"We haven't come close to the medium's full potential yet. Everything is still so linear." – Robert Altman
Altman's technique is so alien, that most viewers automatically dismiss his films as being shoddily put together, which is a shame, because he really is one of the most consistently interesting directors out there.
Typically, Altman begins by constructing an environment (military hospital, theatre, rodeo, diner etc), introducing a large cast, inserting some self referential "performance within a performance" (play, wedding, radio show, etc) and then adopting a style in which the whole cinematic world flows independently of what we see. In other words, his plots seem to unfold even when we don't watch, his camera floating from one nodule to the next, stumbling upon bits and pieces of a "story". But the story is itself non-defined, and it's up to us to synthesise the pieces and make it all coherent.
The environment in this case is Dallas, Texas, a world which Altman viciously reduces to a set of stereotypes (Altman is always at his most mean-spirited in his supposedly lighter, more comedic movies). This is a cartoon world of gas guzzling, upper class Texans, giant SUVs, vapid students, expensive clothing, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, JFK conspiracy theorists and so forth. Even the film's lead character is cast solely as to allow Altman to exploit Richard Gere's iconography (Gere has made a career out of playing suave womanizers).
The film begins with a horde of women bickering in a gynaecologist's reception room. Their voices overlap and overlap until we're left with nothing but annoying static. It's up to Dr. T, a smooth, suave and sexy gynaecologist (played by Richard Gere, of course), to untangle all this noise and please his woman, satisfying their needs and fulfilling their various emotional problems.
The very next scene works as a counterpoint. Dr T's mentally unstable wife walks through a shopping mall, takes off all her clothes and dances in a fountain. No surprise that she's under a shop sign which links her to a deity. She's not only a goddess, an innocent nymph who exists only to be naked, worshipped, twirl and look pretty, but another up-market commodity. As one psychologist says in the film, she's been "loved and pampered too much", Dr T putting his wife on such a high a pedestal that she eventually regresses to a childlike state, unable to do anything for herself.
What follows are a number of symbolic little scenes. The men in the film are dumb carnalists who hunt and shoot flying golf balls, whilst the women are all ditsy airheads, drunks, lesbians or vacuous shopaholics. The women of Dallas are also fighting for a Dallas freeway to be named after a woman, an act which Dr T himself supports; anything to keep the ladies happy.
Existing outside all these characters is a woman played by Helen Hunt. She's a retired golf pro, far more calm and collected than all the idiotic characters swirling around her. As a professional golfer, she's literally "in command" of all the balls in the film. She and Gere forge a romance, but she abruptly calls it off when he offers to provide and take care of all her needs. "Why would I want that?" she says with a shrug. Helen Hunt - the only female huntsman in the film - knows that men hide their dependency needs and narcissistic vulnerability behind a fairly primitive phallic chauvinism. She's also aware that men symbolically control their women through phallic mastery, supremacy and dependence.
The film then becomes a sort of feminist tract, Hunt's character raising the issue of female empowerment and opining that women should "follow their hearts", "reject society's expectations", "be independent", "be strong" and "be as sexually promiscuous as men". Another character in the film, played by Kate Hudson, exhibits this same character arc: she turns her back on marriage and various authority figures (breaks the rules, answers phone in class etc) and embraces a lesbian love affair.
But while the film advocates a form of women's liberation and suggests that women strongly dependent on men accomplish nothing (naming a freeway after a woman isn't a point for feminism, it's just a way to further placate loudmouths), such things are hardly new. It's been over half a century since the largest feminist movements, and if Altman genuinely wished to say something about womanhood, he'd have done so decades ago.
No, what the film's really doing is presenting Dallas as the last bastion against the feminist revolution, and Gere, who thinks he's some smooth lover of women, as an unwitting ally of the anti-feminists. Worship at the alter of the uterus, in other words, and you reduce woman to the various stereotypes in the film. You remove their complexity, their desires. The alcoholism and vacuity of the women in the film is the direct result of men fawning over them.
But the film goes further than this; so much so that you might even call it anti-feminist. Remove the chivalrous romantics like Gere, Altman says, and you're left with a world of Helen Hunts, family units destroyed, everyone sexually liberated, self-centric and cold. After realising this, Gere drives off into the rain, is sucked into a magical tornado (yes this really happens) and delivers a young Mexican woman's baby. In graphic detail, we see a child emerging from a bloody womb, a scene which immediately and violently clashes with everything we've seen before. Romance is gone, in other words, and replaced with cold biology.
And yet Gere finds some nobility in his newfound role. Holding a blood smeared baby in his hands he allows himself a smile. He still worships at the altar, but that altar is no longer pretty.
8/10 – Excellent. Incidentally, Doctor T's name, Sullivan Travis, alludes to Preston Sturges "Sullivan's Travels", both films about a character learning their true value and contribution to society.
