mccabe and mrs miller (w&d robert altman, w. brian mckay, edmund naughton)

There are a few Altman films I have always hoped to see on the big screen, and this is one of them. The anti-western western, by a master of the high Anglo-Saxon art of gentle satire. (The transformation of Gosforth Park into Downton Abbey represents everything that has gone wrong with Britain in the 21st century.) M&M is a typically baroque piece of work which opens with a lengthy, darkly lit sequence where Beatty’s McCabe visits a desultory tavern in a forlorn mining settlement which will one day become a thriving city. The sequence is shadowy, almost mysterious, as the locals ask themselves who this McCabe might be, mythologising him as a gunslinger (which he isn’t). It lasts for perhaps 15 minutes and sets out Altman’s stall to create immersive, confusing (as immersive procedures tend to be) and a novelistic kind of cinema, with Dickensian undertones. The narrative of M&M is underwhelming: Julie Christie’s opium smoking entrepreneur comes to town, in a strangely off-key sub-cockney performance, and goes into business with McCabe to set up the best whorehouse in town. The big players want to buy McCabe out, he arrogantly shrugs them off, with catastrophic albeit predictable results. The chemistry between Beatty and Christie, two luminous screen presences, never quite seems to flower and Christie’s role feels underwritten. The pacing is stately. Nevertheless, the world of the movie, this remote mountainous corner of the USA, is perfectly realised, and there’s an almost regal authority to Altman’s management of the grand set piece scenes, culminating in a final, glorious snow-bound shoot-out that is the equal of any Western that precedes it. This might not be his greatest movie, and the gender politics occasionally make one cringe, but, embossed with the hallmark of its humanist director, it is nevertheless a minor masterpiece. 

From Wikipedia:

Carpenters for the film were locals and young men from the United States, fleeing conscription into the Vietnam War; they were dressed in period costume and used tools of the period, so that they could go about their business in the background, while the plot advanced in the foreground.

the company (d altman; w. neve campbell & barbara turner)

Altman’s ballet film is a curio and a great example of how the mish-mash of filmmaking means that a potentially potent project fails to come off. The film is set in Chicago and uses dancers from the Joffrey ballet company. There are roles for two choreographers who play themselves, Lar Lubovitch and Robert Desrosiers, the latter to great comic effect. There are numerous dance sequences, lovingly filmed, giving the film a strong visual aesthetic. The sequence of Neve Campbell’s dance in the open air theatre, as the storm closes in, is particularly effective. This is filmmaking with a sense of risk which echoes the risk the dancers and the audience seem to be taking. However… the film stars Neve Campbell and she’s also given a story credit, alongside the screenwriter. Campbell dances alongside the rest of the ballet company, with some panache. (It doesn’t look like she’s being body-doubled, a la Portman in Black Swan, but I may be wrong). She also plays a low-key, introspective character, who gets involved in a low-key fashion with James Franco’s young and tender sous-chef. If these character notes sounds wooly, they’re positively concrete in comparison to the narrative, which feels like one of the wooliest narratives ever concocted. Apart from getting together with Franco, and hurting her shoulder when she falls awkwardly, and dancing, absolutely nothing happens to Campbell’s character. There’s no journey, no development, no story to speak of. Which might not have mattered, except for the fact that The Company reminds us of the importance of narrative. As a filmmaker, Altman was a master of creating a world, in a neo-documentary style, and immersing the viewer in that world. Which is something he achieves in The Company. Anyone who has had any dealings with a ballet company will recognise the authenticity of the portrayal. But the portrayal alone begins to become less and less compelling as the film goes on. Because you need a narrative to construct a reason to watch that portrayal. You need stories to knit the fly-on-the-wall elements to life. The script makes a half-hearted attempt to do this at times, with stray storylines about a dancer who’s got nowhere to stay, a storyline which never develops; and Malcolm McDowell’s somewhat laboured character of the great, yellow-scarfed ex-dancer who’s now the autocratic head of the company, but none of these strands are in any way developed, just as Campbell’s character remains frustratingly nebulous. The film collapses in on itself through the lack of narrative. What we’re left with are sketches for a movie: Altman’s capacity to film dance (which was clearly the aspect he enjoyed most in the making of the film); Altman’s documentary-style approach which might have made for a great film about a ballet company but didn’t; and the story of the naif ballerina, Campbell’s alter-ego, which never really got off the page. A glorious failure perhaps, a great example of what film can be when all the pieces of the puzzle are present, but no-one can be bothered to put them together.