Review of Short Cuts (1993) by Kenneth L — 06 Jan 2012

I finally found another Robert Altman movie I didn't think was over-rated. I love M*A*S*H* and Nashville, but wasn't quite as big on The Long Goodbye, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, or Vincent & Theo. I tend to doubt the claim that he was the world's greatest filmmaker, but this one was definitely pretty fantastic. It's an enjoyable but intense three-hour film about various lives in Los Angeles.

This is one of those movies, like Altman's earlier Nashville or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, that has an enormous cast of characters, mostly strangers to each other, whose lives sometimes intersect in ways they aren't aware of. This particular group is enormous - perhaps 25 or so main characters. It would take forever to describe all of them, so I'll just say that some of the characters have very dramatic things indeed happen to them, while others are just seeing another week in their lives. Their stories are collectively very interesting, and half the fun of the movie is trying to work out the chains of connection which interlace them all.

Not all of the many actors fare that well in the movie. Andie MacDowell's performance is actually kind of bad, largely because she sometimes has a stupid Texas accent and sometimes doesn't. Chris Penn's performance is kind of stiff and awkward, as is Lyle Lovett's. Most of the actors do really well, though. Tim Robbins is surprisingly convincing as an outrageously dickheaded cop, and Madeline Stowe is very appealing as his long-suffering wife. Julianne Moore has some of the best scenes of her great career here, including one in which she delivers a monologue while quite plainly visibly naked from the waist down. Jack Lemmon gets a couple of fantastic scenes as an absentee grandfather. Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits are hilarious together as an alcoholic old trailer-trash couple. Jennifer Jason Leigh is excellent as a phone-sex operator who does her job while changing diapers. Robert Downey Jr. displays a lot of that wicked charisma that's made him so successful. Most of the rest of the large cast does quite well in their roles.

The script was adapted from a bunch of Raymond Carver stories by Altman and Frank Barhydt. It's extremely skillful both in the way it connects seemingly all of the characters without drawing attention to the fact that that is what it's doing, and in the way it juggles the storylines to keep them all feeling simultaneous. The movie is so long that you get to feel like you've known many of these characters forever, and you're always surprised when some new bit of information about them is revealed late in the film. Scenes parallel each other in ways the characters will never know about. Altman's camera objectively takes it all in, letting us see all of the details and getting to know each character without taking sides in their conflicts. There is some of that trademark overlapping Altman dialogue, but not too much, and it didn't get on my nerves the way it had in the past. The musical score is one of those unfortunate '90s musical scores that hasn't aged well. Still, this is overall a great movie, one that actually does live up to its reputation.