Altman's technique is so alien, that most viewers automatically dismiss his films as being shoddily put together, which is a shame, because he really is one of the most consistently interesting directors out there.
Typically, Altman begins by constructing an environment (military hospital, theatre, rodeo, diner etc), introducing a large cast, inserting some self referential "performance within a performance" (play, wedding, radio show, etc) and then adopting a style in which the whole cinematic world flows independently of what we see. In other words, his plots seem to unfold even when we don't watch, his camera floating from one nodule to the next, stumbling upon bits and pieces of a "story". But the story is itself non-defined, and it's up to us to synthesise the pieces and make it all coherent.
The environment in this case is Dallas, Texas, a world which Altman viciously reduces to a set of stereotypes (Altman is always at his most mean-spirited in his supposedly lighter, more comedic movies). This is a cartoon world of gas guzzling, upper class Texans, giant SUVs, vapid students, expensive clothing, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, JFK conspiracy theorists and so forth. Even the film's lead character is cast solely as to allow Altman to exploit Richard Gere's iconography (Gere has made a career out of playing suave womanizers).
The film begins with a horde of women bickering in a gynaecologist's reception room. Their voices overlap and overlap until we're left with nothing but annoying static. It's up to Dr. T, a smooth, suave and sexy gynaecologist (played by Richard Gere, of course), to untangle all this noise and please his woman, satisfying their needs and fulfilling their various emotional problems.
The very next scene works as a counterpoint. Dr T's mentally unstable wife walks through a shopping mall, takes off all her clothes and dances in a fountain. No surprise that she's under a shop sign which links her to a deity. She's not only a goddess, an innocent nymph who exists only to be naked, worshipped, twirl and look pretty, but another up-market commodity. As one psychologist says in the film, she's been "loved and pampered too much", Dr T putting his wife on such a high a pedestal that she eventually regresses to a childlike state, unable to do anything for herself.
What follows are a number of symbolic little scenes. The men in the film are dumb carnalists who hunt and shoot flying golf balls, whilst the women are all ditsy airheads, drunks, lesbians or vacuous shopaholics. The women of Dallas are also fighting for a Dallas freeway to be named after a woman, an act which Dr T himself supports; anything to keep the ladies happy.
Existing outside all these characters is a woman played by Helen Hunt. She's a retired golf pro, far more calm and collected than all the idiotic characters swirling around her. As a professional golfer, she's literally "in command" of all the balls in the film. She and Gere forge a romance, but she abruptly calls it off when he offers to provide and take care of all her needs. "Why would I want that?" she says with a shrug. Helen Hunt - the only female huntsman in the film - knows that men hide their dependency needs and narcissistic vulnerability behind a fairly primitive phallic chauvinism. She's also aware that men symbolically control their women through phallic mastery, supremacy and dependence.
The film then becomes a sort of feminist tract, Hunt's character raising the issue of female empowerment and opining that women should "follow their hearts", "reject society's expectations", "be independent", "be strong" and "be as sexually promiscuous as men". Another character in the film, played by Kate Hudson, exhibits this same character arc: she turns her back on marriage and various authority figures (breaks the rules, answers phone in class etc) and embraces a lesbian love affair.
But while the film advocates a form of women's liberation and suggests that women strongly dependent on men accomplish nothing (naming a freeway after a woman isn't a point for feminism, it's just a way to further placate loudmouths), such things are hardly new. It's been over half a century since the largest feminist movements, and if Altman genuinely wished to say something about womanhood, he'd have done so decades ago.
No, what the film's really doing is presenting Dallas as the last bastion against the feminist revolution, and Gere, who thinks he's some smooth lover of women, as an unwitting ally of the anti-feminists. Worship at the alter of the uterus, in other words, and you reduce woman to the various stereotypes in the film. You remove their complexity, their desires. The alcoholism and vacuity of the women in the film is the direct result of men fawning over them.
But the film goes further than this; so much so that you might even call it anti-feminist. Remove the chivalrous romantics like Gere, Altman says, and you're left with a world of Helen Hunts, family units destroyed, everyone sexually liberated, self-centric and cold. After realising this, Gere drives off into the rain, is sucked into a magical tornado (yes this really happens) and delivers a young Mexican woman's baby. In graphic detail, we see a child emerging from a bloody womb, a scene which immediately and violently clashes with everything we've seen before. Romance is gone, in other words, and replaced with cold biology.
And yet Gere finds some nobility in his newfound role. Holding a blood smeared baby in his hands he allows himself a smile. He still worships at the altar, but that altar is no longer pretty.
8/10 – Excellent. Incidentally, Doctor T's name, Sullivan Travis, alludes to Preston Sturges "Sullivan's Travels", both films about a character learning their true value and contribution to society.