Word: stilton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...main plot thread off which Altman works involves Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a punchy, fast-talking gal looking to get her husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) back from a gangster, Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte), whom he foolishly irked. Kidnapping Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson), the doped-up wife of a prominent politician, arises as the logical solution: she hopes to force Mr. Stilton to sic the police on the gangster...
...main squeeze; and even an odd story line about a young jazz musician and the pregnant 14-year-old he befriends. Rounding off the historical side are various pleasant touches: one political makes a mistake about a friend's wife ("Oh, Bess is Truman's wife!"); Blondie takes Mrs. Stilton to an old-fashioned movie theater...
...give us anything too new--we've seen her fast-talking, tough-gal shtick before--but here she backlights her act with a implicit desperation that gnaws away at one's core. Even her act feels tragic as such: like a dreamy teenager, she rattles off to Mrs. Stilton her favorite movie stars and their birth places, and we begin to think she herself is merely an amalgam of all the brands of scrappy newspaperwoman bravery she's seen on screen...
...lets us listen. And the eyes of the jazz musicians alone hold another entire movie with-in the movie. The music functions as a kind of running commentary on the movie: horns roar and seem to laugh cynically as one event unfolds and then another. At one point Mrs. Stilton, napping with Blondie in the house of a friend from work, wakes up at the sound of jazz music careering along across town...