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Archive for the ‘DIRECTED BY Robert Altman’ Category

The Company

07 Apr

The Company –– directed by Robert Altman. Docudrama. The backstage and onstage life of the dancers of Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet. 112 Minutes Color 2004.

★★★★★

A hybrid tea rose. Gorgeously filmed by Pierre Mignot, who took many of Altman’s later films.

This is Altman’s penultimate work, a small masterpiece, which offers the current of a story not spelled out but floating along in the stream of the life of the dancers in which Neve Campbell, the actress who wrote it, produced it, and does (unlike that other young woman who won an Oscar) actually dance it.

She was trained in ballet long before going into acting, and she worked for three years with another writer to grant the Joffrey their story. And then, as no professional athlete could train, for months she trained to get back into ballet condition.

Nothing is filmed in documentary style; everything is filmed in dramatic film style. All of this is quite fascinating if one can step back and realize that only five actors are actually used and only three of them have principal roles, and only one of them says much. The dancers are beautiful actors, doing what they would do anyhow, which is dancing and being humans preparing to dance. All the more interesting if one knows that The Joffrey is a ballet company without stars: anyone may dance major roles. This gives the film narrative a level playing field.

And it also means that all of the relationships are worked out as pas de deux, or pas de trois, or pas de howevermany. And so we get a view of how the dancers actually live. On the stage they are accoutered gorgeously and lit like angels. Off stage they waiter in saloons to make ends meet and sleep on friends’ floors because they are not paid a living wage.

But that is not so much of what we get as it is that we see the ambiance versus the mechanics of a great dance company in counterpoint. Malcolm Macdowell is devastating as the domineering head of the Joffrey, and Neve Campbell and James Franco sweetly play the young lovers, two youths separated and united by their skills. We see the business arrangements and we see the dance arrangements, and we see that, like the lovers, the two arrangements do not meet except in hiding. For what see on stage is glorious is its riches.

We witness about six astonishing ballets of the Joffrey, with the full company engaged in them and preparing for them by their choreographers and dance masters.

Will you sit back in delight as I did to watch these highly entertaining dances? Will you send out for this film better than sending out for a pizza and far more digestible, you may be sure? Will you remember me and thank me that you read this and acted, as the saying goes, accordingly? Will you enjoy yourself so deliciously?

I hope so.

What gifts Altman had to give when his heart was in his work!

 

Streamers

04 Apr

Streamers – directed by Robert Altman. Drama. Six soldiers search and weigh their sexuality. 113 minutes Color 1983

★★★★★

Robert Altman became known and remained successful for big cast movies such as M.A.S.H., Nashville, HealtH, Gosford Park, Short Cuts, Ready-To-Wear, and A Wedding. He is less well known for his filming of stage plays.

These are not records of stage productions, although sometimes they involve the original casts and usually involve small casts. They are renderings of the theatre pieces, but are as a rule shot on sets made and lit for filming. If you like Altman’s touch and are interested to witness the sort of performances actors rejoiced to be able to achieve in his pictures, then (apart from  Beyond Therapy, which he confessed not to relate to), these stage versions are entertainments well worth your attention: Secret Honor, A Prairie Home Companion, The Company are some of them.

Another is Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, which was a big hit on the stage where he directed it and because Cher was in it and because it concerned itself with the last days of James Dean and maybe also because it dealt with cross-gender. The cast was brought over into the movie and it was an even bigger hit. Immediately after it was made, Altman filmed David Raab’s Streamers.

Various descriptions of this film refer to it as a Vietnam War piece, which is strange, since its subject from beginning to end is homosexuality. It takes place in a sparsely inhabited barracks where three rookies in the Air Force await their next assignment, which might be Vietnam. Around them cavort their sergeant and his comrade in arms on an epic bender.

The three men are young and their concern is their sexual relations to one another, but they are too young and too callow to do anything more than approach the subject and circle around it. Is that guy who is so fey actually a sexually active homosexual, or is he putting on a show? Is that other man, or is he not, willing for me to broach the topic of my feelings for him? What does it meant that I am so homophobic?

Playwright David Rabe has captured a perfect moment in the career of male sexual identity: the inchoate moment. All these young men seem to be virgins, unwittingly announcing their inexperience by the center fold pinups inside the doors of their lockers. None of them wish to be labeled as queer. They may wish to dabble. They all are curious. They are all afraid of being labeled, and they are also afraid of being curious.

The force-field of these tensions build to a point of ignition which is set off in all three acts by the intrusion of a black madman in their midst, someone crazed by his self-pity for his doom as unemployable and unlovable. The explosion ensuing is stunning.

The cast won the Golden Lion at The Venice Film Festival. I give it a Golden Lion here.

