There were a lot of things to be thankful for last week. I was thankful for Robert Altman.
Altman, the director, died last Monday of cancer complications; there was little time to think about him before Thanksgiving, but he stayed in my thoughts throughout the holiday. He was a restless spirit and iconoclast, full of contradictions - an American self-exiled to Paris in the 1980s, an outsider who focused on communities, a laid-back spirit who never stopped working. To people who loved movies, he was one of the darling group of Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich and Spielberg that lit the world on fire in the 1970s, but to friends the big bearded man was "the Stoner Santa." In an era full of diamonds, he was his own distinct jewel.
My first Altman movie was "M*A*S*H," the 1970 hit that later became a TV show. The film was about American surgeons stationed in Korea who spent their time golfing, drinking and cracking dirty jokes - even while operating. The project was risky from the start: The screenwriter had been blacklisted, the stars were unknowns and fifteen directors had turned it down before the man who had two small films and a few episodes of "Bonanza" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" under his belt got his hands on it. It ended up with five Oscar nominations and the second-highest box office gross of the year.
I was 13 when I first saw "M*A*S*H," and even after "There's Something About Mary" it was still the raunchiest, most uninhibited - and funniest - movie I had ever seen. Its characters weren't afraid of smuggling martinis or stripping their commanding officers nude, and whenever they were sad they would launch into a song called "Suicide is Painless." It wasn't that they didn't know the rules; they understood the rules but loved breaking them. Years later I learned that though the movie took place in Korea, its real subject was Vietnam. The gung-ho "Patton" won Best Picture that year, but if you wanted to see the real anarchic spirit of the era, then "M*A*S*H" was the movie to turn to.
But Altman would never say that. Ostensibly he was a satirist, but with a wry smile and a bottle of alcohol he stayed above convention. He made Westerns that weren't Westerns, noir films that weren't noir, musicals that weren't musicals and films with tragic antiheroes. There are the masterpieces, the crushing melancholy of "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and the thriving life of "Nashville," but the director spun gold even from the hayfields of the obscure and bizarre; "3 Women," based on a series of hallucinatory dreams, is the closest an American has come to Ingmar Bergman, and "Secret Honor" makes art out of a Richard Nixon rant.
"Loving" is a good word to describe Altman's filmmaking. The Kansas City boy paid homage to home with a 1996 film bearing its name and worked with the same actors repeatedly, making stars out of people like Elliot Gould, Donald Sutherland and Julianne Moore.
"Busy" is another. Altman films bustle with gigantic casts. The camera roves among their overlapping voices, picking each one out in an organic, semi-improvised space. There would be no "Boogie Nights" sans "M*A*S*H," no "Crash" without "Nashville;" the modern multi-character narrative has Robert Altman at its helm.
He worked often and stayed fresh, enjoying a comeback in the 1990s with the Hollywood bust-up "The Player" and the sprawling ensemble piece "Short Cuts." By the time that he had released "Gosford Park" and his last movie, this year's "A Prairie Home Companion," he had 87 film and TV credits, countless straight plays and an opera to his name. He had even survived a heart transplant. "Retirement?" he once said, "You're talking about death, right?" It turned out "you" were.
There is a moment in Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels" when a director out to make a serious film sits in a room full of convicts watching Disney cartoons. They laugh uproariously, and he realizes that the greatest thing he can do is make people smile.
I went to an outdoor screening of "M*A*S*H" this summer with over a thousand other people. It was the first time that I had seen the movie in years, and this time I had 999 laughing with mine. Thirty years had passed; we had left Vietnam and gone to Iraq, but there was Altman's Korea, to make us smile.
Robert Altman was not a politician, soldier or scientist. He was only one of our best entertainers, and years from now I'll still be thankful for him.
Aaron Cutler '08 is a short cut.
