Word: altmans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Robert Altman is getting ready to shoot the climactic production number of his new movie, tentatively titled The Last Broadcast. On the stage of the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., technicians and musicians jostle with actors decked out for such roles as a radio host, a country-music singer, a rope-twirling cowboy, a 1940s-era private eye and the Angel of Death. "O.K.," Altman booms, "let's see what we can do with this ... this mess. I'm just going to sit here and watch." Before the cameras roll, he adds, not entirely jokingly, "Everybody fend for themselves...
Making a Robert Altman movie is a leap into the unknown for everyone involved, including Altman. Oh, sure, there's a script--in this case by Garrison Keillor, who based it closely on A Prairie Home Companion, the public-radio hit he has presided over since 1974. But Altman is notorious for treating a script as merely a series of signposts. In films from M*A*S*H to Nashville to Gosford Park, he has thrived on improvisation, spontaneity, happy accidents. "What I'm looking for is occurrence, truthful human behavior," he says. "We've got a kind of road...
Keillor, who plays himself, originally intended to focus on Lake Wobegon, the imaginary small town that forms the backdrop to Companion. But Altman wanted a fictional documentary about the show itself, with nearly all the action confined to the theater and its backstage environs where the characters' raffish private lives unfold. So goodbye, Lake Wobegon...
...secret of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the menacing silences of Harold Pinter all brooded under the skin of Sam Shepard's naturalism. So the film version, which Shepard wrote and stars in, should be an event and not a puzzlement. In "opening up" the play, Robert Altman has dissipated some of its caged-animal tension and replaced it with torpid mannerisms. Eddie (Shepard) sucks all the existential meaning out of a toothpick; May (Kim Basinger) thumbs her full lips; the Old Man (Harry Dean Stanton), who has intruded on both their lives way too long, tenderizes...
...warned: this is not the Altman of M * A * S * H and Nashville, the funky satirist with an ear for low-life Americana. It is the European Altman, who in Images and 3 Women and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean threw sensitive women into the nightmare zone between past and present, reality and fantasy. In Fool for Love, he situates May's sad childhood literally next door to her fated present and sets Eddie's monologue memories colliding with the flashback images that accompany them. You can have some cerebral fun with this game...