Robert Altman: An Appreciation

At some point in my mid-teens, I started viewing movies differently than I had as a child.  Before that, I enjoyed them strictly for their storytelling value.  As I got older, I started picking what I would watch for other reasons.  One of those criteria that I still utilize to this day was who was cast in a film.  I also started to notice the directors that made the films that I liked and began to follow their careers.

Director/producer/writer Robert Altman was one of those that caught my eye at an early age and at first it was because of the actors he'd use.  Once I had a couple of his films under my cap, I realized that it wasn't just the stories or the cast that drew me into his movies.  It was his ability to see inside the human psyche — the face that we show to the world and the cracks and crevices that make us real. He made those characters real as well.

The first movie of his to catch my attention was Nashville.  Actually, in this case, it wasn't just the actors like Henry Gibson, Lily Tomlin, Karen Black, and Shelley Duvall that drew me to the film.  A friend of mine at the time was ga-ga over the soundtrack and would play it incessantly.  I'm not much of a country music fan, but something about "Tapedeck In His Tractor" by Ronee Blakely called to me loudly enough that I had to see the movie that it came from.

Nashville was a peek into the music industry, a place that I'd begun to think about as a career destination. That made the movie all the more appealing to me.  But as the plot lines and characters developed and intertwined, it was Altman's slant on the American Dream that ultimately touched me, the ability to be who we want to portray to others and the freedom to be who we actually are.  Maybe it's best explained by Kris Kristofferson in the lyrics for a song that wasn't in the movie but should have been: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." 

Three years and five films later, by itself no mean feat, A Wedding was the next of Robert Altman's work to really snag my attention.  His take on the classic theme of the institution of marriage and the trappings of the ceremonial aspects skewed that American Dream in ways that were humorous and insightful with a few taboos added in for flavoring.  The fissures in the facade of what we show to the public and who we are down deep inside were a bit more subtle in the beginning of this movie.  But once the cracks started showing, all hell broke loose.  Regardless of the role played, no one was who or what you thought that they were by the closing credits.

Article Author: tink

Formerly a Public Relations/Artist Development maven in the music biz, I
am now a freelance journalist specializing in the entertainment industry.
Find out about how I got from there to here, and more, when you visit
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