Robert Altman has never been
accused of artistic cowardice. The director (and often the writer) of such
films as MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and Gosford Park, liked nothing more
than gathering stars of all persuasions into stories that require ensemble
acting. Perhaps his most remarkable achievement along these lines was taking
the body of cryptic short stories by American master Raymond Carver and organizing
nine of them (along with a narrative poem) into a complex, multi-faceted
narrative. The film, called Short Cuts, made its debut in 1993, five
years after Carver’s death.
I didn’t know much about
Raymond Carver until I tackled the major biography published in 2009 by a
colleague I met through BIO, the Biographers International Organization. The very
talented Carol Sklenicka (whose upcoming biography of writer Alice Adams comes out December 5) spent more than a decade talking to everyone in
Carver’s orbit. In her Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, I learned a
great deal about a guy from a blue-collar family in the Pacific Northwest who
put his writing ahead of just about everything else. His characters are
hard-scrabble folk, some of whom (like Carver himself) are all too fond of
booze. They can be crass and crude, especially to those who love them, but
they’re also subject to moments of surprising tenderness. The stories are
realistic in the telling: there’s little in the way of heroics, and no literary
fluff involved. Fans of the Oscar-winning Birdman may remember that
Michael Keaton’s character, eager to shrug off his superhero persona, is
desperate to stage a kitchen-sink Broadway production of Carver’s “What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love.”
In the course of a
thirty-year writing career, Carver made several stabs at screenwriting.. Over time,
some of his own stories were turned into short films by others, but Robert
Altman was far more ambitious in his approach. Moving the Carver stories to
gritty Southern California neighborhoods, he carefully interwove them, so that
the driver of the car that hits the little boy in “A Small Good Thing” is the
waitress with the jealous spouse in “They’re Not Your Husband.” And the men who
ogle that waitress in that story’s diner are headed for the fishing trip that’s
central to “So Much Water So Close to Home.”
Leave it to Altman to come up
with an amazingly potent cast, one that includes Lily Tomlin as that waitress
and Tom Waits as her hubby, Others in on the action include Julianne Moore,
Buck Henry, Matthew Modine, and Frances McDormand,. To put a SoCal spin on the
stories, Peter Gallagher plays a medfly-spraying helicopter pilot named Stormy
Weathers, while Robert Downey Jr. is a make-up artist with a kinky streak. The
meshing of so many stories mostly works, but I have my gripes. One story wholly
invented by Altman, involving a classical cellist with severe mental issues,
seems too baroque and show-offy for Carver’s world. And though the meshing of
plot lines leads to some hilarious moments, it also works against the richest
of the Carver stories. The climax of “So Much Water,” involving a woman’s
ambiguous grief over the death of someone she doesn’t know, doesn’t seem nearly
as strong on film as it does on the page. And though the gut-wrenching loss
within “A Small Good Thing” (in which Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison keep a
bedside vigil for their young son) may be enhanced by the sudden appearance of
Jack Lemmon as Davison’s oblivious father, the story’s heart-tugging coda lacks
force. Still, if Short Cuts leads viewers to Carver, who can complain?
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