Slow and long and never goes flat. That’s an amazing combination, and one I’m not sure I was expecting when I popped it into the player. Really not sure what I was expecting, I rarely do. I’ve read Raymond Carver stories in the past, was even in a course partially devoted to his work, and read a story in the book “Adaptations” specifically related to this film. However, I can’t remember much of what these stories entailed, plot-wise, only the feeling they left behind when I finished reading them. It was, I believe, a feeling of fascinating blandness, like the ability to stare for a long time at a neighbor and not be chided for rudeness.
Maybe that’s the best word to describe this film: very, very rude. It’s so invasive and so unnecessary. We peek in for a short time on the lives of these only mildly connected people in the LA area and by the end have received no insight, are rewarded with nothing for our time spent in the seat. The real attraction is in the natural voyeurism that it indulges in, the possibility to spy on strangers for three hours and then continue our lives as they were before, gaining nothing but the childish satisfaction of burning, generic curiosity.
I’ve had a shakey relationship with Robert Altman in the past. Gosford Park, I believe, is the first film I saw by him and I loved it with every inch of my English-manor obsessed soul. Later I gave it a second look, calmed by a few years of giving my affection to other subjects, and it still held up. So I moved onto another Altman film, M*A*S*H*, which I picked because of how much I enjoyed the television show. That film still has a slot in my all-time top five and still thrills me in a deep way. However, accompanying these two shinning items, are two glaring disasters. Thinking about the movie Nashville still makes me quake. I’m ashamed to say that I wasn’t even able to finish that one, it was so aggressively dull and aimless. Then there was his final picture, A Prairie Home Companion, which I can barely mentally reconstruct through the stale, soppy cheese that infiltrated every ounce of it. If I think hard about it, I can remember a few details from Popeye and Dr. T and the Women, though neither with any fondness.
Sloppy history aside, Short Cuts absolutely floored me. Though this would probably be disastrous, when the film finished I felt sure that I could go on to watch days more footage of these peoples’ lives, maybe even adding in a few more neighbors, or friends, or television viewers. The thing that aided success the most was its strong grasp of balance. Everyone could be linked somehow, but it never felt overdone or stretched or contrived. There was enough time spent with each group to get intimate with a storyline, but not so much that one set outweighs another for importance. They didn’t spend time on exposition, yet we always knew what was going on with the characters and had a decent sense of who they were. The thing that thrilled me most though, was that the stories moved one to another almost seamlessly and with full clarity. The film could have come off so lamely, flailing from one thing to the next or having all the events happening to a much smaller set. Instead, everything is carefully crafted, calmly constructed with deliberate, soothing breaths, not the manic frustrations of an LA resident. This may not be a movie that I want to watch again and again, like M*A*S*H*, but it is one I want to pressure all of my friends to see. It gives me a new type of respect for Altman. Not because he always does well, but because he works enthusiastically enough to make films that either inspire great admiration or fuel the necessity to set aflame every print in the county.
Viewed via Netflix.
