Film review

Robert Altman (1993)

The nine short stories and one poem by Raymond Carver from which Short Cuts derives were re-published in a special edition to coincide with the release of Robert Altman’s film in 1993.  In his introduction to the collection, Altman, who wrote the screenplay with Frank Barhydt, gives a clear explanation/justification of how much he reworked the material, in consultation with Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher.  Over the course of the film’s 188 minutes, I struggled to find changes for the better.  Unlike the writing that inspired it, Short Cuts is reductively misanthropic.

It wouldn’t be surprising, given the nature of the source material, for a filmmaker to introduce some kind of link between the components, if only in the form of a bridge between one story and the next.  Altman goes further.  Rather than telling each story in its entirety before moving on to another, he jumps about between them.  He thus abandons one of the potential major strengths of the short story (and an actual strength of the Carver pieces in question) – absorbing the reader, for the duration of the story, in its unique world.  Although I felt this as a loss, it isn’t, in itself, exceptionable; Altman’s changing the location of the action is understandable, too.  Carver’s short stories share a broad geographical setting, the Pacific Northwest.  Short Cuts takes place in what Altman’s aforementioned introduction describes as ‘untapped Los Angeles …, not Hollywood or Beverly Hills – but … American suburbia, the names you hear about on the freeway reports’.  Altman also sometimes has characters from different Carver stories appear in more than one strand of the film, be neighbours, or meet at social events or by chance.

These new connections seem designed to suggest, despite socio-economic differences, a cultural commonality across the several narrative threads – Nashville-­style – but if that’s what Altman intended, he didn’t achieve it.  The dramatic action is punctuated by music:  songs performed by a nightclub singer, Tess Trainer (Annie Ross), cello playing by Tess’s daughter, Zoe (Lori Singer).  (Both characters are invented for the movie.)  This device, which also calls to mind Nashville, serves mainly to expose the gulf in creativity between that film and Short Cuts.  What’s most exasperating about the picture, however, isn’t so much the changes Altman and Frank Barhydt made but, having made them, the effect of what they then choose to retain from the Carver stories.  Here are a few, typical illustrations.

In Carver’s ‘Jerry and Molly and Sam’, family man Al is worried about the security of his job (with a weapons manufacturer) and uneasy about the extramarital affair that he’s having.  The barking of his kids’ pet dog, Suzy, gets on Al’s nerves; he decides to get rid of the animal without anyone knowing.  In the film, Al becomes Gene (Tim Robbins), a police officer, but the other basic details are the same.  Soon after driving out to countryside and leaving Suzy running loose in a field, Al has second thoughts, partly because of his children’s distress but mainly because the landscape where he ‘loses’ Suzy is the one he grew up in, and where he remembers happily playing with his own pet dog.  Al finds Suzy, who, when she sees him, wags her tail before heading off in another direction.  In contrast to this, there’s next to no rationale for Gene’s change of heart, beyond the fact that his wife Sherri (Madeleine Stowe) and their kids, after the dog has gone, make more noise than its barking did.  Gene, in his cop’s uniform, succeeds in retrieving the animal and gives the family who’d adopted it a threatening reprimand.  Altman thereby gets an amusing shot of a dog on a police motorcycle and demonstrates that Gene is a hypocritical ratbag.

In Carver’s ‘So Much Water Close to Home’, Claire Kane is a housewife and mother; her husband Stuart is one of four men who, on a weekend fishing trip, find, soon after arriving at the lake where they’ll fish, a young woman’s corpse.  They tie the body up and don’t report its discovery to the police until the end of the weekend.  Carver explores, through Claire’s reactions to the men’s startling order of priorities, her history of nervous illness and sexual anxieties.  Her distress at what has happened culminates in Claire’s embarking on an impulsive, long, solo drive to attend the funeral of the girl in the lake (who, by now, is known to have been murdered).  In the film, Claire (Anne Archer) doesn’t have a child and works as a children’s party clown.  There’s no background to her marriage to Stuart (Fred Ward) and little tension between them.  Even without this, Claire’s horror at what happened on the fishing trip is credible enough.  But by removing the context of her personal history and any sense of Claire as particularly vulnerable, Altman turns her visit to a funeral home to see the dead girl into nothing more than a melodramatic capper to the story.