 

 

The Gingerbread Man

02 Apr

The Gingerbread  Man – directed by Robert Altman. Noir. A lawyer leaps to the rescue and finds himself trapped. 113 minutes Color 1998.

★★★

The key ingredient in Noir is casting the female, and this one fails on the basis of its being so badly miscast as to wreck the movie. The female in noir, one way or another, must hypnotize us, or cause us to be desirous of being hypnotized. She should baffle and enchant and fascinate us, against our will if we profess to have a will in such matters. Lauren Bacall appears, and which of us is not helpless to know anything rational ever again? Who is there who can figure out the beauteous Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaughnessy? Not I.

In this case we get an actress playing for sympathy or pity or innocence, but the wanness she aims at to achieve this sympathy emerges as a frailty verging on the tubercular. Sympathy is a dull aim for an actor to strive for in a performance. It just won’t do.

And what really won’t do is to have cast an Australian actress in a part which she plays as though her father, brilliantly realized as a mean mountain man by Robert Duvall, had not produced an equally unpredictable cracker in his daughter. Instead the actress in question makes no attempt at a hill-billy accent. Instead of someone peppery and full of tang and fun, we get a droop.

In Noir, the female is more important than the male lead in the sense that our entrancement with her paradox is the element which carries us away from any attention whatsoever with the mad mazes of the plot, which we are not expected to follow and indeed which her presence is there to discourage us from following. So it goes that the plot of this film shoots itself in the foot with all the subtlety of a flare gun, as our attention wanes from the actress in question to the scowl emerging in our brains at the unnecessary and far-fetched plot twists to which we are finding our credulity to be subject.

What did it need? It is obvious that it needed Tuesday Weld.

What it does have is Duvall with oh-such-dirty feet, and the excellent Daryl Hannah as the gal Friday, and Tom Berenger perfectly cast as a lower caste barge captain, and the quirky and inventive genius of Robert Downey Junior as a private eye.

Pierre Mignot shot it gorgeously in Savannah, Georgia, a place which does not register as Savannah but registers like all get out anyhow. The lead is played with mighty dispatch and address by Kenneth Branagh, who evinces all the technical chops needed to play a Southern attorney of great muster and confidence. So the film has that. What it has not is a femme fatale. And without that, we are bereft of our sense of our own potential for self-corruption which Noir is intended to trigger and for us to harmlessly enjoy.

 

Beyond Therapy

01 Apr

 

Beyond Therapy –– directed by Robert Altman. Lampoon. A bisexual dish blinds dates a ninny in a French restaurant in New York. 93 minutes Color 1987.

I should only give it half a star because I only watched half of it. Altman claims it failed because AIDS emerged at that time, but AIDS emerged five years before, and he is deluding himself. It fails because he has no bone interest in the material.

Julie Hagerty is too vapid to alert our interest, much less that of  the improbable goof played by Jeff Goldblum. All the characters are in therapy including the therapists, I guess, but I didn’t stay around to find out. My hour was up.

The trouble with the film is that a fundamental strand of Altman’s nature was exactly like that of the big studio hirelings he made it his business not to become. That is to say, he is exactly like Michael Curtiz or Allan Dwan if in nothing else than that he would like nothing better than to end one production at 5 PM and start another at 6. There are people who like working in a productiont, and Altman was one of them. He says so himself. So he would take up any project that ripened before him. If one withered before it fruited, he would seize on the next one lying around. He wasn’t a studio hack; he was his own hack.

In his case, however, this crap shoot way of working popped up some fine and entertaining pictures. The Company, his next to last film, emerged like that, and, when he took on Gosford Park, he admits he never thought it would come to pass. One way he was a master-film-maker was simply that he was so productive. He liked to work on all sorts of different genres. I don’t know what genre he thought he was working in here.

At any rate, sometimes he executes a film and sometimes he executes a film. This one is crushed by slapdash improvisations by bit players, and not quite rescued by the entertainment value of supporting players: Tom Conti is spot on as a bored therapist, and Glenda Jackson really knows her stock in trade as a therapist more balmy than her clients.

The fallacy of improvisation is this: improvisation is supposed to generate natural honest behavior in actors, but when actors are let to improves, they tend to fall into their personal schtick, which is no more honest than the falsity they are supposed to evade. The actual matter is that actors often go into acting to cut through their own schtick, their personality, to delve a truth deeper than the strip mining of improvisation ever can reach.

Also the film was made in Paris, which is supposed to stand-in for New York, which is just silly. It also accounts for the casting of Conti and Jackson, jetting in from across the channel. to play parts requiring Alan Arkin and Lily Tomlin. Pierre Mignot filmed it, of course, beautifully.

If you find 52-Pick-Up a riveting card game you might be taken with this picture. Otherwise, graduate to Go-Fish. This is by comparison a Doctorate.

