The World According to Altman

A tsunami just hit the film world. America's greatest living director has left us. No, not Martin Scorsese. Robert Altman. Who would have thought that his claim to that title would be in dispute. But it was. In just one example, when The Guardian's list of the top 40 living directors in the world came out in 2005, Altman wasn't even named. When I think about why Altman has such an ambiguous place in the directors' pantheon, I have to conclude that the film school generation has muscled out the yeoman filmmakers like Altman, John Frankenheimer, and Hal Ashby, who learned on the job making television shows, industrial films, and documentaries, and found their own forms of expression that "high concept" can't begin to express.

Altman himself lampooned high concept - the movie factory's new formula for success - in The Player. Seeing his fatuous characters pitch "The Graduate, Part II" or "Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman . . . it's like The Gods Must Be Crazy except the Coke bottle is an actress" highlights exactly what the Hollywood establishment and much of the public finds troublesome about Altman - his eccentricities as a filmmaker.

Of course, Altman's distinctive style has been commented upon and picked over ad nauseum - his overlapping dialogue, his long tracking shots that join one strand of plot with another seemingly at random, his explorations of the psyche that move from the ridiculous to the sublime to the incomprehensible. These style elements are no small part of Altman's magic. Although I had heard his overlapping dialogue in several films before I finally saw his masterwork, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, I felt a thrill of discovery at its first appearance in the Western saloon Warren Beatty's character enters in the town he thinks he's going to own. The conversations at the tables seemed private, snatched up in a passing moment, swallowed just as fast, a dizzying swirl of life as it happens when it is unobserved. Unfortunately, the element of surprise fails Altman as often as it succeeds, and in his more self-conscious films, like HealtH and Prêt-à-Porter, the dialogue seems more like a trick. In his otherwise masterful film (and my personal favorite) Gosford Park, the overlapping British accents of every stripe nearly sink comprehensibility for the American viewer.

His camerawork, on the other hand, always seems dead-on to me. Panning through the convention floor in Nashville, he creates an adrenline high of concentrated political ecstacy that seems documentary in nature - a tip of the hat to his early documentary work (The James Dean Story). His movements through an indoor shopping mall in Dr T and the Women give half-obscured glimpses of Farrah Fawcett's striptease in a fountain to create a consumer-oriented parody of Anita Ekberg's dance in the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita. His straightforward rodeo ring shots in Buffalo Bill and the Indians circumscribe the new Old West, a reservation of sorts for a faded Western hero that his sideshow curiosity, Sitting Bull, mocks.

I find criticism of his supposed casting against type unfathomable. It is hard to imagine a more perfect Popeye and Olive Oyl for Popeye than Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall; a more swoonworthy gynecologist and his mentally unstable wife for Dr T and the Women than Richard Gere and Farrah Fawcett; or a more ill-fated, romantic couple in McCabe & Mrs. Miller than Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The entire cast of his most successful film, MASH, seems inevitable, from the plastic Major Houlihan of Sally Kellerman to the Neanderthal sex tool "Painless" Waldowski of John Schuck.

Altman also made superlative use of music. Although Popeye was roundly panned - Altman lacks the whimsy of, say, Terry Gilliam to pull off a cartoon fantasy - the soundtrack by Harry Nilsson was a winner and the song "He Needs Me" as performed by Shelley Duvall won new fans when it was used in P. T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. Keith Carradine performing his own song "I'm Easy" in Nashville is, along with Audrey Hepburn's "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's, one of the greatest solo performances on film. And of course, jazz is the foundation of Altman's Kansas City, and his exploration of his hometown shows just where he got his musical know-how.

To be sure, Altman's forays into experimental filmmaking leave audiences divided. Many people think his horrorlike Three Women is a terrific film. To me it seems like an undigested dream that tried to be Ingmar Bergman's Persona and failed miserably. But the spirit of adventure - the daring to reach into innerspace to wherever his fancy took him - is exactly what made him a great director. He didn't care about the form, whether he adapted a play (Secret Honor, Streamers), filmed a ballet (The Company), or tried to retread Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye). He simply wanted to show what interested him. All of his films have a jazzy rhythm. They frequently have a desperate edge of the winner or almost-winner hurling toward a fall. They often mock the tepid aspirations of society's drones.

Robert Altman always made the films he wanted to make and never compromised. He succeeded and failed spectacularly, on his own terms. He made films right up to the end because he loved them. He made films for us to love, too. And I do.