Robert Altman (1977)

Reviewing Robert Altman’s Images in late 1972, Pauline Kael described Altman as ‘almost frighteningly non-repetitive … [he] goes out in a new direction each time’.  Some four years later, he was non-repetitive even within the same film:  3 Women is part poignant social comedy, part cryptic psychodrama.  The result is frustrating but never less than absorbing.

3 Women is set in the present day, in the town of Desert Springs, California (a nearly real place:  the film was shot on location in Desert Hot Springs, CA).  Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) works at the local ‘rehabilitation and geriatric center’, helping clients use the hydrotherapy pool, and so on.  Her hard-to-please supervisor rates Millie ‘one of our best girls’ and tells her to induct a new employee, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), recently arrived in California from her native Texas.  Naïve, socially awkward Pinky instantly takes a shine to her mentor, whom she considers a model of style and sophistication.  Well-groomed Millie certainly takes care with her hair and her clothes but she’s grateful for this admiring attention.  She can often be heard rattling on about her life outside work – the men she’s dating, the latest recipes she has devised – but Pinky is the only person listening.  When Millie’s flatmate moves out, Pinky takes her place.

The routines, hierarchies and atmosphere of the girls’ workplace are described with a light yet incisive touch.  The martinet supervisor (Sierra Pecheur) and the fatuous doctor in charge (Craig Richard Nelson) are played a bit obviously but co-workers of Millie and Pinky like Doris (Maysie Hoy) and Alcira (Belita Moreno), exuding fixed opinions and boredom at the same time, are convincing.  The images of elderly people being eased into the pool or snoozing in a bath are sad but lulling:  these men and women seem to be in a safe, if stupefied, place.  There are nice, funny details:  Pinky, at a loose end on her first day at work, pootling around in a vacant wheelchair; the edge of Millie’s skirt protruding below the bottom of her car door as she drives away.  And the two principals’ conversations are very enjoyable.  Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, contrastingly extraordinary camera subjects, are beautifully natural performers.  Much of the dialogue between them was improvised, particularly by Duvall, who has the lion’s share of it.

Signs of 3 Women’s portentous-pretentious side are there from an early stage, though.  Millie, like Pinky, hails from Texas; they share the birth name Mildred, which Pinky conceals because she hates it; their co-workers also include a pair of identical twins (Leslie Ann and Patricia Ann Hudson).  Alone in the apartment, Pinky unlocks her secret diary and reads avidly.  Gerald Busby’s somewhat dissonant flute and strings score is magnetic but, since it’s incongruous with what’s on the screen, a continuing reminder that there’s more to Altman’s story than meets the eye.  Then there’s the third title character, Willie Hart (Janice Rule), who runs a bar with her husband, Edgar (Robert Fortier).  Willie is a much more conspicuous figure when she’s not serving behind the bar.  She’s an artist, producing large-scale murals and outdoor floor paintings that depict stylised naked figures, with phalluses and breasts strongly emphasised.  What’s more, Willie is visibly pregnant.

For most of the film it’s Edgar rather than his wife who interacts with the two younger women.  His character, too, might seem freighted with cultural significance.  Edgar claims to have been the lead actor’s stunt double on the 1950s TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp; the Harts’ bar is part of a venue called Dodge City, which includes a largely disused shooting range.  But Robert Fortier does a fine job of humanising Edgar, even when he turns out to be a boozy lech (he appears to be the only man that Millie actually sleeps with).  The central relationship in 3 Women meanwhile builds to show the growing desperation of Millie’s social pretence.  To the other young tenants of ‘Purple Sage Apartments’, she’s ridiculous:  they don’t bother to conceal their sniggering contempt for her.  Millie, who knows she’s a figure of fun but tries to ignore it, becomes more and more resentful of klutzy, clinging Pinky.  It’s the last straw when Millie makes elaborate preparations for a visit from her previous flatmate, Deidre (Beverly Ross), and the two guys she says she’ll bring with her, and it doesn’t happen.  The threesome, who arrive while Millie’s out, just as quickly drive off, once Deidre has told Pinky to let Millie know they’ve decided to go to Dodge City instead.  Pinky duly conveys the message.  A furious Millie blames her and says it’s time she moved out.  Distraught at Millie’s rejection of her, Pinky jumps from the apartment balcony into the communal swimming pool, way below.

