Short Cuts (1993)

I remember watching Short Cuts for the first time in 1994 or whenever the picture was available on video, as the idea of seeing this film in the theatre would’ve been unthinkable in the area I grew up in. I had just discovered the film’s director, Robert Altman, the year before with his The Player, which I adored. At the time I’m sure I didn’t quite grasp all of The Player, I was twelve, but the film had (and still has) a heady sexual danger, as well as a cynicism, that greatly appealed to me. Come to think of it, reading the critics’ reactions to The Player’s opening shot may have, in fact, been my introduction to the notion of a tracking shot.

But I digress, I eventually rented the Short Cuts video at the store my family frequented and, three hours and change later, proclaimed the film to be “pretentious” and a “disappointment”. Yeah, I was that arrogant. As brilliant as The Player still is, it has a tangible thriller spine that a twelve year old can latch onto. Short Cuts, of course, does not. I labeled Short Cuts pretentious, but that was an insecure twelve year old wannabe academic’s way of saying that he found it boring. I re-watched the picture a few years later in college, with several more Altman films under my belt, and recognized that I was, indeed, an idiot, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.

And now, having bought the film’s essential Criterion DVD a few months ago, and finding myself under the weather and with sufficient time to appropriately digest, I re-watched Short Cuts again. The film, like many of Altman’s films, is a force; which is ironic because that word is misleading to Altman’s approach. Short Cuts, like Nashville or even the final moments of The Player, sneaks up on you with seemingly banal details that slowly accumulate to become something quite tragic or significant. It’s this accumulation, this emotional disruption as conveyed by fleeting understatement, that has people sometimes calling Altman naturalistic in approach.

Just as others have written, Short Cuts isn’t a naturalistic film though; the coincidences, the intersections, even the characters’ occupations, are unusual and stylized. Raymond Carver’s stories, which served as the inspiration for the script by Frank Barhydt and Altman, were usually spare, isolated sketches of casual despair. Altman has taken those sketches into his confident old hands and criss-crossed them into a big, bursting, seemingly free-form soap opera.

And it’s the soap opera that lends Short Cuts the somewhat conventional spine that eluded me as a child; that frees Altman to stage individual moments of potent truth telling, or at least the potent truth telling of movies. As skillfully as Altman underplays, and as subtly and gracefully as he weaves characters’ agendas and neuroses into casual conversation, Short Cuts is still truthful only in a way that fans of movies or literature wish life to be. Real life, of course, is even more mysterious, not to mention considerably less interesting (assuming something can be more mysterious and less interesting at the same time), than the largely elusive happiness of Short Cuts. We all have resentments, insecurities and family squabbles, but we rarely live lives as cathartic as the characters that populate many of Altman’s films. As devastating as many of the moments of Short Cuts are, those characters are still lucky: they have Robert Altman and Raymond Carver as chroniclers handy to imbue their lives with meaning, or at least a fascinating lack of meaning.

The film is set in Los Angeles present day, opening with a series of extended, spontaneous God’s eye traveling shots that instantly establish the film’s loose, spanning perspective. We are to spend a few long days in the lives of twenty or so different characters, some of which are related, some of which aren’t, some of which turn out to be related in ways of which only we, as the audience, are allowed to understand.

There is a TV man and his wife (Bruce Davison and Andie McDowell) whose child is hit by a car but appears to be ok, for now. There is a baker (Lyle Lovette) who is compelled to exact a very misplaced revenge. There is a wife (Madeline Stowe) who entertains herself with her policeman husband’s feeble lies designed to mask his infidelity. There are friends (Robert Downey, Jr. and Chris Penn) with bubbling sexist resentments. There are fisherman (Fred Ward, Huey Lewis, and Buck Henry) who find something inappropriate but continue to fish anyway. There is another couple (Julianne Moore and Mathew Modine) who are haunted by a past infidelity only to drown it in an inexplicable all night party with people they barely know. And, perhaps my favorite, there’s a couple (Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin) who know they’re no damn good for one another or probably period, but decide to go down with one another anyway. Somewhere in there I also forgot the tale of a jazz singer (Annie Ross) and her daughter (Lori Singer) a seemingly casual story of familial miscommunication that ends in heartbreak. Not to mention the TV man’s father, embodied with perfect self-delusional sleaze by Jack Lemmon, who actually has my favorite moment in the film: a defeated, cowardly, painfully long exit that brings to mind Joseph Cotton’s bitter final walk in Citizen Kane.

Notice I didn’t bother to look up the various names that the script assigns the various actors. Not really necessary. These characters are archetypes; a certain malaise nurturing lifestyle is the real character of Altman’s film. And I’m stalling, writing myself in circles, erasing one largely useless passage of summary or redundant critique after another.

Truthfully, I don’t know why Short Cuts is so good, so lastingly amazing, but it is. I watched the film from start to finish a few days ago, and then ate dinner and started the damn thing again, and that is something I rarely do these days in my effort to see every notable current and classic film that I’ve yet to see. The film is a warm embrace that only a cynic could stage with such convincing, humane conviction. Altman’s distrust of platitudes ultimately renders him their greatest salesman. I usually don’t believe the disparate characters linked through a natural upheaval device, but the earthquake that finally unites the oddballs of Short Cuts is wrenching, and perfectly of a piece tonally with the Carver source material. I particularly love Waits’ and Tomlin’s reactions: drinking, they embrace “the big one” that will send them out of this world together, the earthquake stops, and they just as instantly resume the private party that’s just lost its possible major significance to just another day.

★★★★

Posted on March 21st, 2008 in Reviews, Drama, 1993 |

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