The Talkies / A Wedding

...A teacher of mine once remarked that coming across a minor character about whom you would love to know more was one of the most unusual experiences in literature...

...In a flash we see him, and the vision is tempered with profound sympathy...

...How the Post arrives at its judgments Tom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...

...Burnett's insensitive, boisterous husband tells every-body to call him Snooks, but when, during the ceremony, he is asked who gives the bride away, he says "Liam Brenner"—then adds apologetically, "It's Irish...

...The extreme density of the film—Altman deserves considerable credit, at the very least, for his choreography—contributes both to its virtues and its flaws...

...Both films present a group of people who, placed more or less in proximity for a brief period, interact in various combinations...

...It proves to be a Jamesian one of transcontinental disguise and emotional imprisonment, and it culminates in a speech before Gish that is one of the most moving filmed monologues I have ever seen...

...Some critics have complained that A Wedding has nothing to "say...

...And predictably, when Altman goes for humor it often comes too easy: the bride with braces, the senile bishop, and the people in desperate need of bathrooms all pro-vide the laughs, but they're cheap...

...To begin with the latter, which are many, A Ben Yagoda is a free-lance writer living in New York...

...But whites, who vote out of proportion to their numbers (24 percent of the population, and slowly increasing for the first time since 1950), welcome guidance from their magisterial morning newspaper as to which of the various black candidates to vote for...

...the strict attention, on the other hand, to nuances of character and atmosphere...

...As a result, a lot of humans are put on the public pay-roll at quite high salaries, and more than anyone, it seems, the Department of Human Resources helps them...

...and the resident Dr...

...And if the sheer volume of humanity present at A Wedding on occasion either forces Altman into too-easy equations or prevents him from providing enough information, it also gives him room for what he does best...

...Yeldell under indictment (as he was in September, the trial not occur-ring for another month), and with His Honor trailing in the incomplete returns on the day after the primary, there was considerable local interest as to whether the Washington administration was done for at last...

...The bride's mother (Carol Burnett) is dancing with Merrill's husband (Pat McCormack) when he suddenly stops and announces that he is madly in love with her...

...the product of a union between an aristocratic Wasp mother and an Italian father, and Muffin Brenner (Amy Stryker), whose father is a trucker-turned-tycoon from Louisville...

...Two strands of the film go beyond the strategy of particularization into something larger...

...The problem is ecological at root...

...And the subject is hardly unconventional...

...The first has to do with Dino's father (Vittorio Gassman), whose secret history we discover as the movie progresses...

...When Altman is at his best, that is what he offers manifold...

...It could be argued that the general air of confusion imitates the atmosphere of a real wedding—where we are always wondering, Who was that fellow in the maroon leisure suit?—but this is supposed to be art, not life...

...residents who drive off to federal buildings every morning trust their paper to study the entrails at City Hall...

...another example is Horatio in Hamlet...

...Lillian Gish, as the dying matriarch of Dino's mother's family, standing at an open window, her hair down and glowing with light—an astonishing image that plays on our feelings about the young Gish and holds half a century in its grasp...

...So when Barry came in by a whisker the morning after the election, it could safely be assumed that the Post endorsement had played an important role...

...In other cases, Altman's sin of over-population leads him to force his hand, to come up with characters who sound just one note or are revealed (in the end) to be propelled by a single dark secret...

...any wider truths must be supplied by us...

...City Council Chairman Sterling Tucker finished second, while Washington wound up last...

...Predictably, too, the exigencies of Altman's method can work against him when he tries for a deeper look into characters—as one of the prominent sub-plots amply demonstrates...

...I understand why they feel that way—Altman's satire unarguably has its mean side—but I would argue that a stronger impulse in the film is compassion...

...If it does not have quite the cathartic effect of the accidental shooting of the aviator in Rules of the Game (afterwhich it was surely modeled), it does serve much the same purpose: to open our eyes, moving us beyond the small foibles and gallantries we have spent two hours looking at into a world where the possibility of tragedy is always present...

...But A Wedding gives us more characters (48 instead of 24), a col-lapsed time-frame (barely longer than the film itself instead of five days), and a much smaller setting (the grounds of the Corelli mansion instead of a city...

...the importance of words barely heard and images barely glimpsed...

...Burnett does a good job with the role, but she is working at a crippling disadvantage: McCormack has proclaimed his ardor so suddenly, in such a comically ludicrous fashion, that any poignance or tenderness is drastically under-cut...

...We recognize the casual, almost improvisational, attitude toward plot and structure...

...the girlish Muffin happening to see Dino being sobered up in a shower and suddenly glimpsing what the years ahead may hold...

...0 ne comes away from A Wedding with epiphanies of the rarest kind in films—ones that words cannot do justice to: 20 The American Spectator December 1978 Muffin's feeble-minded sister (Mia Far-row) throwing a handful of water at her own image in a mirror, and Dino saying offhandedly, "I'm happy...

...I'm always happy"—both moments, we realize, tell us all we need to know about the characters...

