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Robert Altman (1925-2006)The bohemian craftsman.

By Dana StevensPosted Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2006, at 3:35 PM ET

Robert AltmanI don't feel like writing a measured, journalistic eulogy for Robert Altman, one that outlines the stages of his career or debates the relative merits of 3 Women and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. As Garrison Keillor said earlier this year in A Prairie Home Companion, a fictional imagining of that radio show's farewell broadcast that turned out to be Altman's own farewell: "I don't do eulogies." I just want to be sad for a moment, in print, that the man is gone. He was a singular figure in film history, a bohemian craftsman who was also a satirist of American manners on the order of Mark Twain.

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I interviewed Robert Altman in the fall of 2004. I had just started the "Surfergirl" TV column on Slate a few months before, and his new four-part television series Tanner on Tanner, a follow-up to the classic political miniseries Tanner '88, was about to air on the Sundance Channel. I was paralyzed with fear when Altman picked up the phone—after all, this was one of my artistic heroes, and I had virtually no experience with journalistic interviews. In the end, Altman was too nice a guy to make much of an interview subject—to put me at my ease, he asked me so many questions about myself that the phone call turned from Q&A to casual conversation. Nearly 80, he was absurdly avuncular but also sharp as a tack, acerbic and funny, munching a bagel as he fielded my nervous, overwritten questions.

We spoke for about an hour on the phone, about movies, baseball (Altman was a Red Sox fan, and it was October 2004), and, most warmly, politics. The presidential election was a month off, and Altman had recently shot an episode of the new Tanner series guerilla-style at the Democratic National Convention. He set his fictional candidate, played by Michael Murphy, loose on the convention floor and had him glad-handing delegates and journalists and chatting up figures like Barack Obama, Howard Dean, and John Kerry.

Altman was happy to answer my questions about how the convention scenes had been staged, but he was more interested in talking about the real-life election coming up, about which he was extremely well-informed and even more opinionated. He was convinced that Bush would lose and would spend his lame-duck interregnum shedding his advisers like flies. "You know Powell is gone. You know Rumsfeld will be gone. Cheney will be gone. Cheney should be in jail. I just think they're a band of weasels, and I think they'll all be gone." Two years later, Bush is still in office, Cheney remains at large, and Altman is only two-thirds right about Bush's team. But a comment he made about the war rings horribly true: "Every day this continues, two, three American soldiers, two more are dead, six more are dead … and eventually that's going to add up to a figure that resembles the mileage between here and Mars."

That Altman had so many movies over the years that didn't work—some of them, like Prêt à Porter, were real dogs—was, to my mind, just one more measure of his integrity as an artist. He was always moving forward, throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what would stick. In our interview, he spoke affectionately of his flops: "I get a passion for these ideas in the things that I do, and you know, they're all like your children, and you tend to love your least successful children the most."

He never won a Best Director Oscar, though he was nominated five times (along with two nominations for producing). At last year's ceremony, he accepted a lifetime award with a gracious and quiet speech that contained one of the loveliest metaphors for filmmaking—indeed, for any form of artistic endeavor—that I've ever heard. I wrote about it at the time, but I'd like to quote it again here:

I've always said that making a film is like making a sand castle at the beach. You invite your friends and you get them down there, and you say, "You build this beautiful structure, several of you." Then you sit back and watch the tide come in. Have a drink, watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away.

Even without knowing that Altman was already sick with cancer when he said it (earlier in the speech, he thanked "the doctor who's taking care of me"), this metaphor is enough to make you cry. It's also as good a description as I can imagine of Altman's creative process. There's the idea of a movie as joint creation, built with friends for the sheer joy of making something together. The shrugging acceptance of art, not to mention life, as something ephemeral. And perhaps most of all the indelible image—as indelible as Lily Tomlin's face in the bar scene in Nashville—of the group of friends toasting each other afterward as the tide carries their work away. Here's to everything Robert Altman and friends left with us on the shore.

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Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.

