A Long Goodbye To an American Icon

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The prolific film director Robert Altman died Monday in Los Angeles at the age of 81. three of The New York Sun’s critics recall the man and his movies.

One night at a party, Robert Altman congratulated me for the disapproving review I had just published of Bertrand Tavernier’s “Round Midnight,” a film he despised. I had already met his enchanting wife, Katherine, at a few jazz events, and I thought, well, if anyone can finally make a decent jazz film, maybe it will be Altman. Nearly a decade later, he invited me to a screening of “Kansas City,” and I was so dismayed I had to sneak away. Yet a music film (“Jazz ’34”) and CD from the same project are inspired. He understood the music; he just couldn’t imagine the musicians as more than a Greek chorus.

“Nashville” had the opposite problem — cogent character studies, amateur music in a city where professionalism in the only sina qua non. Many think it’s a masterpiece; I doubt it would make my top-10 list of Altmans. On the other hand, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” is among my top-10 Westerns, “The Long Goodbye” (my favorite Altman, if I had to choose just one) is in my top-10 private eyes, and the much maligned “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” is a quintessential critique of American showbiz.

What a figure Altman cut in the ’70s, breaking through at 45, driving a swath through traditional genres while inventing his own: “Images,” “California Split,” “Thieves Like Us,” “3 Women.” After a few years in the wilderness, working much in TV and creating the best of the movie Nixons in “Secret Honor,” he initiated his second act with “Vincent and Theo” and “The Player.” If the films that followed are uneven (“Short Cuts” and “Gosford Park” are especially flush with privileged moments), there probably isn’t a scene in any of them when you don’t know that you are sharing the unique and indispensable vision of a great filmmaker whose pictures don’t look or sound like anyone else’s.

— Gary Giddins

The first Robert Altman movie I ever saw was “Popeye,”screened on 16 mm at a summer camp for seafaring young boys, and the only thing that made an impression on me was recognizing Shelley Duvall from “The Shining.” My next Altman movie was his deconstructed teen comedy “O.C. and Stiggs,” which was so irritating to others and so obsessed with lobsters that a 16 year old had to love it, for all the wrong reasons. Stone-age cable service screened Altman’s “California Split” almost as often as “Xanadu,” but it was memorable mostly as the movie that was always on but didn’t have Olivia Newton-John roller-skating in it. Later, while working at a video store, a fellow clerk subjected us all to repeated screenings of “Quintet,” Altman’s inert sci-fi sleep-inducer that was a guaranteed customer repellent.

By the time I was blown away by “Nashville,” “The Player,”and “MASH,” I had become convinced that the formal theme unifying Robert Altman’s work was boredom, and I wasn’t alone. The New York Times classified “MASH” as “not successful” and Vincent Canby wrote about the “pretensions” and “tired symbolism” of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” Now that Altman’s been canonized, the Times gives even his worst movies glowing reviews, calling “A Prairie Home Companion” “a treasure” and “The Gingerbread Man” an “unexpected success,” and rather than being tooth-grindingly bad, “Cookie’s Fortune” is “serenely captivating.”

The thought of being canonized would make Altman gag — he fought ferociously all his life for the freedom to fail. No matter how hard Hollywood spanked him, he refused to straighten up, and when they took away his money, he just went off and made a no-budget oddity like “Secret Honor,”a mash-up of “Krapp’s Last Tape” and the life of Richard M. Nixon, featuring exactly one actor and shot on one set. He wouldn’t conform to the system, and when he got his honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement earlier this year it was the closest Hollywood comes to waving the white flag: If you can’t beat him, award him. Fabulous failure was Altman’s real business, and his filmography is a toybox of 36 movies that can be pulled out, argued over, reevaluated, lionized, demonized, cast into obscurity, and rediscovered an infinite number of times. Success is nice, but having the courage to fail will always be more fascinating. Long after “Nashville” has faded from my mind, I’ll still be wondering: What was up with all those lobsters in “O.C. and Stiggs”?

— Grady Hendrix

A director could hardly ask for a more suitable last word than the elegiac “A Prairie Home Companion,” not to mention an Academy Award for lifetime achievement, but Robert Altman’s career often felt like a roundelay of pointed hails and farewells.

Partly that’s because he did the work of a cinematic and cultural innovator, tirelessly dispatching the old and ringing in something new. “MASH” was a cynical kiss-off (or kiss-something-else) to hawks and war films, while “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” forged a poetic-realist anti-myth about the death of the wild West. “Nashville,” for many his masterpiece, explored the tradition of the Grand Ole Opry, only to collapse with a political hangover of an ending that was pure 1970s zeitgeist.

But there was also an ebb and flow to Altman’s full talents. By the end of his triumphant decade, the director’s touch seemed to come and go with each ensemble experiment. The plain, smallerscale works of the Reagan era sent many scurrying back to videotapes of the classics and an Altman they recognized. And after “The Player” and “Short Cuts” in 1992-93, he was put on permanent Comeback Watch, that unenviable backwards-looking purgatory reserved for canonized masters.

He never quit, and for all Altman’s loose-limbed innovations and tonal ironies, there was something almost traditional about his work ethic: tireless, prolific, churning through the hits and misses, year after year. And the director who gave the boot to static studio creations looked far back for his own inspiration, to that well-established monument of humanism (and satire), Jean Renoir’s 1939 classic “Rules of the Game,” virtually remade with “Gosford Park.”

Forty-something at the dawn of the ’70s, Altman was older than most of those remaking Hollywood and had already bid farewell to a lengthy television career when he embarked on filmmaking. A recent interview saw him philosophical about the panoramic span of his career, and perhaps his greater perspective made it easy later to contend with his own legend. “Same book, different chapters,” in his words, and the vivacity of his masterpieces will always make it a ripping good read.

— Nicolas Rapold


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use