Short Cuts

The subtractive test has to be run strand by strand, and most strands pay their way beyond themselves. Casey struck by Doreen’s car, the baker’s calls, the hospital and Paul Finnigan’s arrival bind three households. The fishermen beside the drowned girl set the film’s question of what is owed to a stranger, and that question returns in the Wymans’ and the Kaisers’ scenes. The length is compelled because accumulation is the argument: the city is the sum of what each strand does not see, and fewer strands would make a smaller claim. What gives: Stormy Weathers sawing the furniture is a comic set piece whose point is made elsewhere, and the Bushes’ business is thinner than its screen time.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in a city of contiguous lives, harm passes between strangers without being known, and those nearest the harm look away from it. The fishermen camp beside the dead girl for the weekend and report her when they leave; Claire Kane’s disgust is the one moral response, and it costs her marriage its ease. Lois Kaiser talks men to orgasm on the phone while she changes her baby, and her husband listens unaddressed. Gene Shepard, a policeman, lies to his wife and abandons the family dog. Image and sound carry it as much as speech. A tenth below the gate: the closing equation of a killing with an earthquake is asserted more than disclosed, and the charge of misogyny is partly fair.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation is not the film’s mode, and that holds the axis lowest with The Archetypal Deep. The register is level, ironic and observing. When it rises, the rise is real. The night in the hospital, with Jack Lemmon’s Paul Finnigan talking at length about a betrayal decades old to a son who cannot hear it for his own dying child, is the film’s highest dramatic sustain. Annie Ross’s songs in the club give the film a lament it does not otherwise speak. Zoe Trainer’s death, the cello and the car engine running in the closed garage, is dreadful and cold. Frequency is the charge: three hours hold four or five such moments, and the comic strands deliberately flatten what follows them.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The frame is mythic in outline, and that is what holds the axis lowest with The Sublime: outline, not structure. A plague comes from the sky at the start and an earthquake from the ground at the end, a city struck from above and below; between them a drowned girl lies in a river, the Ophelia figure turned into an object at the fishermen’s feet; a child dies on his birthday with his cake uncollected. But the film evokes more than it builds. The medfly and the quake are bookends, not structures that bear the stories’ weight, and the earthquake resolves nothing and is half a joke about Los Angeles. The particular stays wholly particular: pool cleaners, clown parties, limousine drivers. The archetype is glimpsed through it, not made load-bearing.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance is Altman’s own: Nashville (1975) had made the multi-strand ensemble a form, with a public event at the close that gathers the strands, and A Wedding (1978) and The Player (1992) worked the same instrument. The turn here is to adapt a writer of compressed, single-incident stories into one mosaic, crossing characters between stories that never met, inventing a mother and daughter to carry the music, and moving a working-class Northwest to a mixed-class Los Angeles. The stake on the source was real: Carver’s readers charged it as a betrayal, and the film was made with independent money, at three hours, with no lead. The stake on the form was smaller, since the form was Altman’s proven path: five tenths short of the gate.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told as nine short films, Carver’s stories would remain nine stories of private failure. Cut together, the film knows what none of them knows: that the commentator’s family, the waitress, the cop and the pool cleaner live within a few miles and touch one another only by accident, a car in a road, a body in a river, a phone line. The cross-cutting is the instrument of that knowledge, not its container. The overlapping sound does the same work in the ear: everyone speaks, few are heard. The earthquake completes the form, the one event every strand receives at once, and it shows how little it changes. Held from the top because some crossings are coincidences of convenience.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over thirty-three years. The questions are argued from the release and stay open: whether the film honours Carver or condescends to him; whether its nudity and its women are seen or exploited, Marian Wyman’s argument with her husband above all; whether the killing in Griffith Park, rhymed by the earthquake, is a judgment or a shrug. The film has entered the study of adaptation and of the network narrative, and it yields on return as an ensemble film yields: new crossings, new rhymes between strands, the ear catching what a second voice says under the first. Held at the figure because the writing on it is narrower than on Altman’s largest films, and a second viewing adds more connections than new meanings.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Released in 1993, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real though inherited: the film showed that the literary short story could be the unit of a long film, and that a mosaic of strangers could carry a social diagnosis rather than a public spectacle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the multi-strand film of strangers became a distinct mode of the decade after it, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), whose director has acknowledged Altman as his master, and in the network films of the 2000s, Crash (2004), Babel (2006) and others, most of them lesser; the Golden Lion marked it at once. The form was largely made in Nashville, and that holds the axis a tenth below the gate.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole, and its restorations and home editions are repair. Presence over thirty-three years is continuous but not wide: shown in repertory and retrospectives, kept in a prestige home edition, taught in courses on adaptation and on the ensemble film, and named wherever Altman is; its length and its ensemble without stars keep it out of the broad television rotation. The surface is somewhat fixed to its moment, the early-1990s Los Angeles of medfly spraying, phone-sex lines and the cast’s period styling, though the stories underneath date little. Thirty-three years are credited for what they show, and the bar is met exactly.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the medium is high and bears weight. Geraldine Peroni’s editing keeps some twenty-two characters legible over three hours, and the cuts between strands are timed on rhyme: a glass of milk, a phone ringing, a body in water. Walt Lloyd’s camera roams and zooms within scenes so that the frame finds the person not speaking. The sound mix layers dialogue so that the ear chooses, as the eye does. The performances are among the best ensemble work of the decade: Julianne Moore’s long confession, Lemmon’s monologue, Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s bored professional voice. The charges: broad comic playing in the Weathers and Bush strands, a few crossings made by contrivance, and an ending whose staging is looser than its idea.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Stormy Weathers sawing his wife’s furniture in half, played as farce, and the Finnigans at their son’s bedside. One law governs both: people attend to their own grievance and not to the person in front of them, and the cost falls elsewhere. The law holds across the fishermen, the Shepards’ lies, the Wymans’ party and Lois’s calls, and it holds in the sound, where nobody finishes a sentence to someone listening. The range it covers is wide: farce, domestic comedy, grief, suicide and murder. The strain is in the comic strands, whose tone sometimes works against the grief they are cut beside, and in the earthquake, which belongs half to the law and half to a joke about the city.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Many orders are held in one structure. The family, in ten households: marriages failing, a child’s death, a parent’s old betrayal. Labour, unusually broad for American film: the waitress, the pool cleaner, the limousine driver, the phone-sex worker, the baker, the doctor, the television commentator, the policeman, the clown. The state, in the police and the spraying ordered from the air. The natural order, in the medfly, the river and the earthquake. The city as a social body. The cross-cutting integrates them more than it lists them: the car that strikes Casey connects a waitress’s household to a commentator’s. What holds it from the top: consciousness is shown from outside, history and the sacred are absent, and some households are present rather than held.

Score: 8.3 / 10