Photograph of Robert Altman by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I've always like what I heard about how Altman went about making movies. Everyone involved always seemed to love working with him. Many gush abut how he engaged everyone involved in a project--the technicians, the writers, the actors, especially the actors--into giving of themselves on a project—it's all legendary and quite exemplary. Participants really felt like they were contributing.

Jack Lemmon once compared Altman very favorably to John Ford on this score. Altman, however, wanted you to make suggestions, Lemmon noted. Altman encouraged the actor's collaboration, which Lemmon contrasted to Ford by telling the story of when on the set of Mister Roberts, he very excitedly told Ford: "John, I have an idea!" Ford immediately raised his hand to stop him: "No. No, you don't." And that was that.

Yet, as far as I'm concerned Altman is not only not in the tradition of John Ford, as some have said, he wouldn't make the proverbial pimple on Ford's ....

I've often wonder why I don't have a stronger positive affinity for Altman's movies. At one time I did. In my callow youth, I loved MASH, McCabe, The Long Goodbye, and others when they came out. I think it's his attitude. As generous a person as he seems to have been, nevertheless artistically and esthetically his movies are permeated by a small, callous, mean-spiritedness, and it's usually directed in some obvious fashion against some easy, even PC, target. His movies simply have not traveled well over time with me. And it may of course all have to do with me, but the fact is that I don't much like most of the people he means for you to like, or the facile ways he cleft-sticks the types he dislikes, or the stock manner he makes his points. Nashville may be the apex, or nadir, on this score—it is just one long tedious predicable cheap shot from beginning to end, but most of his stuff is just full of that sort of stuff. He always has a someone or thing he stacks the deck against, a type of person or people, a view, that he just trashes. In retrospect, it often seems just too facile and shallow. He likes to shoot fish in a barrel. He has none of Ford's humanity or compassion. Ford had his side, but you get the feeling he got there regrettably, at an emotional cost, feeling for those who had to fall before the juggernaut of his historical sweep. Ford has the grace to be sad at the conflict between views, cultures, the two sides that exist of everything.

Altman's stance may be more excusable, more tolerable, when he's doing comedy/satire, but he's never gone beyond the sensibilities of the New Left knee-jerk ideologue of the late '60's—politically, socially, and esthetically. One of the most loathsome, gratuitous bits of violence (just thinking about it makes me recoil with revulsion) is the smashing of the Playboy bunny's face with the Coca Cola bottle in The Long Goodbye, as is the smartass humiliation of Hotlips in MASH. He had talent, even genius if you like, and it's not like I think he was a boob, an utter failure, but he also had grievous substantive shortcomings that seriously mar and undermine his accomplishments. Finally, he leaves me with a bad taste. One of Sturges's great movies give me more pleasure than all of Altman.

--Morty_Causa

(To reply, click here.)

Rather than try to compete with the many incisive obits of Robert Altman, I thought I might offer a toast to a particular "motif" he used in many movies that seemed to me to be his and his alone.

It was somewhat an offshoot of his penchant for overlapping, sometimes unintelligible dialogue and loose improvisational style.

The motif was: start with a long-medium shot in which two central characters held the frame with the "main dramatic dialogue" of the scene. But even as those two speak...the camera drifts away from them, as if totally disinterested in "the plot", and goes over to pick up one or two or three "minor characters" doing very little in the corner of the frame.

It was rather "anti-dramatic" and quite funny,and he did it a lot. "MASH," "The Player" and "Gosford Park" come to mind.

However, he did it in a rather "dramatic" way once that I can recall:

In "The Long Goodbye" (1973) Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe and blonde Nina Van Pallandt are talking on the beach at Malibu at night, and as they talk, the camera does that "drift" away from them towards the distance -- where Nina's eccentric old husband (Sterling Hayden), is drowning himself in the surf as Gould and Nina natter on.

Altman had a few other cinematic tricks, but this one always seemed rather meaningful, and witty, to me.

--lucabrasi

(To reply, click here.)

(9/28)

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