Robert Altman died after making The Prairie Home Companion. It was his last movie and was about death even if he planned to make yet another movie fighting both his pancreatic cancer and the heart transplant he kept confidential for 10 years.
His swan song was really the masterpiece Gosford Park. In my memories of movie-making it is the epitome of the Altman touch. Every cliche of the who-done-it mystery from the days of Agatha Christie and big, weekend hunting parties in England is brought out in loving detail and wonderful camera work. The servants dress in tails and eat downstairs much as the upstairs family. Alan Bates presides as the perfect butler. The chaos of the downstairs resolves into yet another complex family of another time. The valets and ladies' maids are called by their masters' names and their masters stay in the many rooms called by their color ("Your master is in the green room", says the housekeeper whose life is far more important than her position belies).
The mystery is not a huge mystery. The violence is not so much violence that Altman can't pan over it and leave it behind. The crime becomes the perfect crime but still a crime of human feelings and inter-connected relationships in a complex world. Each cliche is lovingly skewered, distorted, broken or turned into a joke. Only the death of the lord of the manor is left as reality, but he is not mourned; his history exposed and forgotten, the principals are not those a Hercule Poirot would have wanted and the party moves on to the world that had begun with Maggie Smith arriving in a yellow Rolls-Royce exuding British aristocratic haughtiness.
Garrison Keillor thought Prairie Home Companion was about his radio show and Altman said it was about death. Altman envisioned an angel -- in a white trench-coat that "even the rain wouldn't dare fall on" -- who enters stage center into a circle of white light under a streetlight. Altman's angel of death is white, blond and all mid-Western sweetness. It had been a bad penguin joke on the radio from The Prairie Home Companion that killed her. This angel is mysterious and dead. To Garrison Keeler she only says, "it's not your time, yet."
Robert Altman even fathered some failures, but good director that he was he could say, "All these films, it's like your own children," the Hollywood Reporter reported in its obituary notice. "I love them all, we tend to love our least successful children the most, because they seem to need the most protection, but when they're finished they're finished, they're disconnected for me, that cord is cut, and all I can do is observe them and pray for them and hope that they succeed in happiness."
Article comments
1 - Pat Evans
Thanks for this thorough appreciation. There can't be too many kudos for this great director.
2 - tink
A lovely tribute!!
3 - Howard Dratch
Thanks, Pat and Tink. I should have linked to Tink's "Appreciation" and to Randall A.Byrn's article on Altman's films. Somehow I never got to Vincent & Theo and I was just thinking what a great film that was and how much I will plan to see it again.
4 - Lisa McKay
Congratulations -- this article has been chosen as an editor's pick this week!