directed by Robert Altman
screenplay by Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt
based on the writings of Raymond Carver

This one’s just a two-word review: “Shit Cuts.”

No, just kidding. But I do want to keep this short, and I wasn’t thrilled about this pretentious ponderous movie. All the Robert Altman movies that I’ve seen – which is only a few, but a famous few – have this remarkably dead, false feeling. The camera just sits there (except for when it occasionally careens around hyper-purposefully) and the actors go about their scenes like actors going about scenes. Maybe it’s supposed to play as a cool, literary distance, but to me it usually feels like the bread never rose. I see that things have been written, staged, performed, and shot, but I feel like they’ve been intentionally prevented from cohering to one another by any means other than pressure; that once they leave the frame, all the elements clatter back down on the table, totally inert. There’s no sense of a force of art or belief or anything that binds the actors to each other, to the sets, to the writing. There’s no stick in it. And given the kinds of things Altman does oh-so-intentionally – parallel stories rubbing shoulders, parallel dialogues rubbing shoulders – not to mention the fact that his movies, including this one, are so widely respected: I have to think that the loose, limp, humorless, ain’t-got-that-swing of every damn scene is somehow part of some kind of vision. But I don’t think it gets him anything; I think it’s just a mistake, a basic artistic shortcoming. The Player is good despite the fact that it feels like a world made of all soft-velcro, no hooks. Credit Thomas Newman’s score for submerging the whole movie in a vibe, any vibe, and thus saving it for the audience. Gosford Park was also dead on its feet, but at least had busy writing and production design that could be enjoyed nonetheless. What bits I was able to like about Short Cuts I liked similarly – only with a considerable handicap taken into account. As scenes played out, I was able to imagine how, in their original Carver short story form, they might have had some kind of edge. But as they actually stood, they had been completely defanged by the blandness that was in every frame. Nashville saved itself somewhat by having some really peculiar content; everything in Short Cuts, unfortunately, was really very straightforward. All the less reason that it should have been allowed to be so flagrantly slack. I’m all for leisurely pacing, but only when the film goes deep enough to sustain my thoughts over the long shots. Here each long shot was just a chance to ensure that the ball was good and dropped.

Lyle Lovett is in this movie as a baker. He supposedly acts testy and then cruel and then remorseful and maybe some other stuff, but you could have fooled me because it’s Lyle Lovett and he just looks like a banana bread the whole time. The whole movie was like that, Robert Altman apparently likes it – I mean, he cast Lyle Lovett! – and it’ll take a whole lot of Siskels to convince this Ebert that it’s anything but clumsy and deadening. And three hours of clumsy and deadening makes for a boring-ass movie.

Didn’t expect myself to be this negative! At the time I was open to it; I didn’t mind watching it. But in retrospect it really let me down. Let the record show.