I remember my first Paul
Thomas Anderson viewing consisted of his 1999 sprawling three-hour mosaic Magnolia which was an episodic
collection of vignettes loosely weaving together the lives of some twenty-three
or so characters. The film sported
powerful performances from it’s ensemble cast and boasted brilliant technical
filmmaking despite garnering a still divisive reputation among cinephiles and
average moviegoers. The one thing
everyone seemed to be in agreement on however was the film’s now obvious
similarity to and being in the shadow of the director Anderson briefly became
an understudy of, Robert Altman and notably his 1993 film Short Cuts.
Years went by before I
myself became acquainted with Altman’s work and two weekends ago I finally
managed to see Short Cuts, a
sprawling three-hour mosaic which was an episodic collection of vignettes
loosely weaving together the lives of some twenty-four or so characters, at the
Music Box Theater’s 70mm Film Festival.
Low and behold, all the beats, themes, cuts, and even note for note
scenes were all there in Altman’s film ready for PTA to do the cherry picking. Even the finale of Magnolia felt like PTA was merely trying to one-up Altman in terms
of the spectacular deus ex machina.
Both films are masterful
exercises in technical filmmaking, storytelling and ensemble acting featuring
everything from moments of screwball comedy to hard hitting drama. Both films happen to prominently feature
Julianne Moore delivering elongated, neurotic and rambling soliloquys. Both films include a scene of a character
trying to asphyxiate themselves by turning the car on inside the garage. Both films are guided by an omniscient singer
commenting on the events ala Alan Price’s soundtrack to O Lucky Man! Both feature unforgettable monologues delivered by
aged veteran actors. Both films take
place within California with one encompassing Los Angeles as the other covers
San Fernando Valley. And both movies aim
to present life with all of it’s joys, sorrows, complexities and deeply felt
emotions in microcosm.
The question then becomes
which of these two undeniably great masterworks by two of cinema’s most
distinguished directors achieves a far greater artistic success than the
other? While one filmmaker did it first,
which one did it better? Which one did more
people see? And which one leaves a far
more indelible impression on the viewer?
While structurally similar with many kindred ideas, each film leaves the
viewer with a vastly different filmgoing experience with one leaving more heavy
lifting for the audience to do than the other.
With this in mind, the Movie Sleuth takes a good look at both of these
timeless and otherwise uncategorizable and sprawling ensemble dramas that
redefine the term ‘epic’ with an elongated and dense study of the human
condition only auteurs as gifted as Altman and Anderson could possibly tell.
Short
Cuts (1993) – directed by Robert Altman
Most cinematic adaptations
of an author’s work usually involve straight or loose adaptations of a singular
story. Few however comprise a multitude
of said author’s works together in a kind of compendium giving viewers
something of an overblown smorgasbord.
Enter grand master Robert Altman’s Short
Cuts, a three-hour dramedy based on not one but roughly nine short stories
and a poem by the late author Raymond Carver.
Adapted into a screenplay co-written by Altman and Frank Barhydt, Short Cuts captures the essence of
Carver even as it samples a bit of everything of his. While Carver’s short stories over the years
would receive standalone cinematic adaptations by various filmmakers, this is
the only time a myriad of his stories were gelled together into one giant
cinematic beast.
Concerning the lives of 22
disparate yet loosely connected characters and transposing Carver’s Pacific
Northwest backdrop to Los Angeles, Altman’s Short
Cuts opens on a prophetic montage of a fleet of helicopters dropping
pesticide over the region the characters reside in. The film features everyone from Matthew
Modine, Julianne Moore, Fred Ward, Anne Archer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Robert
Downey Jr., Madeleine Stowe, Chris Penn, Jack Lemmon, Frances McDormand, Lori
Singer, Andie MacDowell, Buck Henry, lounge singer Annie Ross and musicians
Huey Lewis, Lyle Lovett and Tom Waits.
Not to mention the endless cameo appearances along the way, some of
which provide meta commentary while others remain incidental to the
proceedings.
Compounded with Altman’s
trademark overlapping dialogue where multiple characters all talk at the same
time, rendered in 6-track surround sound, Short
Cuts is an episodic journey of sensory overload, comic invention and an
unusual balancing act largely dealing with the hardships of life such as death
and infidelity. Dabbling in everything
from a philandering cop, a depressed celloist, a phone sex operator, a pool
cleaner, fishermen who make a startling discovery, a clown, a doctor and an
estranged grandfather, Short Cuts like
the title suggests quickly cross-cuts between each of these characters’ lives
and somehow manages to balance out all of the disparate stories. Though completely separate, the occasional
crossovers these people make generate consequences greater than they or we
would initially think.
Shot in Super 35 widescreen
by Walt Lloyd and edited with a whip by Geraldine Peroni, Short Cuts is a grandiose, fascinating, frustrating, funny and even
troubling look at modern life in Los Angeles.
The film also is loosely aided by a new age, often somber score by
electronic musician Mark Isham. Maintaining
his use of the zoom lens, long takes, tracking shots and of course the
overlapping dialogue, Short Cuts presents
Altman revisiting the terrain he laid with Nashville
while focusing on a more abstract and decidedly darker band of
outsiders. While some of the cast
members’ stories are often amusing, the unforgettably heavy notes dig their
claws deep into the viewers emotional safe spaces.
