Saturday, September 30, 2006
NASTY MOOD
Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film was Robert Altman's
This is such a famous film and so much has been said about it that it defies further commentary.
I have seen it a number of times and each time there is a new revelation.
It has the bones of a Western but none of the flesh.
Here, the whores are relatively happy but not pretty (well, maybe Shelley Duval but she is a widow forced into the business), the men lack heroic proportions, and there is a lot of dirt everywhere. And mud.
In its time, this was a revolutionary take. Not now. This is the parent of series like Deadwood.
I take it as a 'mood' film and the mood is nasty.
You cannot hear all that is said, it is an Altman film after all, but you know the meaning. And, the meaning is ominous.
There are many sweet, funny, sad, and amazing bits of business along the way.
I don't think that I got how, in each jump forward, the town grows before our eyes; the money that is being earned at the tubs and whorehouse are being plowed back into the business.
This film does not have Julie Christie and Warren Beattie in it. It has two human beings on the make. Their problem is mostly that they are caught in alcoholism and opium addiction.
When it is time to get up and act they are down and disabled.
At the end, the church catches on fire and the whole town turns out to put the fire out.
It is pretty obvious that this is the town that will survive. A black couple holds hands and returns to their small business. The whores gaggle their way back to the village. The miners, both anglo and chinese, whoop it up together as they return to work.
Optimism. Life.
It gets a 5 out of Netflix5.
It even earned a second review by Ebert, thirty years later!
