Robert Altman’s History Lesson

Not just pipe dreams

I have the Criterion Channel but very little time to watch it. That is a shame on our society, which has seen fit to deny me a Living National Treasures sinecure, thus requiring me to work two jobs, a day grind plus this exalted position as your compère.

I feel some shame too, though, because I’m a former film nerd who was once proudly au courant but let myself fall out of mode. Now, in search of some feeling of contemporaneity, I sneak peeks at Martin Scorsese’s intros for the World Cinema Project films, like a child extrapolating from clips and glimpses what the whole thing might be like, and add those titles to my increasingly hopeless to-do list.

Criterion recently ran a Robert Altman retrospective, though, and there at least I had a head start. My nerd buddies and me were big Altman fans back in his heyday. Nashville is one of a handful of films I’ve seen more than a dozen times, and most of those viewings were on the first run.

But time passed and Altman put out a lot of movies from which I was warned away, either by critics or my own dispiriting acquaintance with dogs like A Wedding and Health (neither of which is in the Criterion retro). Every so often word got out that he’d made another great one — The Player, Short Cuts, Gosford Park — and I’d come around again.

I had by then decided that Altman would always be a sometime thing for me. I have said that the Coen Brothers seem like stoners to me, or rather have a stoner sensibility which amplifies random details, sometimes at the expense of sense or narrative drive; so it seemed for me with Altman, but more like indica to the Coens’ sativa. That is, while the Coens indiscriminately spun out ideas, Altman was more likely to settle into a comfy groove and just let it take him where it went. If the central idea was strong enough, that made the groove worth staying in. His vaunted improvisations reenforced that impression — when his movies felt weak to me, they reminded me of ramshackle stage improvs that didn’t get off on the right foot.

I felt that way about his successes, too, like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with its muzzy affect, the feeling of a “pipe dream” as Pauline Kael put it, and the way even its technically thrilling conclusion —McCabe facing down the Sheriff, the camp rallying to save its church — seemed to arrive organically, almost by fortunate accident.

If I had been sharper I would have seen that no movie gets to a proper conclusion by accident and that the affect was just style stretched over disciplined dramaturgy. On reflection even Nashville, sharp and energetic as it is, gives the impression, at least at first, of a shaggy dog story — why are we following so many people, what do these lives have to do with one another? And to tell the truth, pulling them physically together for a concert at the end is kind of a silly move. What’s not silly, though, is the overlapping feelings of the characters. Take the bravura sequence in which the wandering soldier, insensitive to Mr. Green’s grief, just talks to him about his own obsession, and leaves the poor man sobbing, and the sobbing turns into the laughter of the campaign operative, whom Opal-from-the-BBC confronts with her assassination theory, which cuts to the (spoiler) assassin talking to his mother on the phone… well, you could do that with the whole picture, and it shows how well it gets to the point (short vs.: alienation) without seeming to go anywhere at all.

So when all these Altman movies turned up on Criteron I took a flip through some I’d never seen. Dr. T and the Women, I regret to say, never makes the rich gynecologist’s dilemma convincing, and I’ll have to achieve a stronger level of commitment before I get more than a half hour into Quintet.

I felt that way, too, about A Perfect Couple, at first. Opening with Paul Dooley’s and Marta Heflin’s first date at the Hollywood Bowl without any meet-cute preliminaries was promising, as was the comedy of the rainstorm and the defective sunroof. But then I picked up that old feeling of drift and disconnection; we were spending a lot of time learning about their respective suffocating family groups (his a stuffy classical music clan, hers a rock band tribe run by a tyrant), but neither character seemed to show any promise of standing up to theirs. (Spoiler: They never really do!) And for long stretches Dooley’s “I won’t take no for an answer” approach with Heflin, no matter how well-meant, felt creepy, and Heflin’s vagueness I found frustrating. Plus there was that insufferable El Lay theater-rock shtick with lots of billowy clothing and the tyrant leader in a series of ridiculous bro-caps, climaxing with a white one that looked like a gigantic splooge.

But over time I felt the tumblers click. That they were ill-matched, but shared a crappy family dynamic, was the point; each was working that out with the other, and it was as painful and indirect as therapy because that’s what it was; but maybe, just maybe, the thing that would come out of it (and no one in the movie ever used the word “love”) would be good for them. The drift and disconnection, in other words, were part of the package. I went back and watched the musical intervals I’d fast-forwarded through and found that, while they weren’t songs I particularly wanted to listen to, they did match and reenforce moods as they came up, especially Heflin’s — the scene after Dooley first kissed her and she walked slowly around her loft suddenly made emotional sense when I slowed down for it.

The real revelation was seeing again an Altman I’d seen when it came out: Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. Back in the day I’d been disappointed in it. For one thing, he’d just come off Nashville, and this was not that; for another, I was a big fan of the Arthur Kopit play it’s based on, and kind of stuck on its idea of Buffalo Bill Cody — someone who knew better and chose against, not the thoroughly corrupt clown Paul Newman plays, merely the most exalted among an almost completely gutter-racist community of Wild West Show folk who turned the Indian genocide into Americanism for money.

Well, maybe it’s mainly a matter of me letting go of that idea, but the movie played like gangbusters for me this time, and a scene that had seemed unduly discursive to young me suddenly leapt into focus: Bill is shown to be a fan of women singing opera, and during a state visit by the President the first lady brings along a first-rate coloratura who lets rip with an Italian aria. We stay with it for the length of the piece, and see that not only Bill but nearly all the other white people are moved, some to tears. There’s a world of meaning (about racism, community, art, show business, people) in that. (In that way, it reminds me of the “Land of Make Believe” section of Gosford Park. And, come to think of it, of Victor Mature reciting Shakespeare in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine.) But it requires a little patience — maybe enforced by some good weed, or even just the inevitable slowing of one’s critical motor — to see it clearly.