Sara Batkie
Los Angeles is a vulnerable place to live. Too dry and there’s wildfires. Too wet and there’s mudslides. The next earthquake could be the big one. Then there’s the omnipresent helicopters, reminding you of an emergency just out of sight. It’s a city of fault lines and wide vistas, cinematic even if it weren’t where Hollywood called home, where dreams come true but also nightmares. To coexist amidst such uncertainty is one of the grand themes of 1993’s Short Cuts, the late career masterpiece from director Robert Altman, who would have turned 100 on February 20th.
Uncertainty was a fixture of Altman’s own life. Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1925, he served in the Air Force after high school and flew more than 50 bombing missions during WWII. Following his discharge, he moved to Hollywood but it didn’t take; he returned to Kansas City in 1949 to make industrial films. Eventually he was able to build up a formidable television career despite often getting fired from projects for refusing to adhere to network standards. This renegade spirit would serve him well, though, once his career took off in the 70’s and his anti-authoritarian streak aligned with the burgeoning New Hollywood era, producing such classics as M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye. He’d experience his share of ups and downs in the ensuing years, but it was never wise to count him out, even as he approached his seventieth decade.
Short Cuts was Altman’s second film in a row set in L.A., following the hugely successful The Player—but unlike that acidic valentine to the city, the settings and characters here feel far away from the glitz and glamor of the dream factory. They’re people like Doreen the diner waitress (Lily Tomlin, whose presence feels like a knowing nod to the structurally-simpatico Nashville), or phone sex worker Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh) taking her calls in front of her kids, or Stormy Weathers (Peter Gallagher), who pilots one of the helicopters spraying the region with pesticide in the apocalyptic opening sequence. In all, Altman and co-writer Frank Barhydt’s screenplay juggles twenty-two principle characters, which feels like both a throwback to his sprawling ensemble works of the past and a declaration of new artistic ambitions.
If it is an epic, though, it’s one rendered on a miniature scale. Its source material are nine stories, and one poem, by Raymond Carver, transposed from the author’s native Pacific Northwest to southern California. But Short Cuts doesn’t function as a typical anthology; instead, Altman weaves the plots together in a manner that’s distinctly improvisational, with a restless energy that’s matched by Mark Isham’s jazzy score. Carver was famous for a writing style that was shorn close to the bone; the suburbs and its miserable denizens was his milieu. Many are alcoholics; all are looking everywhere but at the crisis dead ahead of them. Altman’s adaptation keeps the connections between the characters both familial and loose – some are married, some are sleeping together, some work for one another, and some simply brush past each other as they go about their day. Aside from a few well-placed zooms, Altman’s camerawork is mostly devoid of flourishes, allowing his scenes to unfold with a patience that its coked-out progeny like Pulp Fiction and Magnolia largely eschew.
It’s an egalitarian scope, one that allows huge tragedies like the accident that befalls the son of Ann (Andie MacDowell) and Howard (Bruce Davison) to exist on the same plane as the petty argument that Marian (Julianne Moore) and Ralph (Matthew Modine) get in before a dinner party. Each story reaches a point of crisis and catharsis, though not simultaneously. Instead of building to dramatic moments, Altman sits in the discomfort of conversation and the gambles of disclosure, when years worth of built-up fissures can shatter a stable-seeming partnership in an instant. It’s no wonder actors wanted to work with him, and the troupe he gathered here matches his verve for the material, exhibiting a “we’re all in this together” camaraderie that’s infectious, even as the characters themselves are largely loathsome.
Short Cuts won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and eventually netted Altman his fifth of seven Oscar nominations. He’d go on to direct eight more films before he passed away in 2006, though none would reach quite the same level of acclaim. Still, he was charmingly sanguine about his shifting fortunes in Hollywood. “Admire me not for how I succeed, not for how ‘good’ the films are, but for the fact that I keep going back and jumping off the cliff,” was a typical sentiment. That he kept taking these leaps of faith long after it was necessary, or even advisable, might be his greatest legacy. He understood better than anyone that endings are a young man’s game, and so he refuses to leave us with one. “It’s not the big one,” a couple characters say after surviving the earthquake that serves as Short Cuts’s climax. In life, as in directing, sometimes the best way to move past disaster is to dust yourself off and enjoy the view.
“Short Cuts” is not streaming, but it’s available on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection.
