This Week in Cinema: Robert Altman Dies at Age 81
The venerable director departed for the Nashville in the sky on 11.20.2006
By Beth Capper
Published: November 27th, 2006 | 4:17pm
Robert Altman was the kind of person everyone aspires to be in old age — still active, cognizant, and working. Altman had cancer, a fact he found out 18 months prior to his death, yet he still continued to develop ideas for future projects, shooting what was to be his final film, A Prairie Home Companion, which was released in June, and working on the pre-production of a film he never managed to make. There are few directors in the history of American cinema who have such a consistently exceptional body of work, encompassing genres as disparate as westerns (McCabe and Mrs. Miller), sci-fi (Quintet), political satire (Tanner ‘88 and Tanner on Tanner), and the murder mystery (Gosford Park), and tackling subjects as varied as war (M*A*S*H), gambling (California Split) and country music (Nashville).
Altman was born in 1925 in Kansas City, center of a then-burgeoning jazz movement. He landed in Hollywood in 1946 after being dispatched from the army, where his obsession for cinema began to take form. Finding little success in Los Angeles, he returned to Kansas City and joined the Calvin Company — the world’s largest industrial film production house — where he directed more than 60 short films. It wasn’t until 1955 that Altman made his first feature film, The Delinquents, a low-budget picture on juvenile crime picked up for distribution in 1957 by United Artists.
Altman started off on bad footing with Hollywood, where a shaky relationship with Jack Warner initially thwarted his success, and although he continued to work within Hollywood, his films and attitude made him something of a maverick. Altman tried to insist on R ratings for his films because he believed that children didn’t have the concentration for them, a point that bedevilled Hollywood executives reluctant to make films that shut out one their most profitable audiences. Altman got his own back at Hollywood in 1992 with The Player, a scathing attack on the film world he inhabited. The Player satirizes the cold contempt with which Hollywood executives scrutinize the creative process and features an excellent performance from Tim Robbins as a sociopathic studio executive responsible for turning down writers. Corruption and murder abound in The Player, and by the end, you can’t help but think that Robbins’ character is an undermining nod in the direction of Jack Warner.
There is no doubt that Altman took his work seriously. His films are highly complex and naturalistic, and his actors were often encouraged toward improvised digressions. One of his cinematic trademarks is the constant hum of overflowing dialogue running between characters, utilized both because Altman wanted to capture something of how conversation actually works, and — as he later noted on the DVD commentary for McCabe and Mrs Miller — because he wanted his audience to pay close attention. His successors are abundant, and you don’t have to look very far to see his influence. His 1993 film Short Cuts, for instance, which takes chunks of Raymond Carver stories and connects them together in a narrative of characters whose lives intersect and intertwine, was almost directly echoed six years later in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and again in 2004 in Paul Haggis’ Oscar-winning film Crash. Despite all this, Altman never won an Oscar until this year, when he received an honorary award for his lifetime’s achievement. In his acceptance speech, he discussed the heart transplant in which he got the “heart of a young woman in her late 30s.” Calculating optimistically, Altman told the Academy, “you may be giving me this award, too early. Because I think I've got about 40 years left on it. And I intend to use it.”
Issue #35
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more