R.I.P. Robert Altman

I was sorry to see that Robert Altman passed away on Monday. When a friend e-mailed me the news, I audibly gasped upon reading it. It's not that the death was a shock--Altman was 81, not exactly ancient by today's standards, but it's old enough that when death comes, you can't say it wasn't unexpected. He kept a heart transplant he had sometime in the '90s a secret for a decade, until he announced it in accepting a lifetime achievement Oscar earlier this year. We now discover that he's been battling cancer for a year and a half--had we known that, we might have been watching for this occasion. But we didn't, so the news is startling somewhat. He's had a grand career, with plenty of ups and downs, but it's sad to see it come to an end.

Altman worked his way up from short documentaries and industrial films in his native Kansas City to television series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bonanza, Combat!, and even The Gale Storm Show. His first major film was M*A*S*H, and what a splash it made. It was exactly the right film for the time, as the U.S. public was turning against the war in Vietnam. M*A*S*H was set during the Korean War, but I don't know whether anyone would have argued that that was the war it was about. It's mix of light-heartedness, irreverence, and gravity reflected the public's conflicting feelings about the American presence in Vietnam and even American leadership as a whole.

Altman's films were always bold in their vision, but they weren't always successful in bringing that vision to the screen and, by extension, the audience. I won't even say that at worst Altman produced interesting failures. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and The Player may have been brilliant, but Popeye and A Wedding could, depending on how forthcoming you might be, be described as train wrecks. But that didn't matter. What was important was that Altman always sought to portray honest--if not always pleasant and attractive--emotions. Even at their most tenuous, his films had a sense of reality to them. We were living in LA when Short Cuts came out. It's set in LA, and it ends (don't worry, there aren't usually spoilers in a Robert Altman film--they don't end so much as simply stop) with a large earthquake. We saw the film in a Santa Monica theater on a Sunday night, and as the final credits were about to roll, we were hit by a minor earthquake ourselves. It was a very disconcerting feeling--were we being drawn into the movie itself? Even if we weren't part of the movie, would we react just like the characters we'd been watching? I'm confident that Altman would have set it up that way if he could've. (As it happened, this was almost exactly a week before the 1994 Northridge quake hit. Despite his famous dislike of Hollywood, I don't think he was involved in initiating that one, either.)

For more informed opinions, you can check out Tony Scott's appreciation in The New York Times or take a look at Richard Corliss in Time magazine. All my opinion boils down to is that we are diminished in not having the next Robert Altman film to look forward to.