Screen

...Stigma...

...Yet Griffin does indeed woo and bed her even while under police surveillance...

...We never doubt that this man would risk destroying himself for this particular woman...

...But without that insight Mill looks simple-minded...

...These stories, before Altman took them in hand, were genre pieces with linear plots and tiny casts...

...The reader is constantly startled by this character's meditations: his feeling that the murder was a sacrifice made to appease his anonymous persecutor...

...his fantasies of amusing his future cellmates with tales of his executive and amorous adventures...

...Just as the noose seems to be tightening around the executive's neck, happenstance comes to his rescue...

...RICHARD ALLEVA 20: 5 June 1992 Commonweal...

...With the psychology of its lead character missing, some of the oddities of the plot seem downright absurd...

...Since the movie's Mill also seems shallow, we can simply dismiss the affair as a case of like being attracted to like...

...This would be a perfectly serviceable plot for a thriller but Michael Tolkin did not choose to write one...

...Mill tracks down a writer whom he supposes to be his tormentor and, in an access of cold-blooded murderousness which he himself doesn't and will never understand, kills the fellow...

...Griffin is rather like Camus's Meursault, but he's an all-American Meursault whose utter detachment from his fellow humans leads him not into drifting but into ruthless competition...

...It would be nice to report that this collaboration between an old, returning master and a young, arriving one has resulted in a masterpiece...

...But he is also something of a mystic who is actually driven more by his obsessions and weird intuitions than by consideration of power or finance...

...They goose the audience into whispering, "Wasn't that Jack Lemmon in the corner...

...So, without meaning this time, the old subverter has subverted again, and the results are unfortunate...

...But the use of Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts in the final scene is delicious satire indeed...

...After the slaying, we see nothing but a tense young man in fashionable clothes driving from office to police station to restaurants to parties to story conferences, dealing with people nervously or ruthlessly, and fending off the police in interrogation sessions staged too offhandedly to be suspenseful...

...transformed a pulp Western called McCabe into McCabe and Mrs...

...Altman turned them into dreamlike tours of singular milieus containing dozens of characters...

...So, now that Altman seems to be back in Hollywood harness, let us hope that he can pull himself in the direction of projects than truly suit his temperament...

...The last thing Mill needs is to fall in love with the live-in girlfriend of the murdered man for this would give the police a motive for the crime...

...Mill talking to June on his cordless phone as he (unseen by her) lurks outside her house and spies on her through a window...

...his strange love/hatred of the (to him) invisible audience which he works so hard to entertain and degrade...

...This, in addition to the well chosen locations, certainly helps create verisimilitude...

...But we never question this in the book because we are privy to Mill's paranoiac fears about appearing to be less than all-powerful...

...Instead of demolishing a story for the sake of creating a new, self-sustaining movie, Altman has kept the plot intact but wound up with a film that is dehydrated...

...Most surprising then is Altman's faithful rendering of Michael Tolkin's novel, The Player...

...Instead, The Player is a fascinating tour of an exceedingly quirky mind...

...Their extroverted comic energies momentarily break through the torpor of this movie and remind us of how good Altman is at capturing the comedy of noisy, self-intoxicated promoters, and make us wonder at why there isn't more of this sort of satire in this movie about an industry that is fueled on self-promotion...

...But the film's Griffin Mill is opaque...

...If The Player is the trenchant satire its admirers claim it to be, why do all the star walk-ons seem like trailers for "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous...

...Michael Tolkin's The Player, a somber book by a storyteller who is an odder duck than Altman ever was even in his screwiest pictures, is simply not the best vehicle for this outgoing, generous, essentially comic showman to ride...

...Tolkin, whose directorial debut, The Rapture, I hailed as the most original American movie of the last few years, did the script himself and has reproduced all of the book's important incidents and characters...

...undermined Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye and blew it up into an extended rendition of a Fellini parade, L.A.-style...

...Most enjoyable of all are the story pitches made by Dean Stockwell and Richard E. Grant as two writerhustlers...

...Mill has left enough of a trail to attract the police but not quite enough to get himself immediately arrested...

...It is the reader's access to the not-quite-insanity of Griffin's mind that makes the novel interesting, not the all too familiar mechanics of a murderer's cat-and-mouse game with the police...

...Still, any movie generally recognized as a comeback is a comeback, at least as far as it is an issue...

...After all, issuing death threats is a crime...

...Altman is still a highly skilled director and a few images from The Player linger in the mind: the murder victim drowning in a shallow canal with a few ascending bubbles announcing his last seconds of life...

...or "Gosh, Harry Belafonte hasn't aged a day...

...But do shallow Machiavellis really risk life imprisonment for a grand amour...

...Aside from that, the star appearances are only used as "cameos...

...Altman took plots and turned them into parties...

...Miller, a hippy's dream of the frontier...

...But the film's killing, exceedingly well-staged, is less a gratuitous act than a hotblooded manslaughter...

...we have no access to his mind...

...We walked out of these films with a buzz on, and that buzz was a continuation of the buzz on the soundtracks: surgeons wisecracking while jovially operating under appalling conditions (M*A*S*H), barroom palaver (McCabe), the grousing of gamblers in California Split, the conversational crosscurrents of A Wedding, the country music intrigues of Nashville...

...The film's girl is played by Greta Scacchi who makes June a typical California airhead (despite some nonsense about an Icelandic background...

...Word would get out that he was a target...

...Tim Robbins, Commonweal 5 June 1992: 19 right as Mill and occasionally shows us a glimpse of the freak inside the suit, but for the most part little more is asked of this actor than to wrinkle his brow in concentration or slit his eyes in suspicion or widen them in alarm...

...Griffin Mill is, in his external professional life, a predator, a pitiless champion of the "bottom line," a shark...

...In the movie, as in the book, Mill risks imprisonment for the sake of a romance...

...One of The Player's most talked-about features is the presence of dozens of Hollywood stars playing themselves...

...He took a standard service-comedy novel and turned it into that ode to hip sterism, M*A*S*H...

...Despite a few clever passages, The Player is a torpid, shallow movie...

...Altman and Tolkin have been faithful only to the book's plot and the plot is the least interesting thing about the novel...

...In the book the girl is pathetic but not shallow and, no matter what we think of Griffin's overall character, the passion he feels for June is downright Lawrentian in its ineluctability...

...For instance, when Mill first gets threatening post cards, why doesn't he report this to the police...

...The plot: Griffin Mill, the vice-president in charge of production at a fictional Hollywood studio, has been getting death threats from an anonymous scriptwriter apparently maddened by Mill's cavalier treatment of his story proposal (though Griffin cannot remember meeting him...

...But it hasn't...

...Then he discovers that he killed the wrong man and so now he has both the law and madman hot on his trail...