Verse:
Hawley, Richard A.
victims. You have to let that round-house punch come full ever. He becomes the sort of person you avoid in real life, circle and clip you on the chin, too. After all, what...
...The real significance of cere- The thru-way is jammed monies like weddings having drained away long ago, Rita is And on a quiet side street the sort of person who now tries to dedicate herself to going As a man shovels, an artery closes through the motions...
...It's a very pointed and he tends to interrupt a scene and go on to something else telling gesture, I guess...
...Altman's films have usually been wonderful because Sirens sound...
...Vittorio Gassman), makes a speech to his dead mother-inIn Nashville, she plays the BBC reporter who is running law, something about her "mala casa...
...He's the type who acts as if you should help Altman's solution to the problem is not to act in his film, but him make sense of his life when in fact you can't figure out rather to project onto one of'the roles in it a parody of his own what the hell he's talking about...
...middle of interviews, usually at the moment the subject is COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...And interviewer are even rather like his as a writer-director...
...Like Rita, Altman gets very Prints itself silently across our thoughts: caught up in the occasion, the ritual of mating, and practically Blizzard . . . Everything is officially wrong turns his film into an ark...
...After all, what makes someone who would try to corner you at a cocktail party and Citizen Kane great is that Welles played Kane himself...
...You smile uneasily, and look role as maker of it...
...At the conclusion he Since this is what Altman is doing himself in essence, she has announces, like a Christopher Columbus who has decided the to be taken, I think, as a bit of self-caricature...
...genres-and revive them for us...
...They breathe new life into Out, out past the lights them in the very act of poking fun, because these movies are so Meadows are storing this gift like cream, original, so full of energy...
...Just as off he goes with his long-lost brother...
...they're one thing in our lives that doesn't just go through the motions...
...He becomes the sort of person you avoid in real life, circle and clip you on the chin, too...
...This makes her job not unlike Altman's, which is to dream up activities and intrigues for everyone to become embroiled in, and to see to it that the festivities get as generally screwed up as possible...
...All I know is that if he hadn't made it at anytime he pleases, so she compulsively jumps up in the this point, I might have...
...It is her job to MC events like the viewing of the presents, and to see to it that January everything comes off smoothly...
...It little like this...
...That's why she's so pathetic...
...confide in you...
...Her habits as an whole thing didn't work out, that he is going back to Italy...
...In Three Women, he Where it belongs...
...One latecomer who arrives at the reception on horseback And pop...
...Altman is also like And up your trouser leg Rita in that he is trying hard-too hard-to keep it all from And over the air: becoming just an empty ritual...
...They're downis paired with another who pulls up on a motorcycle...
...Every character and every incident Autos askew, related and unrelated have their counterpart...
...Electrically, cleanly It may even be that this time Altman is a little too like his The news beeps its alarm, anti-self played by Chaplin...
...The head of the groom's family, Louis Correlli is the character played in each film by Geraldine Chaplin...
...gone a bit dead on him...
...showed us what those feelings were, how intent he is on humanizing such characters...
...It's rather incoherent around trying to do a documentary on the Nashville scene...
...Even the event of the wedding itself is neatly balanced by the death of Cold in the walls the family matriarch (Lillian Gish) just as the wedding party And up the stairs arrives back at the house for the reception...
...In A Wedding, as in Nashville, this surro- for your chance to escape...
...and rambling, and much of it is in Italian...
...And he's down, too...
...But when his aspirations for a character like this fail, the character becomes more odious than 19 January 1979: 19...
...It drifts to rest, Altman has always had special feelings, special ambitions, Increases itself for poor, benighted creatures like Rita...
...In A Wedding Chaplin plays Richard A. Hawley the "wedding co-ordinator," Rita Billingsley, who is in charge of all the arrangements for the reception...
...They take cliche people and events-and movie But it's not like this at all...
...The night's alive...
...about to reveal his innermost thoughts, and rushes off after some celebrity she has spotted...
...An implication of male homosexuality As by a whimsical magnet, at one point is matched elsewhere by one of female homosexu- Snow slung low on the wires ality...
...Toward the end, our relationship gate figure is the most obnoxious, irredeemable character in with A Wedding, perhaps with Altman himself, gets to be a the movie, the one whom the satire ridicules most pitilessly...
...But A Wedding might almost make Tangles of bush and twig fingers us wonder whether Altman's own, self-invented forms haven't Grow soft in its handling...
...It's become too easy and automatic for Over the cordwood and along the house him to do this kind of stuff...
Vol. 106 • January 1979 • No. 1
