Review of Short Cuts (1993) by Josh C — 09 May 2007

In one of the film's opening scenes, Matthew Modine, in one of his better performances, and his wife, Julianne Moore, who is particularly bold in her role and proves beyond a doubt that she is a natural redhead, meet another couple played by Fred Ward and Anne Archer at a concert and make a spontaneous dinner date, but we see the faults in both marriages climax over the weekend. While Modine and Moore avoid an unmentionable issue that is chipping away at their marriage, Ward goes on a fishing trip with his buddies, an enjoyably experimental crumb of casting hilarious comedy writer Buck Henry and 1980s rock icon Huey Lewis together, and they discover a dead body in the water.

In the meantime, a waitress, played by Lily Tomlin with her usual dry/assertive feminine toughness, accidentally hits young boy with her car. When the kid runs away from the accident, she imagines he is all right, but never learns the true consequences, or the harassment his parents, Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell, must face from the overextended vindictiveness of the local baker, Lyle Lovett turning in one of the least striking performances of the film, who is fuming because the kid's ordered birthday cake was never collected. Davison's father, Jack Lemmon delivering on a painfully pathetic note, drops by the hospital after a twenty-year desertion and recounts the story of his unfaithfulness to Davison's mother. MacDowell's daughter, Lili Taylor, is married to Robert Downey, Jr., who unfortunately doesn't get the screen time demanded by his infinitely entertaining and charming presence. His character is a man aroused by sadism. Their party buddies, the inescapably sexy Jennifer Jason Leigh and very good Chris Penn, tip-toe around repressed tension in their marriage, as Leigh earns her living as a phone-sex operator, leaving Penn with a wife whose approach to sex is left indifferent.

Tim Robbins, in a fantastically entertaining performance, is a completely unlikable cop who cheats on his wife, untouchably beautiful Madeleine Stowe, oblivious to the fact that she's known his secret for a long time and laughs indifferently about it behind his back. Robbins's mistress is realtor Frances McDormand, and Stowe's confidante is her sister, Julianne Moore.

Anyway, these strands are woven together with musical passages by a sad cellist and her sourly cynical jazz-singing mother, Davison and MacDowell's neighbors. Everything culminates in a fashion very much to the same effect as the ending of Magnolia, which its writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson camouflages in surreal Biblical reference.

Did Magnolia mirror everything in this film from the unknowingly interlocking ensemble format to the mysterious event preparing itself for a violent, cathartic effect on said ensemble, bringing it together? Yes. Very clearly. Especially since Anderson was the late Altman's fallback director on A Prairie Home Companion, showing an obvious affiliation and admiration between them. However, is Magnolia more emotionally piercing, powerful, and consequential than Short Cuts? Yes, it is. Short Cuts is directed with a steady vision and imagination in combining several different Raymond Carver short stories into a single picture that expresses something entirely its own, and was definitely fun to write and direct, but its immediate giving to the audience is a tad dehydrated.

It's not fair, however, to view a movie particularly in the subjective comparison to its unauthorized doppelganger. Independently, Short Cuts is in essence a portrait of how small communities are, no matter how large they are. It is indifferent about the coincidences in the capsule of the lives of the endless stream of characters, which though it's in no way brief to us is coverage of a brief amount of time.