It’s a pivotal moment when 3 Women abandons the benign shallows of the hydrotherapy pool for the psychic deep end.  Whereas Pinky’s suicide attempt fails and she eventually wakes from a coma, the film never recovers.  Pinky returns to the land of the living suffering from what hospital staff term ‘temporary amnesia’ but the symptoms were predicted earlier in the film.  Her strikingly elderly parents (Ruth Nelson and John Cromwell), whom Millie contacts while Pinky lies unconscious in hospital, arrive from Texas; when their daughter comes to, she doesn’t recognise them.  She returns to live with Millie but no longer the meek appendage she was before.  Pinky is now the boss and does the things that Millie, not she, used to do – drinking and smoking, sleeping with Edgar, shooting at Dodge City.  And she hates being called Pinky; she yells at Millie that her name’s Mildred.  Millie, for her part, becomes submissive.

The film isn’t short of echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), in which personal identity is permeable and human relationships are power struggles.  Liv Ullmann’s character in Persona has renounced the power of speech; in 3 Women Janice Rule’s Willie is a non-speaking role until the closing stages.  But Altman’s realistic treatment of Millie’s and Pinky’s lives isn’t a good fit with the enigmatic, allusive imagery on which Persona depends and which 3 Women imitates, though intermittently and superficially.  Pinky’s personality is undoubtedly unstable after the suicide attempt but you get the sense that this is dictated less by an underlying premise than by what Altman needs to happen in the story.  When Pinky has a bad dream she reverts to childish dependency, asking if she can sleep the rest of the night in Millie’s bed (Millie agrees).  During the night, drunken Edgar arrives to announce that Willie’s about to give birth.  He has no intention of being with her for the occasion so the two girls drive to the Harts’ house, where Willie has gone into labour.  Millie tells Pinky to get a doctor; Pinky, now back in insubordinate mode, stands outside the house, staring implacably at Willie’s agony.  No medical help is called and the baby is stillborn.

3 Women’s finale sees Millie, Pinky and Willie living, or at least working, together at Dodge City, where Millie runs the bar, wearing the hat and clothes that Willie used to wear, and Pinky, more little-girlish than ever, refers to Millie as her mother.  A delivery boy (Dennis Christopher, who registers in this tiny early role), unloading soda supplies from his truck, tells Millie he’s sorry to hear about Edgar’s death from ‘a gun accident’.  Millie doesn’t sound at all sorry about it.  In an interview at BFI in 2001, Robert Altman explained to Geoff Andrew that ‘3 Women literally came from a dream’.  Even though Altman dreamt that ‘I was making this film’ rather than the events of the narrative, you can’t help wondering if a dream is a good starting point for a screenplay.  Sylvia Plath was right that dreams seem ‘when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much’; but dreams recounted to someone else are a byword for boring them to tears – never mind if the dreamer happens to be a creative artist.

I like 3 Women, even so.  Its great merits include, as well as Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, Chuck Rosher’s lighting, which is expressive in various locations – the parched expanse of Dodge City, the hushed rehabilitation centre, Millie’s home.  Her favourite colours, she tells Pinky, are yellow and purple (‘I love irises’).  According to its name, purple’s in evidence on the outside of the block she lives in.  Inside her apartment, yellow and gold dominate the décor.  They’re prominent, too, in Millie’s extensive wardrobe, while Pinky dresses for her name – dusty rather than shocking pink, of course.  I’d seen 3 Women once before, in the summer of 1977, on its original UK release.  It has aged better than two of the three Altman films I returned to at his BFI retrospective in 2021 – better, that is, than M*A*S*H (1970) and Short Cuts (1993), not as well as the masterly Nashville (1975).

8 August 2024