Altman pissed on forms he informalized. Too hip to go for bourgeois notions of entertainment – too hip to ignore them – he went for comic realism, a dry offhandedness that at times spurned convention. Praised for dialogue that overlapped, his films (which, by and large, were dinner parties, happenings, hangouts) let actors improvise freely. He had a loose, liberal style, a tendency to revel in cinematic mosaics.
MASH (1970) was a long-haired take on the college hi-jink film of the 40s. It was dark screwball, a backslider’s view: cynical, funny, sharp. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) was an impossibly sad Western and one of his best offerings. The movie whites out.
Nashville (1975) sought to be a record of something, a crazy quilt, but the director’s remove from his subject (fictive country musicians and assorted hangers-on) sideswipes the effort. Compare Nashville to Woodstock (1970). The latter was a conscious hype, but the documentarians behind it mirrored the energy of the festival. Hanging on the outcome, moved by the music, they worked to produce a document true to the source. The music in Nashville is atypical. It shows nothing of real Southerners, of these people. (Are the songs inseparable from the characters they reveal? Perhaps I need to give the film a third look.) Rather, the “scene” is a powder keg of hazy politics, a dumb substitute for America and the star-maker machinery of Hollywood. As such, the movie is bogus.
The 80s saw Altman retreat from Hollywood. (Movie execs had come to loathe him.) He returned strong with The Player (1992), a poke at the coterie he could never really join. Propelling this look at the dissolution of L.A. (which started with The Long Goodbye [1973]), Short Cuts (1993) piled on a few good subplots. Gosford Park (2001) was Marxist tripe. His last film, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), put me to sleep. I woke up; Bob did not.
He left a mixed body of work. In many ways the Altman circle is closed to what makes Hollywood tick (i.e., generic celebrations of archetype and dramatic, plot-driven fare). Too often his observations are rudderless; characters arrive complete, but situations bore. I can’t train myself to admire his filmography as a whole.
Still, I dig his photographs of the 60s.