Short Cuts

Rating R Formats DVD Genre drama Starring Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Anne Archer, Matthew Modine, Madeleine Stowe Directed by Robert Altman External Links Criterion Collection

In many ways, Raymond Carver was the classic American literary icon: He exploded onto the scene, dazzled readers with his mastery of words and themes, pickled himself with alcohol, and died way too young. The same description can and has been hung on writers like Faulkner and Fitzgerald. And the cliche is just as shallow and demeaning to Carver as it is to his predecessors.

Carver's time in front of his audience was brief indeed, roughly the fifteen or so years stretching from the early 1970's until his death in 1988. That end, though, was not from the bottle (he was dry for the last nine years) but from lung cancer. And, to defeat the cliche even more, he was known to be open, humane, and funny regardless of the tenor of his sobriety. These same characteristics also permeated his short stories and poems.

Like most great writers, Carver was bard to his time and place. A committed Pacific Northwesterner, Carver wrote of the vagaries of fate and love and the ways in which these impacted his neighbors. In his little corner of the world, just as in all the other corners, people spend their days navigating the choppy waters that stretch from dust to dawn. No one much plans out their future; each seems to accept that it would never live up to their plans anyway.

The same world view can easily be ascribed to filmmaker Robert Altman. Also hitting his stride in the early 1970's, Altman has spent the past thirty years charting that same sea. It wouldn't take much examination to see the thematic linkages between Carver's world and Altman's. The blind optimists, committed compulsives, and accepting no hopers of Altman's world would be right at home inside the pages of any Carver story. With hindsight, it now seems inevitable that these two neighbors would find their way to each other's porch.

After the heady successes of the 1970's, Altman's 1980's were no picnic. With the coming of movies like Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), Altman's anarchic independence seemed a costly antique to the studio bosses. For most of the following decade he was relegated to low budget films based on stage plays (Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Secret Honor, Streamers) and cable series (Tanner '88). By the early 1990's he was effectively written off.

Fortunately, no one told him.

In 1991, Altman roared back with The Player, a biting and corrosive satire of the Hollywood that had displaced him. With the concurrent reemergence of an independent American cinema, Altman was well-placed to become its patriarch. His next project, 1993's Short Cuts, would not only certify his status, it would also connect the filmmaker directly to the works of Raymond Carver as well as provide Altman with one of his greatest works.

What is remarkable about the joining of Carver and Altman in Short Cuts is the way in which the filmmaker is absolutely faithful to the spirit of Carver while veering dramatically from the letter. Harkening back to the structural mode of Nashville (1975), Short Cuts tells nine separate stories, each based loosely on a Carver short story. Instead of presenting these as a compendium as Carver did, Altman intercuts the stories so that all the characters are related through coincidences and circumstances. We follow a character from one story as they enter a shop. In the same shop is a character from another story. This is the one whom we will follow out the door. Another seemingly glaring change from Carver is the location. His stories all took place in the small cities and towns of Washington State and Oregon. Altman stages his film in the significantly more urban and unreal world of Los Angeles.

As jarring as these changes may at first seem, each works in service of the vision of both artists. Any collection of Carvers' stories reveals a texture made up of the totality of works in that volume. Altman replicates this by interconnecting the stories, by drawing the intersections in graphic, cinematic terms. And the change of locale only serves to underscore what lies at the heart of Carver's work: its universality. The questions of life and death, fidelity and infidelity, of how love can be defined within the seemingly contradictory human tendency toward self-absorption, are not ones which are bound by geographical limits. Carver's geography was the map of the heart. Altman understands this and proves it by seamlessly adapting the author's characters to L.A..

The performances from the typically mammoth Altman ensemble are wonderful throughout. Of particular note are Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits as a waitress and her loving but hopelessly drunk husband, and Jack Lemmon as an estranged father who shows up unexpectedly at the bedside of his mortally wounded grandson. His fumbling confession of an affair to his son (Bruce Davison) as they await word of the grandson's fate is one of the highlights of the film and certainly one the actor's best moments in a lifetime of great work.

Criterion Collection has released Short Cuts in what is beginning to seem like a jag of Altmania. Their recent releases of his earlier 3 Women and Secret Honor have been met by other distributors with releases of The Company and the brilliant but sorely underrated California Split. In this case, Criterion has upped the ante with a superlative two disc set that includes an excellent 1:2.35 transfer, a collection of interviews with Altman, Carver, and actor Tim Robbins and three excellent long form documentaries. The best of these is To Write and Keep Kind, a PBS piece on the life of the author. The best addition, though, is a collection of the Carver short stories on which Short Cuts is based. If you've never had the pleasure of reading this great writer, this is a good place to start.