Robert Altman Dies At 81 Leaving A Legacy Of Film - Page 3

1975's Nashville had numerous stories revolve around country music and the Grand Ole Opry, and meet in a political campaign. Nashville is another of his brilliantly-casted multi-stories with Shelley Duvall in her hippie, skinny, gangly sensuality and more of his often-used crew of consummate professionals — Keith Carradine starting out and Geraldine Chaplin who was born into the movie world. In between were McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a new kind of non-Western look at characters and business in the West and, one of my favorites, Brewster McCloud, a Texas-sized fantasy with another angel and a boy who builds his own wings to fly in the commercial space of the Houston Astrodome.

In 1978's The Wedding he attacked,explained,circled,filmed, described, criticized, chortled at, and perhaps admired the great, American institution of bourgeois marriage. Geraldine Chaplin presides as the wedding consultant who wields the real power over proceedings that must impress the guests and bring honor to the affluent parents. Still, the institution is being dissected, fly-wing by fly-wing, by the master of dissection. Each principal is examined while stories swirl as always in circles and eddies of touching one life to another. Mia Farrow has the greatest joke of the movie and was directed into perfect timing when she recounts (counting) the military school boys she hosted to daddy-dear. Altman uses Lillian Gish, once the most beautiful of young actresses (for D.W. Griffiths), when words were still a long way in the future, presiding over the affair from her bed and dominating it by her untimely death, yet another pale angel.

I don't forget, since it made an impression on me back in '78, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson with Paul Newman of the flowing hair and Geraldine Chaplin as Calamity Jane and the world of the West, our Frontier, the Wild West reduced to a vaudevillian spectacular of financial hassles and bickering actors. Not only is the world a stage but even our myths of America could be turned into theater and Altman did just that.

Altman's sense of place, after the great characterizations, is one of the things I most love about his movies. Never do we not see where we are and feel what it is like to be there. It is not forced down our throat. There is always a sense that there is a there there, unlike Gertrude Stein's view (in reference to Oakland, California) that "there is no there there."

Roger Ebert eulogizes Altman best back in '75 in his Nashville review. I, too, would use it now to categorize the filmography of someone without a place in a category, unless the category is "Altman-esque":

Women: God, but Altman cares for them while seeing their predicament so clearly. The women in "Nashville" inhabit a world largely unaffected by the feminist revolution, as most women do. They are prized for their talent, for their beauty, for their services in bed, but not once in this movie for themselves. And yet Altman suggests their complexities in ways that movies rarely have done before. The Lily Tomlin character, in particular, forces us to consider her real human needs and impulses as she goes to meet the worthless rock singer (and we remember a luminous scene during which she and her deaf son discussed his swimming class). Part of the movie's method is to establish characters in one context and then place them in another, so that we can see how personality — indeed, basic identity itself — is constant but must sometimes be concealed for the sake of survival or even simple happiness.

By the time of Prairie Home Companion Altman's women — epitomized by Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep and movie daughter — become symbols of 20th century women of strength entering the 21st century.

Peter Travers in Rolling Stone tells us, after a long journalistic relationship with the master, that:

The last laugh I shared with Altman onstage came when he was discussing A Prairie Home Companion. He said he had upset Garrison Keeler, who thought of the film based on his radio show as a light romp. Altman shook his head and said, 'No it's not, it's a film about death. Virginia Madsen plays an angel who keeps picking people off. By the end of the picture she's practically taken the whole cast with her.' In retrospect, Prairie feels even more like an elegy for a time past that won't come back. But Altman wouldn't go in for eulogies. 'It's just death,' he said, 'nothing to be afraid of.'

Some articles, such as this one, are written after sometimes strong discussions and suggestions by my wife, Patricia Beringer. Our photographs have always carried a dual copyright. Therefore some articles carry the same Beringer-Dratch credit.

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

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