Short Cuts

tripping over ourselves

While there's no cinematic equivalent to the Mona Lisa, I submit a list of the top ten American movies of the last 50 years in no particular order:

The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Mulholland Drive, Tree of Life, Boyhood, Short Cuts.

Whaaaaaa... Short Cuts? Is it even Altman's best work? Well, everything unique and original in the other movies on this list was done before... by Altman. (Is there anything the man hasn't tried?) And everything Altman achieved in his career can be summed up in Short Cuts.

Five of the entries on my list are genre intact: gangster, war, bio, sci-fi, adventure. Lynch is a genre of his own (a master of hook and subvert), Pulp Fiction is pomo-noir with a swagger, Tree of Life, an audacious and transcendent poem, Boyhood, literally an epic achievement of dedication and commitment. Short Cuts doesn't seem to fit in as it is merely an observation of lives and love. But what observations! What lives! What heartbreaking affection. All underscored with a resonating heartbeat patching into so many paths, teetering on the brink of disaster and threatening to explode, which it does, in the form of a climactic planetary stroke. Nothing brings people together quite like a natural disaster. An earthquake, tremoring just enough to inform us of our place in history on the cosmic map. Enough to bring us down to earth, reboot our egos, and put multiple perspectives in perspective. Enough to appreciate the simple state of being.

A larger-than-life baroque master is at the helm, warbling out contrapuntal narratives and swirling themes orchestrated to perfection. Multiple story-lines wavering under one very singular umbrella. And under Altman's protective cover the talent runs free and easy, playful and experimental, ironic and sincere. The key characters in one story become walk-throughs in another, paradoxically tethere...

A huge cast full of familiar names, where each one does their job very well… but without commitment, without emotion and under a script so intricate that it leaves anyone lost.

I'm usually very critical of movies with bad or weak scripts. It's a recurring problem in cinema. This film, however, makes the opposite mistake: the script is excessive, it has so many characters and so many interconnected sub-plots that it is almost necessary to make diagrams and schemes on a board to be able to follow what is happening. I got almost halfway through the movie and I didn't really know who was who.

The film begins with a fleet of helicopters spraying something over the skies of Los Angeles. I, who was very young when the film was made, had to do some research to realize what they're doing: spraying an insecticide to fight flies, something I had never seen in the middle of a city. Then the film begins to introduce us to a multitude of characters and their everyday stories: we have several middle-class couples, each with the problems of their lives, we have a limousine driver married to a cafeteria worker, the pilot from one of the helicopters, an erotic line operator who has a husband and children… and we follow the daily problems of these couples and families. The film tries to give us a portrait of ordinary people and their lives, but it does so in an excessively dispassionate and uncompromising way, failing to convey the emotions of the characters, with whom we have no particular connection. The only sub-plot that tries to go through the most emotional way (that of the child) turns out to be so melodramatic that it loses credibility.

Technically, this film is low-key and doesn't bet too much on anything flashy. The cinematography is the standard used at that time, the special effects and visuals work reasonably, but not surprisingly, the sets and costumes are regular. The editing work was well done, but the film, with its three hours long, becomes a little tiri...

Robert Altman's Short Cuts is a lovely polyptych of interconnected stories, inspired by Raymond Carver's short stories and his poem "Lemonade," which asks: what if this had happened, rather than that? What then? It's the question we all ask ourselves at some point in life, the endless branching paths of possibility, the sliding doors moment that changes everything or nothing.

Altman weaves together lives in Los Angeles, letting stories brush against each other, intersect, diverge. A child is hit by a car; a baker calls with increasingly angry messages about an uncollected birthday cake; a woman discovers her husband's infidelity while a helicopter sprays for medflies overhead. The connections are sometimes direct, sometimes tangential, sometimes purely atmospheric. What matters is the accumulation, the sense of lives lived in proximity, of small choices rippling outward in ways we can't predict or control.

The ensemble cast is remarkable, each actor given space to inhabit fully realized moments rather than complete arcs. Altman trusts the audience to find meaning in fragments, in the juxtaposition of one person's crisis against another's mundane Tuesday. There's no grand synthesis, no tidy moral; just the texture of lives unfolding, the what-ifs hovering over every decision, every conversation, every moment when things could have gone differently.

8/10: a humane, observant film that understands life as a collection of interconnected stories, each one asking what if, what if, what if.