Take for instance a thread
involving a young boy struck by a car on the way home from school. At first it seems like an aside and then
proceeds to build and build in the unforgiving ways life often does. Some of the strongest scenes boil down to
either soliloquys including a towering sequence delivered by Jack Lemmon and a
heated exchange between Matthew Modine and a bottomless Julianne Moore. Short
Cuts is also completely frank about the sexuality of the characters’ lives,
often sporting casual nudity which doesn’t so much aim to titillate as it
further stresses the deeply buried frustrations running through many of the
characters’ day to day interpersonal struggles.
If Short Cuts is categorized as a sexy comedy, it is inarguably the
heaviest one out there. There are scenes
that will make the viewer laugh aloud with others that will leave you in a
stunned silence, all the while still maintaining a disparate abstraction from
vignette to vignette. Some will question
whether or not the endeavor needed to be so overblown yet I don’t think
Altman’s intent is for the viewer to recall every anecdotal encounter upon
initial viewing. Like the pesticide
dropping helicopters opening the film, Altman drops you in the middle of it
all, giving you little to navigate your way through the tragicomic
travelogue. Short Cuts is the kind of film that challenges everything we know
about the movies regarding the prototypical beginning, middle and end which
will enthrall many and aggravate others looking for cohesion and resolution to
the maze that is Altman’s film. Still,
like The Razor’s Edge hero Larry
Darrell says when confronted with the burning question about the meaning of
life, “there is no payoff”.
Score:
Magnolia
(1999) – directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
After the critical and
commercial success of his second feature Boogie
Nights, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson enjoyed both newfound acclaim
as a fresh new auteur to watch for in addition to being branded a ripoff artist
for his film’s close proximity to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. True or not,
that didn’t stop the (at the time) young maverick director absorbing the
influences of both Sidney Lumet’s Network
through the structural prism of Robert Altman’s sprawling ensemble epic Short Cuts with his next feature Magnolia: a fast, hard and heavy mosaic
of vignettes concerning the loosely connected lives of some twenty three or so
characters in San Fernando Valley over the course of one day.
Loosely linked by an opening
prologue pertaining to the nature of chance alongside a recurring motif of the
Exodus 8:2 biblical passage which pays off later, the film is a tapestry of
derailed, damaged or otherwise broken lives headed toward some sense of
self-actualization or self-destruction. Featuring
much of his Boogie Nights cast
including Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, John C.
Reilly, William H. Macy and Alfred Molina, Anderson’s film seems to follow in
the footsteps of Altman’s epic tragicomedy while channeling the director’s own
riff on Martin Scorsese’s use of the zoom lens, the tracking shot, the whip pan
and the use of the freeze frame in key moments.
If that’s not enough, Anderson even restages the now famous rotating set
piece from Network into a television
show of competing child geniuses.
Aided by an Academy Award
nominated supporting performance by Tom Cruise (one of his very best by the
way) and containing the final performance of Jason Robards in a role not
dissimilar from his own state of physical health at the time, Magnolia is an aggressively dark and
troubling masterpiece that provides as much human warmth through the characters’
respective dilemmas as it serves up moments of pain and anguish. In the place of Annie Ross’ recurring lounge
singing permeating Short Cuts are
recurring songs by Aimee Mann, ala Alan Price’s contributions to O Lucky Man!, which serve to comment on
the drama when the ensemble cast doesn’t burst into song with Mann. Far more technically proficient than Altman’s
picture with a bevy of elaborate visual effects shots and a grand finale that
tries to one-up Altman’s deus ex machina, Magnolia
is a visually exciting film to behold with an even greater emphasis on the
power of montage. This was also to be the first of two collaborations with composer Jon Brion whose use of the organ and orchestral strings are at once filled with longing in addition to joy, evoking a mood that is difficult to come to terms with.
In later years, Anderson
would look back at Magnolia with,
much like the Jason Robards character, a sense of regret that he didn’t do more
to whittle down the film’s sprawling length.
The film was enormously well received critically but it didn’t have the
same box office pull of his previous feature.
It didn’t help that the director’s love for Altman couldn’t shake the
views of some who felt he was just imitating Short Cuts. Anderson ups the
ante with the troubled backstories of his ensemble cast of characters but it
provides a resolution which Altman’s film defiantly refuses to give, raising
the question of which of the two films is less compromising to their respective
audiences. Arguably it wasn’t until
Anderson’s oddball romantic comedy Punch-Drunk
Love that the writer-director began to find his own cinematic language
before further mastering his command of the medium with There Will Be Blood, The
Master and Inherent Vice. Still, what’s here in Magnolia is indeed very strong and affecting even as it looms in
the shadow of Altman.
Score:
Verdict:
And the winner is of course
the far sharper edged sword Short Cuts
for a myriad of reasons. While not as
kinetic and abstract as the film it would clearly inspire years later, Robert
Altman’s audiovisual exercise is told in a cinematic language relative to no
one else’s but his own. Where Magnolia plays like a cacophony of
influences, Short Cuts charges full
steam ahead with little concern whether an audience is on board or not. Moreover, unlike Magnolia, it doesn’t let you off the hook after the picture
ends. Some might come away arguing Short Cuts doesn’t tie together the
varying loose ends but life itself is full of disconnected abstractions where
people seem to get away with murder and all we can do is admit to our own
powerlessness to stop it from happening.
Magnolia strikes viewers hard
but comparatively is the easier film to digest.
Short Cuts, like it or not, is
clearly the more challenging of the two.
While Anderson would indeed find his own niche with his subsequent
features, Magnolia was made at a time
when he was still figuring things out as he celebrated his own favorite
movies. Altman, on the other hand, was a
master filmmaker at the top of his game whose idiosyncratic cinematic language
never once owed itself to anything.
- - Andrew
Kotwicki