SHORT CUTS
With Anne Archer, Bruce Davison, Robert Downey Jr., Peter Gallagher, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Lyle Lovett, Andie MacDowell, Frances McDormand, Matthew Modine, Julianne Moore, Chris Penn, Tim Robbins, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Madeleine Stowe, Lili Taylor, Lily Tomlin, Fred Ward, and Tom Waits.
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Ross recorded a comparable version of this song well before Altman got around to making Short Cuts, and his use of this tune as a kind of impressionistic clothesline on which to hang some of the movie’s images, feelings, and themes recalls the lovely instinctual use he made of a few Leonard Cohen songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller 22 years ago. It’s an art of drifting, merging chance encounters between song and story, sound and image, mood and subject–Altman’s special talent at its best. Manny Farber once described director Howard Hawks as someone “whose whole movie-making system seems a secret preoccupation with linking, a connections business involving people, plots, and eight-inch hat brims.” Despite the obvious differences, Altman is clearly in the connections business himself. It’s the connections, in fact, that make some of the transitional moments of this movie as exciting as anything he’s done in years. And he seems to know that, because he calls the movie Short Cuts.
Mixing roughly ten miniplots and 22 characters, Short Cuts is Altman’s return to his ecstatic anthology mode–a kind of juggling act he practiced with two dozen characters in Nashville and twice as many in A Wedding. This time he does it all on a tightrope without a net.
Contrived accidents are basic to the movie’s game plan. One reality is made to spill into another, and some of the loveliest developments–the humanizing of a disgruntled baker (Lyle Lovett) who we’ve encountered mainly as the disembodied telephone voice of a crank caller, and a mix-up of snapshots between two clusters of characters at a Fotomat–can be described as exercises in dialectical relativity that come about when separate fictional worlds in the movie are briefly made to converge.
The good news about Short Cuts is that it’s Altman soup–with a few characters and situations from Carver stories tossed in for flavor–and for all its flaws it’s real art, packed with irony. The bad news is that Altman’s conception of art won’t rest with the intricate processes he sets in motion, but has to incorporate high-flown generalizations about them to give his audience a sense of superiority. If only the siren call of the marketplace didn’t force him to give the whole farrago some artificial sense of closure.
