Short Cuts

Robert Altman invites you to spend an evening with him in Los Angeles. Returning to the 'polyphonic' style off filmmaking that he perfected in Nashville, Altman this time eschews the glamorous hustlings of Hollywood players for the lifes and loves of middle-class Angelinos. Loosely basing the plot on the spare minimalist short fiction of Raymond Carver, Altman interweaves the lives of more than 20 main characters into a complex, epic patchwork of city life. Although Carver's settings are transposed from the Midwest, to the Californian suburbs, the run-down spirit of his K-Mart fiction remains: nearly all the narrative shards are concerned with the breakdown of relationships, casting an smog-like pervasive malaise over the city. Yet Carver's understated mood of crisis becomes more explicit in Altman: there is something of the biblical epic about a film that begins with a plague of medfly and ends with an earthquake. Framing the film within these apocalyptic visions, Altman deploys his usual weapons of biting satire and delightful touches of comic observation for the ambivalent dual purpose of lightening the tone and contributing to the atmosphere of a dyfunctional society fearing imminent disaster.

One must admire the logistical virtuosity required to sustain nine plot threads intact for over three hours, but it is impossible not to feel that by spreading himself so thin, by making the cuts so short, Altman detracts from the emotional impact on an audience that is not given enough time to digest each slice of life. Short Cuts is, basically, a very high class soap opera. It is the quality of the acting that sets it apart: Tim Robbins, again showing himself as America's most versatile actor, playing a splendidly corrupt cop; Jennifer Jason Leigh nonchalantly feeding her baby as she conducts phone sex calls; Lily Tomlin as a tired-out waitress.

Short Cuts is possibly a failed experiment, but, at times, a very funny and a very cautionary one.

Review by Jim Watkins
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95