Short Cuts. - movie reviews

You can look at Robert Altman's Short Cuts in two ways. You can say that, as an adaptation, however loose, of nine stories and one poem by Raymond Carver, it turns something very close to gold into something very close to dross. Or you can say that, as a more or less original creation by Altman and his co-scenarist Frank Barhydt, it is vulgar, pretentious, voyeuristic, overlong, and, above all, contrived. After that, you can add that Altman has all kinds of technical prowess. But is that adequate compensation for a gross insufficiency of artistry, intellect, and taste?

Item: Three men on a weekend fishing trip discover the nude body of a girl floating in a river (Carver). How? By one of them taking a leak just where the body bobs among some rocks. In subsequent shots, bubbles of urine surround the body (Altman).

Item: A jealous surgeon asks insistent questions about a party three years ago, where his wife may have drunkenly kissed and even yielded to another man. She is expecting guests and trying to remove a spot from and iron her skirt as this interrogation proceeds (Carver). As she is not wearing panties, her blouse leaves open her front and rear, over both of which, especially the red pubic hair, the camera lingers lovingly. Thus her confession, eliciting lubricious laughter from the audience, is wrongly imbued with humbling hostility (Altman).

Item: The surgeon's wife is a painter, and her nudes, with the pubic hair often managing to loom large behind the actors' heads, are prominently displayed. When she is painting her sister in the nude, the surgeon comes home, and an awkward threeway conversation ensues (Altman - not in Carver).

Item: One of the anglers, on his return home, makes love to his wife, but then alienates her by relating how he and his friends fished through the weekend with the dead girl there in the water, and reported it only afterward (Carver). On first hearing this in the middle of the night, the wife gets out of bed to sit on the edge of the bathtub - to do what? Wash her feet, it seems. Why? So the camera can fondle her naked buttocks (Altman).

Item: A tough, adulterous traffic cop, after a night with his mistress, returns to his wife, the aforementioned painter's sister, and morosely gets into bed with her, only to be aroused by her foot massaging his genitals (all Altman).

Item: A young woman, a classical cellist, cannot get any affection from her mother, a nightclub crooner. The girl keeps inflicting real or imaginary injuries on herself, and will eventually gas herself in the garage. Earlier, she strips naked under the prying gaze of a pool repairman, and dives into the pool to float there like a corpse. (This entire inept tale was invented by Altman, so that the mother's nightclub songs can act as a musical bridge for the picture.)

Item: The pool repairman's unloving wife earns money at home by dispensing telephone sex, mostly sadistic, while changing a child's diapers or performing other household tasks, even as her shocked and neglected husband looks on with a hangdog air. Family quarrels and other loud noises do not seem to deter the clientele from fantasizing (all Altman).

Item: A couple spend agonizing hours by their eight-year-old son's bedside; he is comatose after having been hit by a car (Carver). The husband's father, living in another town and completely estranged from his son for thirty years upon being divorced by his wife, picks this moment to show up at the hospital, make a nuisance of himself, and keep his son from his comatose son with an endless self-exculpatory account of how he was seduced, once, by his wife's sister, which brought on the divorce (Altman).

The story "A Small, Good Thing" is the most moving of the lot. It tells how the dying boy's mother had ordered a fancy birthday cake and then, because the boy was injured on his very birthday, forgot the order. The hard-working, needy baker now keeps making phone calls to the family's home to demand pick-up and payment. The father doesn't even know about the cake, and the phone exchanges become ever nastier and, after the boy's death, downright spooky. Finally the parents angrily seek out the baker at work late at night; yelled at, he understands and becomes compassionate, making the hungry parents sit down, and comforting them with coffee and his fresh-baked rolls - "a small, good thing," as he calls it.

Thus in Carver. Altman, however, introduces on top of the baker's hate calls the nagging intrusion of the well-meaning but meddlesome and ludicrous father of the husband. This, of course, lessens the impact of the heckling and hectoring phone calls, and shifts the pathos away from the parents to the finally dejected old father.

But there is worse. Altman wants a unifying motif at the beginning and finish of the film. So he starts with an attack of Medflies on Los Angeles, and sinister, spraying helicopters cruising the night sky, aerial shots interspersed with short takes of how the film's various characters react to this seeming menace from above. He ends with a menace from below, a 7.4 earthquake (accomplished by jiggling the camera), in which nobody dies. But it is enough to muck up the gentle, touching moment of the baker bearing the tray of rolls with the building shaking and the three characters hastily seeking shelter. Other stories, such as "Neighbors" and Vitamins," completely lose their point in the movie.