A Perfect Couple

I finally got around to seeing this for-many-years-as-good-as-lost Altman film, and I must say, I was extremely impressed. It is a highly unusual piece. Altman biographer Patrick McGilligan says "There is not another movie like it in the Altman canon," and he's not kidding; there is scarcely another movie like it in anyone's canon. The closest I can think of is George Romero's also criminally underrated There's Always Vanilla, which also deals with the arc of a romance between "ordinary" people with no touch of Hollywood iconography about them.

The film is conceived in terms of a number of binaries: two families, a rigidly patriarchal Greek family and a rock music collective with its own sort-of-patriarch; classical music and pop music, which join hands in the climax; a "perfect couple" of two decidedly imperfect, non-glamorous people, and a near-silent "imperfect couple" of two glamor-pusses, whose path repeatedly crosses that of the perfect couple, but in ways that only the audience perceives. (The perfect couple meets through a video dating service that is a direct precursor to the Internet dating services of our own day; that lends the film an oddly timely-contemporary touch.)

The rock music collective, Keeping 'Em Off the Streets, co-formed by Altman collaborator Allan Nicholls, actually existed and concertized a couple of times, but failed to win a recording contract. (The soundtrack was preserved on Altman's own Lion's Gate label; I recently scored a copy of this rare LP.) As many of the reviewers here at the IMDb enthuse, the music is quite delightful, and rather difficult to pigeonhole, with rock, pop, jazz, and theater music elements. There are a lot of musicians, a lot of singers, a lot of people (and even a dog) just hanging around, in somewhat elaborate and rather magical spaces (courtesy of master designer Leon Ericksen), and the musical numbers seem to emerge from the ambiance. The film is very driven by the songs.

Adding to the flavor of A Perfect Couple is a remarkably casual-positive attitude toward several gay and lesbian characters, so much so that Vito Russo singled the film out in his book The Celluloid Closet as being "special" for its era in its recognition of a "happy, well-adjusted" lesbian couple as a "family."

In the lead roles, Paul Dooley is remarkably winning, and Marta Heflin has a mysterious, somewhat withdrawn quality that suddenly announces itself forcefully in her one solo number, "Won't Somebody Care", which is also one of the great musical sequences in all of movies, if you ask me -- right up there with Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" in Nashville.

The next forgotten Altman film that needs to be rehabilitated is H.E.A.L.T.H., which Helene Keyssar praises most interestingly in her book Robert Altman's America. I saw it only once many years ago and am eager to see it again.

This movie had feeble comedy, no chemistry, and a plot that slogged along as if wading through knee-deep mud. Marta Heflin, presumably cast for her swan-like, melancholic countenance, was unbearably dull. It was as if she was in a Quaalude haze throughout the entire film. I could barely sit through the repeated almost-but-not-quite hookup scenes, watching Heflin affect doe-eyed bashfulness while flimsy garments were peeled off her skeletal shoulders. As for the band scenes, which accounted for nearly half the film, think vocal chords strained very nearly to rupturing and lots of white polyester vests. This movie is a bona-fide stinker. Were there any characters that were at all interesting? Well, there was a crying baby that made a few appearances.

Off the wall romantic comedy with one of the strangest plots I've ever seen. A middle aged man who still lives at home with his entire family falls for a woman 20 years his junior. This causes tension within his family, especially with the domineering father, a real tyrant. This guy is well into his fifties and still lets his father tell him he can't bring a woman home with him as though he were still a teen. Very weird family. The woman is a real loser type who needs a man to feed off of emotionally. They haven't got a chance. Very entertaining film with lots of shrill singing sequences and some good, and at times bizarre, dialogue. Great ending as the camera shows us the perfect couple after the rice has fallen from their hair and then pans over to the other perfect couple cynically revealing history in the process of repeating itself.

This decidedly unconventional romantic comedy is watchable, but is neither very romantic, nor very funny; more often it seems like a promo for a pop music band. One half of the "perfect couple", Marta Heflin, has some appeal, but Paul Dooley lacks charm, and their instant connection is not believable. The liveliest performance is given by Ann Ryerson as a horny possible date, but unfortunately her part is very small. Still, at least compared to the same year's "H.E.A.L.T.H", also by Robert Altman, which I saw yesterday, this one has a bit more structure to it. **1/2 out of 4.

Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin play a most decidedly IMperfect couple in Robert Altman's version of a romantic comedy. His claim at the time (justified) is that Hollywood had always allowed only beautiful people to fall in love, so he wanted to make a romance with a couple of ordinary folk. He succeeded when he found the paunchy Dooley and the distractingly skinny (nearly anorexic) Heflin for his leads, but the film itself is not much of a success. This came out during Altman's "experimental" period, meaning he threw together some disparate elements and hoped for the best. Actually, it's quite accessible for Altman, considering "Quintet" came out in the same year, and it's one of his least Altman-like projects. Unfortunately, it's those very qualities that also make it one of his least interesting and ugliest from a purely visual standpoint.

The film does boast some good if dated music though, performed by the real-life band Keepin' Em Off the Streets, led by Ted Neely, most known for playing the role of Jesus in the film version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" (and whom I saw perform the role on stage in a touring version).

Grade: C