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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 174 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Short cuts
Dir: Robert Altman
Robert Altman is Hollywood’s supreme debunker of American mythology. From his first success MASH to his great 1970s films McCabe and Mrs Miller and Nashville and his recent work The Player, he has sought to present an image of American society that challenges the official version.
Short Cuts is an adaptation of a series of Raymond Carver short stories. Its style is reminiscent of Nashville, with a complex story that cuts continuously between the overlapping lives of a series of lower middle class characters in Los Angeles.
The camera flits in and out of their lives like an eavesdropper. The sudden shifts are so skilful, and the interweaving group of losers and loners so deftly drawn, that we never lose track of the different strands.
There is no plot as such, rather a mosaic of linked stories. There is the waitress who, afraid of loneliness, always takes back her drunken down-and-out husband. Running over a child, who claims to be unhurt and insists on hurrying home alone, she never discovers the unspeakable outcome of the accident.
There are the child’s parents, their marriage undermined by an undercurrent of resentment, who the accident brings closer together. There is their neighbour, a middle-aged jazz singer who has never really noticed her cellist daughter.
There is the hospital doctor who treats the child – on the surface a stable, dedicated professional but below it simmering with jealous rage at his wife’s infidelity.
The stories are not of equal strength. Yet the many small brushstrokes amount to a coherent vision of contemporary America – a deeply pessimistic one.
We see the characters trapped in their own selfishness and isolation, bumping into and bouncing off each other, never really meeting, and unable to control their own destinies.
If the film falls short of a masterpiece, it is partly because its one-sided bleakness offers little sense that even in the darkest moments human beings are capable of solidarity. This is tied into an ambiguity at the film’s heart.
At times it seems one is being offered a picture of a society, of Americans who had hopes and expectations and who are now struggling to make sense of why the American Dream has passed them by. At other times, it seems that Altman is simply saying: this is life, this is what people are like.
However, the vigorous, often amusing performances draw out one’s sympathy towards the characters and make the film alive if limited in its vision.
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