Short Cuts - Vidas cruzadas

When Altman is good he's among the greatest, and SHORT CUTS is among his best (M*A*S*H, BREWSTER McCLOUD, NASHVILLE). Adapted from Raymond Carver's collection of stories, SHORT CUTS offers a roving, restless glimpse into the lives of several Los Angelinos. The characters aren't completely real - in an 'I-can-relate-to-these-people' sense (I never expected this from this movie anyway), but are presented in a slightly hyperreal sense with Altman highlighting the everyday lives of characters who try valiantly to maintain their public personas (cutting across class boundaries in the process), even when things are spinning out of control beneath the surface (literally symbolized by the ending, though at least he didn't stoop to throwing in a rain of frogs...).

Los Angeles is famously mocked as a place that's all surface and no depth (see ANNIE HALL), and the slight exaggerations seen here characters plays with this, even as the isolation and instability of certain characters humanizes them. Through it all there's plenty of humor - though, as is usual with Altman, even the humor packs a wallop. Annie Ross' deadpan complaint gets to the heart of it all: "I hate L.A. - all they do is snort coke and talk." The irony in such nastiness becomes a bit more apparent when you consider where that assessment is coming from, within Altman's tragi-comic variant upon the notion that California's trends become America's truisms a decade or two down the road.

There are so many great moments here - Chris Penn's growing befuddlement (and seething, simmering murderous anger) with his wife's phone sex operator job; Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin as a boozy working class couple; Peter Gallagher and Frances MacDormand's marriage, collapsed into tantrums and furniture vandalism; the Tim Robbins/Huey Lewis confrontation; Jack Lemmon, Julianne Moore and Matthew Modine all deliver strikingly memorable performances. Every time I watch this, I get something new out of it - though it requires a bit of patience, SHORT CUTS is really worth checking out.

The day-to-day lives of a number of suburban Los Angeles residents.

In many ways, this film is a follow-up to Altman's "Nashville", another story of several people (twenty-four) going about their day in Nashville. How many characters are in this story of folks in Los Angeles? Probably about the same.

If anything, this story strikes me as better. Better scripted, for sure, and with much more mystery and suspense (and more dead bodies). We have an incredible cast: Tom Waits and Jennifer Jason Leigh steal the show, but Robert Downey, Tim Robbins, Chris Penn and a dozen others are amazing, too.

In front of a group of fishermen, a waitress bends over for a slab of butter. They take in the image like hungry wolves gulping meat, as her skirt rises high, revealing everything. They like what they see, so they ask her, `Can we have more butter, please?' The double meaning is obvious.

In a nightclub, a singer languishes over a sultry little song about `a good, punishing kiss.' The conversation in the foreground -- ex-cons relating cruel, violent stories from prison -- moves to the rhythm of the jazz saxophone, a dissonant snare-drum-prose accompaniment to the song. It's a deliberate ambiguity that binds the viewer in the scene's artistic tension.

In an upscale home with a breathtaking view of the city of angels, a struggling artist is being questioned about her relationship with another artist. She's naked from the waist down, suggesting both sexual aggressiveness, and vulnerability, simultaneously. She's seductively defiant with her husband. She confesses to an affair; but she does so angrily, indignant for being asked. It's sweet and sour, light and dark, truthful but deceptive, all at once. More double entendres.

Robert Altman's Short Cuts weaves all these disconnected scenes together like common strands of rope. It's the interplay of opposites that firmly holds them all together. The title itself, `Short Cuts,' has dual meaning: it's an interconnected mixture of `short cuts,' as in `off the cutting room floor' or `film clips;' and, it's an unmistakable reference to the web of human life, the social short cuts between ourselves and everyone else, as in the famous `six degrees of separation,' which tells us that we are only six personal relationships away from everyone else in the world. Set in LA, this idea makes for a lovely irony: although the main characters are completely absorbed in their individual worlds, they are intimately connected to each other. They just don't know it.

Short Cuts is one of Altman's masterpieces. See it if you can.

After seeing Short Cuts and pondering over it as a cinematic experience, I feel a strange feeling that I haven't had before with any Robert Altman film: confusion. Normally, understanding that Altman's style is one of using confusion and misunderstandings to move the plot along, I was surprised when I reacted so positively to MASH, Nashville and The Player but not this.

The cast, overall, is quite good with Robert Downey Jr. and Madeline Stowe giving the best performances along with the great Jack Lemmon in perhaps the scene with the only real emotional pull as he describes the sad truth of why his family broke apart. Everyone else seems lost and misguided, floating around in this LA world Altman is exploring without much to do. They act out, involving themselves in affairs, drugs, their children's lives and the simple desire to survive each day but none of it particularly moved me. Even one plot line involving Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell that should have had great emotional depth has almost none to speak of.

I have the greatest admiration for Altman and his ambitious vision of how to create interesting stories and characters. Yet, despite many claiming this to be one of his best works, I didn't feel at all that it was on par with MASH or Nashville as it seemed to meander and sag heavily in the middle until a final occurrence brought many of the characters together. This may be what Altman wanted; the meaningless and accidental nature of many of life's adventures that nevertheless still affect us. However, I wish it would have been made more cinematically stimulating.

Wonderful, beautifully acted film about lives interweaving in Los Angeles against the backdrop of an invading poisonous bug. Ensemble cast is perfect, with standout performances by Robbins and Downey Jr. Altman succeeds in bringing us a film examining the coincidence of everyday life that we are too busy to notice. Shows a keen sense for relationships and the hardships of loss.