The Altman Centenary

This past Thursday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Altman, who passed away nearly twenty years ago in 2006 at the age of 81, ten years after the heart transplant he revealed during his acceptance of a lifetime achievement Oscar at the 2006 ceremony¹, at which point he also spoke the following line:

“I love filmmaking…it has given me entré into the world and the human condition.”

My own filmmaking career did not go the way I initially designed it, and yet it was my journey into that world that gave me just about everything that I value most in my life today. Watching films as a kid and as a young adult gave me my entrance into the world, and deepened my understanding of the human condition, before pursuing it as a career led in its own way to meeting my wife, and thus having my children, and to my career as a professor.

It’s not the only similarity I have with Altman, one of the precious few cinematic figures who genuinely earns the term genius. I am also bald.

Altman looms large for me - follicularly and creatively - even though I didn’t gain a deep appreciation for his work until somewhat later in life. I knew him from a fairly young age because of MASH². I don’t have childhood memories of the show per se, but it was a ubiquitous presence even though I was only two months old when it went off the air. Even now as I try to pinpoint when I discovered that it was based on a movie, I’m drawing a blank. It may have been the Blockbuster Video Greatest Movies of All Time guide that I’ve written about before - and which occupies enough psychic and emotional space in my early cinephile development that I suppose I have to write about that and only that at some point - or perhaps the equally-canonical The Great Movies by William Bayer (which also deserves a write-up of its own at some point if only because it’s where I first heard of Luis Buñuel). I don’t think it was the joke from The Critic where Jay Sherman desperately searches for a good, original film to see in theatres and is relieved when he finds what he thinks is a repo screening only to discover that it is “The movie of the TV show, not the original movie,” but who really knows?

I certainly knew the show well enough to note the drastic difference in tone and approach once I did finally watch the movie at far too young an age. It would go on to get a lot of play, even though its more acerbic tone gave me pause and its critical view of Christianity made me worry I was going to hell (though that now feels like a soothing balm). MASH is certainly a movie where not all of its attitudes fare all that well today, though it equates itself nicely in the way that it always did, which is in how its anarchic style pairs so perfectly with its anti-establishment nature. This is one of the few war movies that actually feels like an anti-war movie, in no small part because we see only the bloody aftermath of battle with none of the carnage that so often gets framed as heroic through Hollywood’s lens even when they’re trying their best not to do so. But what really resonates is the style - the ever-probing eye of Altman’s documentary-style camera, the overlapping dialogue, the lack of traditional narrative plot points, the way that scenes play out according to the natural rhythms of conversations rather than a need to hit dramatic moments or share story information. These are things that, as we eventually see, would come to typify Altman’s approach throughout his career, plied here for the first time and so perfectly paired with the material that it’s one of the few Hollywood films that feels genuinely revolutionary, that rare instance in which the language of cinema is being completely re-written before our eyes. Just as the madcap doctors of the 4077th MASH are defying the military structures of authority to which they are nominally beholden, so too is Altman tearing down the foundational notions of what a film should look or sound like. He’s pulling off the scabs of cliche and formula and allowing fresh blood to flow.

For whatever reason it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I did the full catch-up with the rest of his filmography, though even then it was somewhat in shifts. I went through all of the major works first (Nashville, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Short Cuts, The Player), and then several years later went through the “b-sides” (Three Women, Images, Buffalo Bill and the Indians) only to find that they were just as good.

So much of why Altman is missed is not just because of this style - you see traces of it here and there, in particular in his acolytes like Paul Thomas Anderson - but because of how mercilessly he probed and deconstructed not just cinematic technique and genre but America itself. A film like McCabe and Mrs. Miller not only demystifies the classic American Western with its insistence on genuine human character and the natural rhythms of life, but also tears down our false notions of this country’s founding. In its depiction of the slow but inevitable destruction of the individual under the gears of corporate greed, Altman dispels the notion so central to the American expansionist myth. The idealistic pioneers we have built up in our cultural consciousness were in fact nothing more than desperate men looking for a way to make a buck who eventually got either bought out or killed by larger corporate interests.

His critique of America reaches its zenith, of course, in Nashville. I’m linking below to a piece on the film that I’ve just re-published because it says perhaps all I could say about not just the film but perhaps even Altman’s value and importance as an artist.