In the story ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please’, Marian and Ralph Wyman are high-school teachers.  They’re apparently satisfied with their jobs and with each other, though Ralph is occasionally nagged by the memory of a party they went to a year or two back.  They both drank plenty; he saw Marian kiss another man and wonders, since he got too drunk to remember anything else about the evening, if she went further.  The jealous doubts that Ralph harbours about his wife come suddenly to the surface, with dramatic effects on their relationship.  In the film, Marian (Julianne Moore) is an artist and Ralph (Matthew Modine) a doctor.  He’s irritated by her predilection for painting nudes, and this isn’t the only fly in the ointment.  Altman’s Wymans, constantly sniping, seem to loathe each other’s company.  Yet Altman still uses the party as Carver did.  It’s mildly astonishing when the film’s Ralph starts up about what happened there:  you just don’t believe he would have kept his worries about this to himself.  And Marian’s admission of the extent of her infidelity means little.  The couple’s marriage is already toxic.

The Carver stories are full of fraught, fractious, frustrated partnerships but usually impart some idea of what the partners have, or might have had, in common to draw and keep them together.  Viewers of the film who’ve read and remember the stories may find themselves making use of their substance to enrich Altman’s version, but this works only for a while.  His agenda is so wilfully diminishing of his characters that you soon get to feel indifferent to most of them and antipathy to the director’s approach – and this is a long film (half an hour longer than Nashville, though it feels twice the length) from which to disengage early.  Of course, there’s interest in watching the high-powered cast at work – though some of this is now historical interest (Frances McDormand and Julianne Moore at early stages of their long screen careers).  Where a Carver character is largely an invention of the screenplay, Altman tends to rely on gifted performers to build up a slender role – Robert Downey Jr, for instance, who plays Bill Bush, a make-up artist specialising in facial injuries.  Bill uses his wife Honey (Lili Taylor) as a model.  One of the neater collisions of characters from different strands occurs when Honey and Stuart Kane’s fishing pal Gordon Johnson (Buck Henry) coincide at a Fotomat, pick up each other’s pictures by mistake, and are equally shocked – he by the images of Honey’s injured face, she by snaps of the dead body in the lake.

Honey’s parents are Doreen and Earl, played by Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits respectively.  The latter’s casting has a glamorising effect, albeit in an offbeat way.  In Carver’s story ‘They’re Not Your Husband’, Earl is a blowhard slob; the Waits persona gives his abjectness a bohemian, raffish edge.  In the story, Earl is dismayed when, calling in at the fast-food place where Doreen works, he overhears two other men ridiculing ‘the ass on her’, as Doreen bends down to scoop ice cream for them.  Earl promptly orders Doreen to lose weight.  Even though she does so with impressive speed, the film’s compressed timeframe – everything appears to happen over the space of a few days (another Nashville echo) – doesn’t allow for that.  Yet the script still includes Earl’s scathing deprecation of the size of his wife’s backside, even though it makes no sense with Lily Tomlin playing Doreen.  Frances McDormand is Betty Weathers, policeman Gene’s mistress, though she’s cheating on him, as well as in the process of divorcing her husband, Stormy (Peter Gallagher).  In the most tedious of all the film’s episodes – and the competition is keen – Stormy, invading the marital home while Betty’s out of town with her other man, destroys everything in it.  This takes time, to put it mildly.

For several reasons, the adaptation of ‘A Small Good Thing’ merits more extensive comment.  Its subject matter alone – a young boy, hit by a car, falls into a coma and dies – makes this the most emotionally powerful of the Carver stories.  The boy picks himself up from the road unassisted and is conscious for some time after the accident; the hospital doctor gives repeated, though increasingly equivocal, assurances that all will be well.  Interrupting the story’s narrative, as Altman does, weakens not only its grip but the sense, so strong in the original, of the child’s parents finding themselves in a nightmare that keeps getting worse.  Even so, this element is still more involving by far than any other in Short Cuts:  you naturally hope against hope that little Casey Finnigan (Zane Cassidy) will pull through; his parents, Ann (Andie MacDowell) and Howard (Bruce Davison), are unusual in not being dislikeable.  The sequence in which the boy refuses help offered by the motorist who knocked him down – his mother has told Casey never to get into a stranger’s car – and makes his own, stunned way back home, a couple of streets away, is the film’s most memorable.

