Short Cuts

Like Van Morrison, director Robert Altman has been too long in exile. In fact, he’s been living in France. He had to move: for more than a decade, no one in Hollywood would return his calls. The brilliant maverick of ‘70s cinema became the displaced crank of the ‘80s. He was even willing to do work for television, a medium he thought he’d successfully escaped during the ‘60s.

Then, last year, he scored a hit with The Player, a film that proved the old theory that you can’t go wrong in Hollywood by saying nasty things about it. In Short Cuts, Altman takes a similarly critical view of the country. The results are mixed, but Short Cuts may be one of the defining films of the decade. It’s certainly one of the harshest.

Short Cuts is epic in length and overloaded in cast. The free-flowing script was adapted from a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver; it’s packed with enough bitter ironies for six movies. Some of the stories work, and some don’t.

What does work in Short Cuts is Altman’s vision of a society drowning in petty bickering, constipated hostility and latent violence. The movie is a long prologue to the apocalypse and Doomsday is only deferred, not escaped. Altman has always been a jaded romantic, but this may be his most cynical film.

In many ways. Short Cuts’ perspective is accurate to a deadly degree. In the movie, it feels as if the barely contained anger of the ‘90s is enough to start the Great Quake. Short Cuts is merely tracing the fissures.

Altman has returned as a grim, but gifted prophet. Whether you love it or hate it, you’re going to want to see Short Cuts.