Nashville is also his high point as a filmmaker who had everything at his disposal. The free-wheeling cinematic 70s crest at about the time his career did - Nashville comes out in the same year as Jaws - and by the time Star Wars comes out two years later they are mostly over. The year after Nashville Altman made Buffalo Bill and the Indians: Or, Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, in which Paul Newman plays the titular Western icon as a sad, drunken has-been reckoning with the fact that his entire image is built on a lie that covers over a history of colonialist violence. In 1977 he released Three Women, in which he returned to the interior dreamscapes of earlier films like Images, which was his take on Polanski’s Repulsion. As he moved into, and especially as he fully entered, the 80s everything changed - the industry was now one that was not particularly welcoming to someone whose work was so personal, so human-focused, and so free-wheeling. He made some interesting movies - Secret Honor, a one-hander that starts with Philip Baker Hall, as later-days Richard Nixon, entering a room with a gun before launching into what is ostensibly a feature-length monologue, filmed while Altman was employed by the University of Michigan with a largely student crew - and some absolute gonzo novelties like Popeye, which is in its one way one of the strangest and most wonderful things ever funded and released by a studio. But it wasn’t until 1992’s The Player that he had his “comeback,” a critical hit for which he was nominated for Best Director (he would get nominated again the following year for Short Cuts, a rare instance in which the director is the only nominee for their film³). This second renaissance carried him into the 2000s and arguably lasted, to some degree, until his death.

And even twenty to thirty years past his heyday, his films were as messy, human, alive, and darkly incisive and satirical as they always were. It makes complete sense that Kurt Vonnegut - another totemic creative figure for me - would pen a loving contemporaneous appraisal of Nashville for Vogue, as their work has in common so many key features, including a fondness for unremarkable strivers and a dark sense of satirical humor. There are few filmmakers I can think of in the modern cinema world who can so effortlessly traverse genre while also maintaining such a stylistic and thematic consistency. Part of this is because we don’t really let anyone do that anymore - certainly not in American filmmaking. That kind of independence has gone somewhat out of vogue but is also not a luxury anyone can afford any longer. Certainly no one with the prickly cantankerousness, the complete inability to suffer fools, that Altman possessed could get far in a world in which we are always on display and where treacly kindness is seen as a virtue to a degree that it has been mandated and weaponized.

His absence is one that is deeply felt not just because of the work we no longer get, but because of the sense that an era passed away forever with him.

I mentioned his acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Oscar at the top of this piece. It’s actually a video that I come back to time and time again. First of all, it’s introduced by Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep in a pitch-perfect homage to his signature style, but the speech itself is such a wonderful combination of heartfelt, sincere, biting, and forward-thinking with just enough of an undertone of “I’m thankful for this but also fuck you for waiting so long and giving me a consolation prize.” It is perfectly Altman and represents everything wonderful about him and just about everything that make his films so unique and so dearly missed in today’s cinema landscape.

What ultimately makes it so moving, however, is that he opens the speech by commenting on his reticence to accept an award like this because of the implication that it means his best work is behind him, before then making the case that he is still working and that his career is thus not near its end. He finishes on a joke - that the heart he had received ten years prior was from a donor in her late thirties, and so by that calculation he had another forty years left. The reality is that he would be gone in less than a year, his final film having been finished by the point he delivers his remarks. It’s pointless to wonder over whether or not he knew the end was near, or if he genuinely thought he had more films in him. He was indeed prepping a movie at the end - a fictional remake of the documentary Hands on a Hard Body. But what matters either way is that, much like he never gave up when his career was on the rocks in the 80s - he kept making movies, and doing it his way, even if all he could so was adapt plays for TV - he refused to give in to the inevitable even as he was looking in the face of death itself.

There’s a lesson to be learned there that transcends even the monumental import of his films.

-cs

1. It is interesting to note that this award is presented at the ceremony during which Crash, a movie that on the most superficial level can be termed Altmanesque for its sprawling ensemble and yet in both its thematic bungling and dramatic heavy-handedness is ultimately a bastardization of his style, would be awarded Best Picture

2. Popeye would have technically been my first exposure, as I had seen it numerous times as a kid, but I didn’t connect that it was him until much later.

3. He would of course share a hug with the only director to achieve this feat twice, David Lynch, in 2002 when the two lost in this category to Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind