Robert Altman
Well, I couldn’t let the day go by without mentioning the passing of Robert Altman.
He had a gigantic filmography with all kinds of stuff in it. 87 directing credits, including anonymous TV piecework, a decade’s worth of adaptations of American plays, some bizarre (and failed) experiments, some charming frippery, a few expensive studio misfires and probably twenty or so visionary masterpieces of American cinema.
If you’ve never see MASH, or only know the material from the insipid TV series, do yourself a favor and see the original. It will blow you away. It’s profane, hilarious, bloody, shocking, electrifying and defiantly frank in its depiction of the human condition.
Altman could be distressingly erratic but his successes were so definitive and inspiring that they always made up for his failures. You could sit through a dud as hapless as Beyond Therapy knowing that, sooner or later, he would come back with a superior entertainment like The Player or the flat-out masterpiece Gosford Park. Eclectic, prodigious and up for anything, his unpredictability made him relentlessly uncommercial but also gave him the most daringly alive career of any American director.
I am dismayed to find that I have only seen 17 of his movies: Countdown, MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, California Split, Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Popeye, Streamers, Fool for Love, Beyond Therapy, Aria, The Player, Short Cuts, The Gingerbread Man, Cookie’s Fortune, Gosford Park and The Company. As I peer over this list, I find six staggering masterpieces, one expensive, fascinating failed experiment, five worthwhile but lesser works, one atrocity and two mainstream studio pictures that could have been directed by anyone (both of which were, by the way, commercial failures). That would have been an entire career for most people but for Altman it’s barely a fifth of his output.
I also note that Altman’s breakthrough work, MASH, was released when he was 45 years old. 45 and he was just beginning! So there’s hope for me yet.
Truly Madly Deeply
Juliet Stevenson, sort of a British Laura Linney, is a woman whose cellist husband has died suddenly. Alan Rickman is the dead husband. It’s strange enough to see him playing a romantic lead; that he does so in a Village-People-style moustache is the mark of a truly daring actor.
Juliet misses Alan quite a bit, and so he obliges her by coming back and moving in with her. And things are nice, briefly, before he starts reminding her that he’s actually kind of a dick. He brings loads of dead guys around to watch videos all night, rearranges the furniture and continually picks at her manners and decorating choices.
Not a zombie movie per se, closer to a ghost story or a psychological drama, it’s about how we idealize the dead, how we remember them not as they were but as we like to think of them.
Another way to look at the story is that it’s as if Juliet and Alan are living their relationship in reverse. They start out intensely in love with each other but as time goes on they increasingly get on each others’ nerves as their personalities begin to clash. Juliet gets entangled in the lives of others and Alan starts to be more comfortable hanging out with the guys.
Mostly this is all well-observed and well-played. There are a few examples of twee British rom-com cuteness.
I have been told that it is one of the all-time great tear-jerkers. My tears remained unjerked, but then I was watching it primarily for its view on the walking dead. Your results may vary.
Director Anthony Minghella, Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson (with Kristen Scott-Thomas) would later examine a somewhat darker aspect of the love-after-death theme with their stunning, electrifying movie adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Play, which is available as part of the invaluable Beckett on Film set.