 

 
 

O.C. and Stiggs

28 Mar

O.C. & Stiggs – directed by Robert Altman. Parody. Two 16 year old middle class high school boys wreak revenge on a mean insurance agent. 109 minutes Color 1983-87.

★★

Confetti.

Thrown full our faces and we are expected to find it funny.

Robert Altman detested teenage movies, and when he was offered one, presumed to make it as a satire of the genre he was expected to produce. It fails. Things that looks funny on paper sometimes no amount of fancy cutting can enliven with actual fun. On paper alone is where they are funny. It is not a satire. It is a parody, a quite different thingamajig.

What’s wrong with it is the casting of the two boys, which resulted from a national hunt that ended up snaring two perfectly ordinary youths. Broad comedy never requires ordinary youths. What it requires is young people with marked quirks. Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor were wonderful together because they were most peculiar people. Their eyes were odd, their bodies were odd, their voices were odd. Likewise, this odd film requires boys who are absolutely odd; instead they are Wonder Bread.

Cavorting on the sidelines, we have Louis Nye momentarily amusing as a gay high school drama teacher, and Jane Curtin consistently droll as a relentlessly drunk housewife in a teetotal household. Visible also is Dennis Hopper as an NRA maniac, Ray Walston as a  talkative codger, and Cynthia Nixon as a charming young thing –– all peculiar, each and every one of them, and all belonging here because all inherently funny. So there is entertainment value to be sighted from time to time.

But the film itself fails because Altman’s detestation of the genre is insufficient to realize that the film is not a teen-flick, but a flick for eleven year olds. It is their fantasy of what teenage license would be like.

The story resembles a mayhem movie from The National Lampoon, which in fact it is.  I was on the writing staff of the National Lampoon, and, while I could not have done it, my friend Chris Miller who wrote Animal House would surely have patted this material into better shape. But what Altman has permitted is not a satire but a satyricon, an adolescent phantasmagoria, which is not to say there are not amusing and arresting passages.

But Altman, who never wanted to make the same movie twice, took on the new genre without considering whether farce was actually right for his instrument as a director. In the end and overall the film suffers from The Auntie Mame Syndrome which is that if you try to show up stuffy people by torturing them, they turn into teddy bears in the minds of the audience who tend subconsciously to cuddle up with them and take Auntie Mame to be a Nazi.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Dennis Hopper, DIRECTED BY Robert Altman

 

Altman On Altman, interviews by David Thomson — introduction by Paul Thomas Anderson

26 Mar

★★★★★

Really, you can’t do better than this to inform yourself about the Altman films you’ve seen, and introduce yourself to those you have not seen — for instance, for me, Secret Honor, Philip Baker Hall’s brilliant performance of Richard Nixon in extremis.

This book, as with all David Thomson’s books, is a necessary text, for which I am grateful to Altman and Thomson both.

The book covers as much as David Thomson’s knowledge extends, which is pretty far. So you get insights into some of the technical challenges and tricks Altman used, you get a good sense of Altman’s business deals, his sense of actors, and how things got to the screen and how things did not get to the screen. You also find yourself in the presence of Altman’s unusually permissive personality and his equally rigorous standards for adventuring forth on projects new and unexpected, by this the most forgivable of workaholics.

Altman is quite open, and does not make a case for himself at all. Neither are we at the mercy of being told how wonderful everyone else was. Warren Beatty certain was not wonderful.

Thomson tells Altman’s story from the start, so it serves as a satisfactory biography. The book has good illustrations, a thorough bibliography, an index, and a full personnel list of Altman’s film and stage work, including his non-credited work and TV work. Wow!

Most directors do not get to continue working to the age he worked. And yet, he became well known only with M.A.S.H., when he was well into his 40s, and was still at the end of his life making good movies, such as Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion.

I can’t recommend the book more highly than to say I can’t.

 
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Posted in DIRECTED BY Robert Altman, Uncategorized

 

Secret Honor

22 Mar

Secret Honor –– directed by Robert Altman. One Man Show. Richard Nixon already nuts goes nuts justifying himself. 90 minutes 2005

★★★★★

In a bravura performance Philip Baker Hall gives a rendition so varied, witty, unaccountable, rash that one wonders from start to finish how anything so miraculous could be taking place before one’s very eyes. It’s sort of the Grand Canyon of acting, or maybe Pinnacles, or maybe it is simply beyond compare.

So the fun of it is now, to see what might be wrong with it.

It is actually the record of a stage piece Hall performed in Las Angeles, Ann Arbor, and eventually New York.  And the first thing to note is that the performance is a mite too big for the camera, which is to say that the reality a theatre audience supplies to a piece played in front of its many-eyed multitude, the camera itself asks to suit up differently into its tiny aperture of a lens.

