Pictures from Robert Altman’s life
Robert Altman’s impact on cinema is the stuff of legend. In the 1970s he applied the Chaos Theory to how stories in Hollywood were told and became one of the godfathers of indie film. Altman, who died on Monday in a Los Angeles hospital, discovered that coincidence could be just as powerful as narrative and that overlapping perspectives of the same scene could release emotions impossible to put into words. He was an artist and a maverick.
Hollywood distrusted his ironic and often cynical attitude to convention. But few could dispute the magical skills he brought to the most populist work. His 1969 film M*A*S*H, about the antics of a mobile army hospital in Korea, established the hallmarks of his style. Altman revelled in leaky vignettes rather than tight story lines. The mumbling actors and the short attention span of his camera made a profound nonsense of perfectly shaped scripts and feelgood (or indeed bad) narratives.
His appetite for black comedy and his dislike of happy endings resulted in some acute satires about modern manners. The Long Goodbye (1973) played brilliant tricks on a neurotic detective (Elliott Gould) whose old-fashioned values fall short of the greedy Me Generation of modern Los Angeles. His backstage drama Nashville (1975), an epic account of a week in the lives of 24 musicians and fans attending a country music festival, was an exhilarating tapestry of contemporary American life. Altman hit his peaks during periods of profound disenchantment, although during the 1980s he was a box office ghost.
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His spectacular return to form in the 1990s was an inspiring feat. The Player (1992), starring Tim Robbins as a ruthless Hollywood executive, is one of the greatest satires filmed about the grisly business of greed, survival and shame. Short Cuts, shot just a year later, was the film that put his name into the dictionary. Eight middle-class couples in a rampantly consumerist milieu touch and fail to share their personal disasters. Its almost accidental structure defies every expectation.
Altman’s slippery understanding of human traffic has been as important and influential to film as Hitchcock has been to suspense. That’s not to say that his career is free of duds. One of the most painful duties I’ve ever had to perform was to review his preposterous mid-life crisis movie, Dr T & the Women (2000), starring Richard Gere. His last film, a musical spoof called A Prairie Home Companion, which is yet to be released, left me cold. I’d rather remember him for Gosford Park (2001), his last truly great film, about the upstairs-downstairs antics of toffs and servants in an English country house in 1932.