Closer to home: Carver versus Altman

I want to compare Robert Altman's film Short Cuts with some of the stones by Raymond Carver on which the film is based.(1) My purpose is not to test the fidelity of the film to the stories: a film has its own kind of vision, and a director should be free to mold his material in whatever way he thinks fit. Some films of literary works may succeed by virtue of the way they reproduce some of the qualities of those works in another medium: one thinks, for instance, of the Merchant/Ivory films of novels by Henry James and E. M. Forster. But it is just as possible for a director simply to use the literary work as a starting point for his own creation. However, once that has been done, it seems reasonable to ask: how does the vision of the film compare with that of the literary work? Film has immense popular prestige, and it is likely that many more people will see the film than will read the stories. Should this be a matter for complacency or regret?

These questions are complicated in the case of Altman and Carver by the fact that Altman has gone to some lengths to emphasize the closeness of the connection between the film and the stories. Carver's name features prominently in the credits for the film; an edition of the nine stories and the poem has been published by Harvill under the title Short Cuts and with an introduction by Altman; and the screenplay of the film, by Altman and cowriter Frank Barhydt, has been published by Capra Press with an introduction by Carver's widow, the writer Tess Gallagher. Both the introductions, while noting the substantial changes Altman has made to Carver and the subtle weaving of his 10 quite separate pieces into a single whole, stress the inspiration of Carver's work and the indebtedness of the film to the stories. It seems fair then, after giving the film its due as an outstanding piece of filmmaking, to ask what has Altman added and what has he lost? What kind of insight do the two auteurs have into human behavior, what kind of view of life do they embody; and ultimately, what is the relative value for our culture and our ways of thinking of the two works and the two kinds of vision?

1

Altman's is a big film; long, multifarious, fast-moving; visually packed, loud with noises, voices, music. On the big screen, and with the enveloping stereophonic sound, it impacts on the senses. There is a lot of close-up and medium close-up: not only of faces but of bodies and objects (helicopters in the opening sequence, police motorcycle, cars, kitchen-equipment, all the dense materiality of the American big city, here the suburbs of Los Angeles). Noises, large and small, are registered with larger than life sonority. The rhythmic blood-beat of helicopter blades (you almost feel the wind), the deep-throated roar or growl of a motorcycle, the crunch of boots on gravel, a dog barking, the chink of motorcycle keys falling on a table. As in Altman's Nashville (1975), there is a sense of pressure, of turmoil, of many lives and energies pursuing their own paths and then intersecting, or colliding, bumping off each other. This sense of packed action, of material life, is one of the things that gives this film its impact and exhilaration.

The film begins with the helicopter behind the credit tides, which themselves slide onto the screen in vivid reds and blues like sideways floating planes, and then fade like radar images. It's almost an echo, as once reviewer pointed out, of the opening of Apocalypse Now (1979), Coppola's film about Vietnam: and this feeling will persist and be reaffirmed at the end of Altman's film. The echo is also ironic: these choppers are not, ostensibly, hostile but merely spraying the thousands of LA gardens with Medfly insecticide. But the feeling of threat is still there; social, municipal power inflicted for the good of citizens whether they, individually, like it or not.

Structurally, the sequence serves to give a sense of a common context, to unite the multiple threads of the different lives, different situations, different plots, which are going to be loosely bound together in the film. There is the motorcycle cop and his family, the wife he's cheating on and their three small children and the dog; the swimming-pool cleaner whose wife looks after their baby and toddler while running a telephone sex-line from their apartment; the night-club singer and her celloplaying daughter in her early twenties (the one story in the film not based on Carver); the painter of female nudes and her doctor husband; the young man doing a course in horror-movie makeup, and his wife; the TV commentator and his nice Southern wife and their eight-year-old son; the cafe waitress and her drunken limo-driver husband; the three men in the cafe who are going off on a fishing trip; the helicopter pilot whose wife is the cop's mistress.

Generically, it will be clear, the film is related to soap-opera, or, more distantly, to those American disaster-movies (Airport, Towering Inferno) where many different characters and situations are brought together by a single all-enveloping crisis. But Altman transforms the genre. Instead of the plodding connections of the single-location (street or bar or hospital) of the soap-opera, or the easy linking of one group to the next via the single crisis, the characters in Cuts are related by chance contacts of a multitude of different kinds, governed and often hampered or injured, but also energized, by chance events and associations. The cafe waitress, driving to work, knocks down the TV presenter's son who is on his way to school. The waitress's husband stops at the restaurant for coffee and is half-offended, half-stimulated by witnessing the three fishermen talking coarsely about his wife's sexual attractions. The young doctor, calm, efficient and humane at his hospital, treating the boy in a coma, is made shouting, resentful and uncomprehending at home by his wife's revelation of her infidelity three years before, a revelation that comes just before the arrival for a barbecue supper of two friends, one of the fishermen and his wife. The latter are also in unresolved marital conflict, in the aftermath of another of the film's crises: the fishing trip on which the three men discover the naked body of a murdered young woman in the river, but don't report it until their three days of fishing are done.