It is not that the stage reality is false, but that in a camera, acting must be supplied in a different way for the audience to complete it — because the movie audience completes acting in a different way than it completes acting on a stage. Here you will see the rubric of stage acting in full panoply, which always sacrifices a degree of reality for the living audience itself to supply, for every stage actor knows that the theatre audience has its own job in telling the story and in competing the character’s reality.

But the camera cannot supply reality. The camera is not human and cannot complete a performance. So the actor must back up and supply it all. With film the audience is not multiple but instead always the audience of one, the camera lens –– and filtered through its tiny glass hole to the audience of one in the parlor or the many-eyed audience in the picture palace, if the actor’s reality cannot be registered as details of breath of which not one is sacrificed, the performance will not register at all –– or shall look monstrous or actorish or bad.

Garbo understood this. Garbo understood that what the camera was seeing was what was happening inside her lower back, and rising up inside her spine and out. It did not matter what her part was or her costume was or her lines were. What Garbo offered was the inner physical location of her ironic soul, not metaphorically but as an actual physical locale in her. And this could be experienced by anyone who saw her, and went on seeing her, despite the falsity of her vehicles.

It is not that the movie actor must play things smaller for the camera lens; not at all; the performer can be very large in his performance. It is rather that movie acting calls upon a different area of the actor’s instrument. Indeed, sometimes the stage performance itself uses the movie-acting set of strings, and when the stage performance is filmed, there is no difference whatever between the two.

In the case of Philip Baker Hall, we have stagecraft acting at its most remarkable. It is not virtuosoism for its own sake, nor is it self-indulgent even once. It is still astonishing. It is flabbergastering. I cannot imagine how he achieved it. But it has not been recast for the more lurid lens of the camera. So one watches it from a distance which one would never be able to sustain watching it in a theatre, without rushing up the aisle and out and calling the cops. In a theatre it would be so strong a performance one must engage with it or die. Hall describes the fact that some theatre audiences would start to sigh when Nixon sighed, pant when he panted, inhaled deeply when that is what Nixon did. Oh, believe me, as a performance it is huge, but its hugeness is not the hugeness of the screen. One sits back in wonder and amazement, a stance one never could have achieved watching this as a live performance in a theatre.

Hall makes no attempt to look like Nixon, except for the always all-important matter of the hair and something hunched at the back of his collar, but one never doubts for a moment that this is Nixon. Nixon who is a madman thinking it is president of the United States, the madness consisting of the fact that that is exactly what he is. He strives to be, he agonizes to imagine that he is the thing he actually is. Nothing could be screwier. Or more disgraceful. We get the whole story in hiatuses. The blurts of a creature who cannot finish a sentence. The manipulator manipulated. And now trying to manipulate himself but only finding a puppet on too many strings as subject. He is pitiful — so pitiful you can’t pity him.

Philip Baker Hall is not a small actor, in the same sense that Edward G. Robinson was not. His personal presence is wide and deep, his voice is singular, rich, meaningful. His face is a conquest of the actors’ needs. He was born to act. If he were cast as a small man, as a nebbish or a creep, he would be a nebbish and a creep, but the work would still be huge. You can prove this to yourself. For in Secret Honor that is exactly how he has been cast. Nixon in the Checkers speech was a little boy begging. And this is Nixon begging to be heard, still begging, begging to be heard by a history which by its hearing him he hopes to revise. This is Nixon at his most disgusting and therefore most real. And therefore almost most forgivable.

Nixon himself was a very bad actor. People voted for him because of that. Kennedy was a very good actor. People voted for him because of that. The only difference between them is that what Nixon actually was was visible behind his atrocious performances before us: a scrambling rat, and with Kennedy his inner drama is completely screened. All of this Philip Baker Hall captures in his capable fist and releases before us with astonishing skill. If you want to see him entirely different in an entirely different role, see him In Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film Hard Eight, which he plays power incarnate, opposite Gwyneth Paltrow and John C. Reilly. In Robert Altman’s Secret Honor he plays power disincarnate. Power deconstructing itself all over the floor. Power trying not to discover that it never existed.

The Special Features are quite fine. Hall gives a long interview. Nixon newsreels show us the poor man – always in flagrante of course –– and Altman himself does the commentary.

The only thing that doesn’t work in Secret Honor is Altman’s use of the video monitors as cutaways from the performance, for it never tells a story or lands as a plus to the character, and besides no cut-aways were needed. Who wants to take one’s eyes off of such a piece of work as Hall with such generous genius provides us?

Otherwise the film is a model of how to capture a stage performance, particularly a one-man show, in a cinematic way such as to erase quite completely its stage locale with an audience watching, and supplant it with a setting so probable and unquestionable that a camera in motion in it can bring before us, without demur and with full distinction, a priceless piece acting art.

 

 

 

 
 
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