, his reputation rests primarily on the films he made in the 1970s.

The liberating initial impact of “M.A.S.H.” and “Nashville” is hard to recapture, and their politics have not worn well. Altman never moved past the salon leftism of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and occasionally made his political points heavy-handedly and anachronistically. While “M.A.S.H.” was nominally set in the Korean war, its antinomian spirit and tone were obviously shaped by the Vietnam conflict, still raging when the film was released. “Nashville’s” mockery of bourgeois pieties now seems stale and predictable, and Altman consistently incarnates official authority in two-dimensional hypocrites. Even when his actors acquitted themselves well (for example, Robert Duvall’s bible-thumping Frank Burns in “M.A.S.H.”), there is little of interest in the lampooning of such easy targets.

In his 1971 “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”, Altman pioneered many of the themes now familiar to viewers of later revisionist westerns such as “Deadwood.” Warren Beatty played a self-deluding gambler who thinks himself an entrepreneur and Julie Christie a business-minded but opium-addicted whore who team up to bring a casino-cum-brothel to the new mining town of Presbyterian Church, but are broken by an alliance of monied interests and organized religion. Nicely acted and beautifully shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, nonetheless it suffers from ham-handed parallels between the ruthlessness with which the Old West was developed and the workings of contemporary capitalism, and a Leonard Cohen soundtrack that belongs in an altogether different kind of film.

Oddly enough, the two Altman films from the central decade of his career that stand up best are not among his most ambitious. They work by constraining his inventiveness in tightly constructed plots solidly rooted in established genres. In 1973’s “The Long Goodbye”, Altman worked from a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, based on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 Philip Marlowe mystery novel. (Brackett, as it happens, had been William Faulkner’s collaborator on the much earlier Hollywood adaptation of Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.”) Rather than attempt a 1940s-style film noir, Altman and Brackett reimagined Chandler’s tale in a contemporary Los Angeles, peopled by wastrels as emblematic of their day as their originals were of theirs.

Elliott Gould portrays Marlowe’s familiar world-weariness as the disillusionment of a survivor of the ‘60s, creating a version of the character very different from Humphrey Bogart’s, but, in its own way, almost as memorable. Altman also managed to coax effective performances from two celebrities of the day not known for their dramatic talents, the former baseball player Jim Bouton (as the small-time crook and friend of Marlowe’s, whose request for Marlowe’s help in getting out of town to avoid being falsely accused of his wife’s murder triggers the story), and the model and socialite Nina van Pallandt (as the alluring wife of a missing novelist; as her husband, Sterling Hayden delivers his last major performance). Brackett’s tart dialogue updates Chandler’s jaded view of Los Angeles, which is photographed appreciatively by Zsigmond.

In 1974’s “Thieves like Us”, Altman, his frequent collaborator Joan Tewkesbury, and the novelist Calder Willingham adapted Edward Anderson’s 1937 crime novel, but adopted a perspective opposite the romantic view of ‘30s bandits popularized by Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” and its imitators. Bowie, Chicamaw, and T-Dub (played with understated economy by Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, and John Schuck), the three small-time crooks who manage to walk out of a prison farm because of the negligence of the guards, and embark on a crime spree, are all dim mediocrities. Yet the press and radio build them up into equals of the Barrow or Barker gangs, with the lurid media version of their capers counterpointed against the reality of their fumbling attempts to avoid capture. T-Dub, notionally the brains of the outfit, loses his heart to a faded beautician he meets along the way, putting his actual name on the marriage license. While the film shows the trio as having all been dealt poor hands in life, it also mercilessly anatomizes their meanness and stupidity so as to deny any exculpation.

That these would be the Altman films that come closest to complete success demonstrates that for all his pose as a rebellious artist who was obstructed by the studio system, he did his best work despite himself, when the discipline of a tightly crafted script held him back from habitual and self-indulgent excess.