After years of stalemate (and underground work) this masterpiece celebrated its comeback
on the surface of the great director. And it sounds very relevant after the Will Smith case
At the end of the 1970s, the commercial career of a film giant like Robert Altman is already in an impressive stalemate. The Palme d’Or won at the Cannes Film Festival with M * A * S * H (1970) far away, and also the great public success obtained with Nashville (1975) a faded memory. Despite a filmography full of only great films and not infrequently masterpieces, (such as I Compari, 1971; The Long Goodbye, 1973; California Poker, 1974, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, 1976; A marriage, 1978), his wanderings for various production companies, his natural inclination to experiment (Images, 1972; Quintet, 1979) and the nonchalance with which he usually ventures into companies inevitably destined for commercial flop have over time completely alienated the confidence of producers.
The opportunity to unmark from that first moment of impasse he was offered in 1980, when after the invisible Health (even never released in Italy), unusually paired Paramount and Disney put him in his hand twenty million dollars of the time for Popeye – Popeye (1981 ); but the transposition / musical for the big screen of Elzie Crisler Segar’s still hugely popular comic book hero (starring Robin Williams, launched by the sitcom Mork & Mindy, in the title role) becomes in her hands an attempt at ferocious satire (scripted not to case by the legendary militant French cartoonist Jules Feiffer) who is massacred by the press as well as ignored by the public and who after forty years has not yet been granted a necessary critical reassessment. After what remains his greatest dbcle, in the decade of the Eighties Altman becomes even more incorporeal in the coeval production logic: in fact he retires to France, dedicates himself to theatrical direction and scrapes ever smaller budgets to bring extraordinarily filmed large pices to the screen.
And in a re-dimension that would have extinguished anyone in depression, he made other beautiful (and forgotten) films: like Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), from a comedy by Ed Graczyk, the mighty Streamers (1983) by David Rabe, Madness of love (1985) also starring its author Sam Shepard, as well as more eccentric feats such as Secret Honor (1984, a filmed monologue in which Philip Baker Hall plays Richard Nixon) or the surreal and misunderstood Don’t Play with the Cactus (1985). With Group Therapy (1987, again taken from a comedy and always made in economics) Altman seems to raise the crest: and rediscovers a choral dimension with a schizoid rhythm just when a few months after the death of the great Raymond Carver he began working on the reduction for the cinema (which will become America’s Golden Lion in 1993 today) of a dozen of his stories. Acquired a commission for Antenna 2 which on the occasion of the centenary of Van Gogh’s death entrusted him with the Vincent & Theo river (1990), Altman ready for his rescue.
Back to the United States and, As Carver continues his grueling script work, he is contacted by an indie production company (Avenue Entertainment) who owns the rights to Michael Tolkin’s corrosive Hollywood satirical novel, The Player, which seems to fit perfectly on his strings. puppeteer as well as offering him on a silver platter a vehicle of potential revenge against the establishment that had ostracized him. Thus was born The protagonists, which in these days when the Hollywood flaws have returned to the spotlight in the worst way is exactly thirty years old (it premiered at the Cleveland Festival on April 3, 1992). the story of the very demanding and infallible Hollywood producer Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), whose career is doubly threatened: by a young executive on the rise, Larry Levi (Peter Gallagher), and by a mysterious stalker who threatens him with death. Convinced that he is persecuted by the screenwriter Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio) to whom he refused an interview, he manages to track him down thanks to the man’s girlfriend, June (Greta Scacchi), and after a violent altercation he kills him by passing the incident as the consequence of a failed robbery. After Studios security chief Stuckel (Fred Ward) informs him that the police know of his latest meeting with Kahane, Mill receives a new threatening fax from his persecutor and realizes he has killed the wrong man; meanwhile, detectives Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) and DeLongpre (Lyle Lovett) suspect him, while two screenwriters (Richard E. Grant and Dean Stockwell) corner him by proposing a script for a film destined for certain failure.
Believe it or not, that’s not the beginning: even if the real villains of the Mecca of Cinema (ie those who do not appear on screen) hardly get away with it. The protagonists perhaps, as some have shrewdly defined it, “the greatest anti-Hollywood film ever produced in Hollywood”, that hell of opportunism dominated by the logic of profit whose dynamics were described by Altman himself with these words: ” they were looking for a good actor, a good director and a good writer; now they first decide how to sell a film and then, once it is sold, they try to put it on its feet ”. The first three characteristics invoked here are all there, and pantographed. There are dozens of good actors involved (in addition to those already mentioned in the plot there are also Sydney Pollack, Brion James, Angela Hall, Dina Merrill, Jeremy Piven, Gina Gershon, Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis – the latter in the finale with open stage applause- and a frightening crowd of stars in the role of themselves including Karen Black, Robert Carradine, Peter Falk, Jack Lemmon, John Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, Elliott Gould, Anjelica Huston, Nick Nolte, Burt Reynolds.
The script (written with great skill by Tolkin himself) both a tightly narrative manual and an example of a rare corrosive dialogic skill; and as for the “good director”, well, the initial Wellesian sequence shot (in which, exemplarily, the characters discuss sequence shots) of almost ten minutes is enough – perhaps even a tribute to the analogous one of Il fal delle vanit, 1990, by Brian DePalma? – which immediately speaks of a renewed Altmanian pleasure not only related to being able to coordinate, as always, an accomplice and used cast at best, but also to leave a mark again on the level of that pure spectacular construction for images absent from his cinema at least since the days of the deranged but fascinating Quintet. A few months after the “premiere”, the revival ends at the Cannes Film Festival with two awards (for best director and Tim Robbins) and the following year with three Oscar nominations (direction, screenplay and editing). And Altman is finally ready for America today, the opening of the last act that is finally dazzling in a career that will see other great successes and at least three other masterpieces (in particular the choral, poignant, final -terminals? – Gosford Park, 2001, The Company, 2003, and Radio America, 2006). We will never know how and what his gaze would look upon today, in a contemporary far more extreme and desolate than his most pessimistic visions; but we can imagine it, and (maybe) smile.
April 7, 2022 (change April 7, 2022 | 10:04 am)
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