Altman Lost in a Dream

...Its central idea of psychological dependency and metamorphosis was explored with far greater subtlety and complexity in Ingmar Bergman's Persona, featuring Bibi An-dersson and Liv Ullmann (whose acting seems still more impressive today than it did 10 years ago, especially given Duvall and Spacek's feeble impersonations...

...Miller), yet energy, ambition and sheer technical brilliance have more than made up for a lack of consistency...

...With 3 Women—except for the music, a moody flute and cello score by Gerald Busby that portentously announces we are watching and listening to Art—Altman was wholly on his own for the first time...

...For instance, Altman captures many of the rituals of women living together—like sleeping on a rollaway bed in the living room when a roommate is using the bedroom to entertain "company...

...None of Millie's embarrassingly apparent shortcomings matter in the least to Pinky, whose admiration borders on awe: "She's the most perfect person I ever met...

...In contrast to, say, Fellini's treatment of the waif-like Giulietta Masina in La Strada, Altman exploits the physical appearance of these actresses in the crudest possible fashion, encouraging them to act like zombies in order to hammer the point that the characters they play are emotional ciphers...

...And since we see her copy Millie's Social Security number at one point, it comes as no surprise to learn later that she has none of her own?Altman's obvious metaphor for the interchangeability of the two characters...

...On a rather simple level, in fact, it is a crude but effective comedy of manners...

...fortunately, they are usually dissipated by the cold, clear morning light...

...Altman's movie is indeed "personal," a la Barbra Streisand's recent epic, and it is equally lousy...

...She culls the women's magazines for a "surefire way to win a man" and chooses breath deodorants, frozen conconc-tions of bananas slathered in chocolate sauce and sprinkled with Rice Krispies ("I made them once before," she says, "and they were a real big hit"), and plastic "Florentine wine goblets...

...The characterizations are perfectly in keeping with such a satirical approach...

...Thus we are given several instances of what Altman probably regards as foreshadowing, but are actually little more than creaky plot devices...

...Miller deftly parodied the Western, The Long Goodbye lampooned the detective thriller, and in both cases by simultaneously accepting and playing off the conventions of a genre, Altman himself imposed effective reins on his otherwise undisciplined imagination...

...About halfway through the film, after Willie has rescued Pinky from a suicide attempt, the three women start to assume one another's identities...

...As a matter of fact, 3 Women could be termed a Star is Born for intellectuals...

...Another leitmotif is the bringing into focus of a blurry object in the foreground—presumably to correspond with the way the jigsaw-puzzle plot is meant to fall together...

...Hence 3 Women appears to have been brought to life in what must have been a state of extreme artistic frustration...

...Unfortunately, Altman repeats the same little effect four more times, an example of the heavy-handedness that plagues the entire movie...

...His apologists have claimed that 3 Women is free from the demands of dramatic logic because it is a "literal 'dream' film," yet the real problem is that it is excessively logical: All of its episodes are mechanically structured to fit the requirements of the director's thematic notions...

...In the last year, however, Alt-man's Buffalo Bill and the Indians —released after prolonged and well-publicized difficulties with producer Dino De Laurentiis—turned out to be a disaster, and he was subsequently fired from the productions of Ragtime and Breakfast of Champions...

...Millie, for one, is a totally vacuous creation of the supermarket culture...

...Altman can make the films he wants to because he is probably the most talented and certainly the most prolific of the new breed of independent American directors (3 Women is his 10th movie in seven years...

...It originated, according to the production notes, in a vision Alt-man had one Saturday night: "Two girls from Texas, dreaming of the good life, meet in a desert community, come to terms with the undercurrents in their lives, and undergo a metamorphosis...

...Not surprisingly, the result is little more than a spasm of self-indulgence that should cause the most diehard Altman admirers to join in the despair at the regrettable direction his career is now taking...

...Scenes are repeatedly shot through water —in a swimming pool or an aquarium—as a literal poke in the eye to presage the means of Pinky's suicide attempt...

...ALTMAN LOST IN A DREAM BY ROBERT ASAHINA In Robert Altman's 3 Women, two hours pass before Janice Rule utters her first line: "I just had the most wonderful dream, but I can't seem to remember it...