...As we see it, Burnett is wasting all her emotion (and fine acting) on a buffoon...

...Lauren Hutton, for example, as the wedding photographer, never manages to establish a personality of any kind, and the film drags during her scenes...

...So with Mr...

...Altman's films—A Wedding most of all—concentrate on the particular...

...This is one of the most tiresome conventions of the American theater, and it plays no better here...

...It is something like a cross between Rules of the Game, Grand Hotel, and Father of the Bride, with a cast of (almost) thousands...

...By contrast, her counterpart in Nashville—the BBC journalist played by Geraldine Chaplin—was as neat an authorial self-parody as Chaucer's narrator in Canterbury Tales...

...A Redding Wedding is simply too cluttered...

...The most trusted of all his advisors, Joseph Yeldell, formerly director of a rambling, protean, some would say phantom, agency called the Department of Human Resources, was recently convicted of bribery...

...He was defeated in the Democratic primary by a young upstart named Marion Barry, described as having been a street radical a decade ago, but now a habitue of fashion-able tailors and possessed of a studied, orotund diction...

...The second is an episode of violence and mistaken identity that serves as the film's climax...

...To be sure, A Wedding is unmistakably an Altman work...

...How many such employees there are, exactly, where their offices are located, and what they do inside them, are mysteries that have successfully resisted the investigative re-sources of newspapers and official inquiry...

...Indeed, A Wedding may represent a new kind of film altogether—epic social comedy...

...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Rebell D.C...

...Arithmetic reveals that A Wedding allots less time per capita to its characters even than Nashville, and some of them just don't have the time to become much more than bodies moving on the screen...

...A Wedding, his new movie, is a world apart from the hazy dreamscape of 3 Women—which in turn had virtually nothing in common with its predecessor, the antimythic Buffalo Bill and the Indians...

...Democracy: One Man, Two Votes By the time this column is published, our nation's capital will have elected a new mayor, the eponymous incumbent Walter Washington having been ousted at last...

...Altman's ample understanding can have an amazing reach, extending even to the least likeable character he shows us...

...Glancing off people and interchanges like a bumper car at a fair, he can catch just this or that glance or remark, never making too big a point of it, and then move on...

...nobody is quite sure, because for one thing it is nearly impossible to get anyone in the city government to answer a phone, but D.C...

...By rejecting, for the most part, Hollywood conventions of plot and characterization—most of them sentimental and simplistic—he may limn persons and situations in whatever scale he chooses, at times with dazzling results...

...the undercurrent of iconoclasm...

...True to its title, the film takes place entirely at the ceremony and reception celebrating the marriage of Dino Corelli (Desi Arnaz, Jr...

...Startled at first, she comes to accept the idea as the day wears on and even agrees to a tryst, but at the end of the reception changes her mind...

...Would the embattled mayor find enough missing ballots to upset the street-savvy radical of yesteryear and the Post's The American Spectator December 1978 21...

...Finally, Altman's technique limits the kinds of meaning he can offer...

...THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda Robert Altman, the most consistently interesting contemporary American film-maker, has once more declined to repeat himself...

...Feelgood, played wonderfully by Howard Duff, dispensing drugs, liquor, and advice with a wry, Chekhovian detachment...

...Like the Lily Tomlin character in Nashville she has an unattractive husband (indeed, he's positively boorish), and the affair awakens long-dormant feelings in her...

...Upon learning that the wedding coordinator (Geraldine Chaplin) is unhappy be-cause she is a lesbian, or that Dino's mother (Nina Van Pallandt) is so tense because she is a heroin addict, we feel like groaning out loud...

...Critics have complained, too, that A Wedding is nasty...

...Most people knew that the man not to vote for was Washington—a cautious, in-effectual plodder perennially in hiding from the press and everyone else with the exception of a few trusted aides—"trusted, that is, by him, though not often by anyone else," as the Almanac of American Politics observed...

...The Department of Human Resources is a billion-dollar elaboration of the idea that humans have no resources and so are unable to help themselves...

...Barry had won most of the white-dominated wards west of Rock Creek Park...

...A last-ditch effort to count the employees sitting at their desks was made last year, but this census was never published, and we may assume the task was never completed...

...Yet Altman can give us what no other filmmaker can...

...Only after two viewings could I sort out all the wedding guests and participants, and even then the nature of all their relationships wasn't completely clear...

...Similarly, since Dina Merrill and Virginia Vestoff have been given nothing to work with, the aunts they play emerge as ciphers...

...A Wedding's uniqueness may be appreciated by comparing it with Nashville (1975), the Altman work it most resembles...

...if by this they mean that it offers no pronouncements on the role of marriage, class, or family in American society, they are right...

...Note the indefinite article in the title...

...Shortly before the election, the Washington Post splashed its Holy Water in Barry's direction—a highly significant endorsement because most whites in the District of Columbia don't follow local politics, quite correctly assuming it to be an all-black spoils game...

...Only Altman...

...He was speaking of Pyotr Perhotin, the official who helps Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov...