Director: Robert Altman
The revisionist genre needs some serious revision. McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an alternate take on the Western - the characters are more low-key, a female is the dominant presence, and the West here depicted is devoid of honorable men. This would all be interesting if we had any investment in the main characters. Unfortunately, I never got invested. Altman's bossy and far-seeing Mrs. Miller is a film creation, not a 'real person', but Beatty's McCabe is a smaller-than-life figure, a dopey hustler; he's supposed to be 'like us'.
Altman films like to tackle about 17 subjects at once, and this one's no different - there's lots of religious symbolism, 1960's allegory, feminist rhetoric, and so on. I think Altman was a trailblazer in cinema, but besides Nashville, I've yet to see anything approaching a great film out of him. His characteristic huge casts too often mean we're switching places in the story just when we're beginning to empathize with a particular character. His stories are often grand, but his protagonists are not. Altman films can be a fun place to hang out, but they just never coalesce for me.
I'm with you on Altman in general. I think we've discussed this before.
ReplyDeleteI also think we've discussed this before, but I have to mention it anyway: I love his version of The Long Goodbye. It's supposed to be a revisionist hardboiled detective story, but, as a big fan of Chandler, I actually think that Altman and Elliott Gould create a Marlowe that's truer to how Chandler wrote him than the more traditional movie renderings are.