The car driver is Doreen (and the doctor treating Casey will be Ralph Wyman).  Lily Tomlin does well to express her distress at hitting Casey, both at the scene and when Doreen first gets back to her trailer home, but her remorse doesn’t last – an illustration of the shallowness of Altman’s working characters into different stories rather than of Doreen’s short memory.  Shortly before the accident, Ann has ordered a cake for her son’s birthday.  While he’s in hospital, the baker makes phone calls to the Finnigans’ home, with reminders about the order to be collected but without identifying himself.  In the story, the baker asks on the phone, ‘Have you forgotten about Scotty?’ (as Carver’s boy is called).  Carver is pushing it by making these repeated calls anonymous, but you just about accept it, such is the momentum of Ann and Howard’s disorientation.  Altman retains the anonymity while making the calls much more unpleasant – with references to ‘that little bastard Casey’, and so on.

The story concludes, on the page and on the screen, with Ann realising who the calls are from, and going with Howard to confront the baker.  In the Carver, once Ann and Howard explain their situation, the baker is mortified.  He says he works such anti-social hours that he’s forgotten the rudiments of social behaviour.  By way of apology, he bakes the couple cinnamon rolls and, as they eat, starts to talk about himself.  The food is the ‘small good thing’ (the baker’s words) that gives the story its title.  Even in their terrible circumstances, Ann and Howard find that eating and listening absorb their attention and deflect their grief – ‘they did not think of leaving’.  The corresponding scene in the film is well played by the three actors concerned but the baker (Lyle Lovett) is given scarcely any opportunity to explain himself.  What’s more, Altman has previously included a shot of him making one of the calls, his face fixed in a malign grimace as if he’s determined to be nasty.  As a result, the baker’s change of heart comes across as a mechanical volte face.  The encounter doesn’t at all suggest that Ann and Howard are deriving a temporary consolation that they don’t want to end.

This strand of the film is also remarkable for a new character that makes a strong impression but not a good one.  Some of the lines delivered by Howard’s father, Paul Finnigan (Jack Lemmon), echo those of another father and grandfather in the Carver poem ‘Lemonade’, but this elderly man is largely the creation of Altman and Frank Barhydt.  Paul, estranged from Howard for decades, turns up at the hospital where Casey is being treated, and regales his son with an account of how, when Howard was a child and also involved in a car accident, his mother went to her sister’s house and found her seducing Paul.  Bruce Davison does a beautiful job of listening to this monologue, registering Howard’s mute, baffled misery.  Jack Lemmon’s forceful, over-prepared acting is thoroughly incongruous in an Altman movie.  It’s hard to fathom what value the latter saw in adding the Paul ingredient, except that it further increases the tally of unhappy marital experiences in the film.

It’s even harder to ignore how many female members of his cast Altman undresses.  Madeleine Stowe’s Sherri poses nude for Marian to paint.  Julianne Moore wears nothing from the waist down throughout the showdown argument between Marian and her (fully clothed) husband.  The stripped body that Stuart et al discover in the lake might be thought enough naiad-ity for one film but Altman also has Zoe Trainer emerge naked from her mother’s house and  get into their swimming pool.  Zoe’s progress is shot through the glass of a window, which reinforces the composition’s peeping-tom quality.  This is not so much the male gaze as male ogling.  Altman seems to be on the same wavelength as the two men in the fast-food joint getting themselves repeated views of Doreen Piggot’s rear end.  (This kinship is made queasier by these two voyeurs being Gordon and Vern Miller (Huey Lewis), shortly before they join Stuart Kane for the fishing weekend.)

Short Cuts begins with a line of helicopters over Los Angeles, spraying against a Medfly infestation.  It ends with an earthquake in the light of which television news reports a single fatality, killed by falling rocks.   We know better:  the young woman concerned (Deborah Falconer) has been beaten to death, moments before the quake begins, by the crazed Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn).  We’ve watched Jerry’s mostly silent sexual frustration grow over the course of the film, as he listens to his wife Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh) at work as a phone sex operator.  The implication of the TV news report is that the earthquake will allow Jerry to get away with murder but why should it?  His attack on the young woman is witnessed not only by his friend Bill Bush but also by the victim’s friend (Susie Cusack); why would she, at least, conceal the truth?  In his introduction to the Carver short stories, Robert Altman says that ‘Raymond Carver’s view of the world, and probably my own, may be termed dark by some.  We’re connected by similar attitudes about the arbitrary nature of luck in the scheme of things’.  The concealment of a killing that provides Short Cuts with its final flourish is characteristic of the film as a whole.  It illustrates, rather than arbitrariness, Altman stacking the deck to give a ‘dark’ account of human behaviour.

4 July 2021