...McCabe and Mrs...

...She fantasizes about winning a mail-order sweepstakes and buying a microwave oven, but her continual drone of empty chatter succeeds onlv in making her into an object of ridicule...

...It is therefore particularly amazing that Andrew Sarris has fatuously professed admiration for the director's "eventual elevation of Millie and Pinky from groundlings to goddesses...

...in case we missed their symbolic function, Pinky muses, "I wonder what it's like to be twins...

...If this brief account makes the movie sound a trifle arcane, I should point out that 3 Women is not totally inaccessible (although it does have its share of willful obscurity...

...As she was fantasizing about birth and death and two women fusing together, I could not help thinking of the vastly superior nightmare sequence in Brian de Palma's Sisters, a shocker that starred Margo Kidder as one of a separated pair of Siamese twins...

...Movie making is a collaborative art, something the auteur theorists are continually forgetting...

...Pinky eventually moves into Millie's apartment...

...Meanwhile, Willie Hart (Janice Rule), the pregnant wife of Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier), the girls' landlord, slowly emerges as the catalyst of this strangely symbiotic relationship...

...We know better, of course, and Altman neatly underscores Millie's complete lack of awareness by showing her driving away from one scene with her dress sticking out from under the door of her car...

...Altman's misogyny, while apparent throughout his career, has never been this blatantly displayed...

...He conceived it, wrote it, produced if, directed it, and even formed his own production company after his run-ins with Dino De Laurentiis...

...Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), a novice physical therapist, forms a peculiar emotional attachment to one of her coworkers, Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duval...

...I shudder to think of the domestic squabbles that could result from that statement—Sarris' wife, Molly Haskell, will surely take a different view of things...

...and not only do the two gradually become inseparable, but Pinky begins to ape Millie's gestures and parrot her expressions...

...Despite Sards' prediction that critics would be upset by Altman's "imitating Europeans when he should be breaking new ground right here in the good old U.S.A.," less forgivable in my view is his being outclassed by his American peers...

...Even the overinflated Nashville did nothing to diminish his stature as an exceptionally interesting contemporary filmmaker...

...t more discouraging than Altman's regressive ideology is the almost total derivativeness of 3 Women...

...Similarly, a pair of twins appears intermittently throughout the movie...

...The movie commences at the Desert Springs Rehabilitation and Geriatric Center in Palm Springs, California...

...Perhaps all of these difficulties stem from Altman's failure to advance beyond his own earlier successes, and his need for a strong formal base that provides control...

...As for Rule, she wanders around for two hours like a catatonic earth mother in a broad-brimmed hat...

...His oeuvre ranges from the ridiculous (Brewster McCloud) to the sublime (The Long Goodbye), from the wooden (Thieves Like Us) to the poetic (McCabe and Mrs...

...At the conclusion they have become three aspects of a single personality...

...In Nashville, screenwriter Joan Tewksbury's careful dramatic structure placed an external constraint on Altman's tendency toward visual and literary excesses...

...What is worse, Altman simply cannot keep his camera away from Duvall's buck teeth, or Spacek's bug eyes...

...Besides being belabored, this kind of cinematic engineering is so singleminded that it frequently isolates what is before us from any coherent dramatic context...

...One of the weakest sections of 3 Women is Pinky's nightmare scene, a sort of dream within the dream-movie...

...Now all of us have fantasies that are compelling in the dead of night...

...But Robert Altman awakened with the determination to base a movie on his dream—and unlike most of us, he was able to do so...

...her role is merely the most extreme embodiment of the crazy lady played by Sandy Dennis and Geraldine Chaplin in previous Altman films...

...By that time, though, it is disappointingly clear that the movie is a nightmare we would rather forget...

...Most of Altman's visual trappings are taken straight from Fellini, notably his Juliet of the Spirits...

...Sadly, Altman is simply incapable of shouldering this kind of burden, and he ended up with an egocentric mess...

...Do you think they know which one they are...

...Altman has also found the perfect visual correlate of his erector-set approach to movie making...