HUH?

Does George W. Bush care as much about his country's people as Middle Eastern leaders care about theirs?

Robert Altman

February 19, 2006 (The New York Times)

ROBERT ALTMAN'S LONG GOODBYE

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Robert Altman, who turns 81 tomorrow, will receive his very first Oscar in a couple of weeks: an honorary one, of the sort the academy so often employs to ease the bitterness of a veteran nonwinner's declining years. (And, of course, to square historical accounts and deflect the outrage of future generations of movie lovers, who might feel that the failure to honor an important filmmaker reflects sort of poorly on the awards' credibility.) Like King Vidor, who had to hang in for 85 years to cop a thanks-for-the memories statuette, Mr. Altman has five best-director nominations and zero Oscars to show for a long and prolific career, so he pretty emphatically qualifies as overdue. He has been overdue for 30 years.
Hollywood has in fact never known quite what to make of Mr. Altman, who seemed to come out of nowhere with "M*A*S*H" in 1970 and, despite the industry's best efforts to send him back there, wouldn't go away. With the kind of weird, inexplicable gambler's instinct he would explore, hilariously, in "California Split" (1974), Mr. Altman parlayed his winnings from "M*A*S*H" — which remains by far the biggest hit of his career — into an exhilarating half-decade run of high-stakes moviemaking: seven pictures in the next five years, of which five are, like "M*A*S*H," at least arguably masterpieces.
Those great films — "M*A*S*H," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971), "The Long Goodbye" (1973), "Thieves Like Us" (1974), "California Split" and "Nashville" (1975) — still look like the core of his achievement: to paraphrase Raymond Carver (whose work Mr. Altman adapted in his 1992 film "Short Cuts"), they are what we talk about when we talk about Robert Altman. That's not to say that the two dozen feature films he has managed to direct in the last 30 years are negligible (though there isn't a power on earth, or beyond, that could persuade me to sit through "Quintet," "Health," "Prêt-à-Porter" or "The Company" again), or that Mr. Altman's skill has in any way diminished with age: the silky command of "Gosford Park" (2001) is ample proof that it hasn't.
It's just that in the early 70's the conditions were right for Mr. Altman's loose-jointed, intuitive, risk-courting approach to making movies, and the planets over Hollywood haven't aligned themselves in that way since. The wondrous opportunity those years afforded adventurous filmmakers like him was that studio executives, for once in their ignoble history, actually knew that they had no idea what they were doing: a man who could deliver the elusive, mysterious (to them) youth market, as the 45-year-old director of "M*A*S*H" somehow did, became a mighty valuable commodity.
Mr. Altman, who had spent the previous couple of decades directing industrial films, episodic television ("Bonanza," "Combat") and the odd low-budget picture, seized his moment and set about the task of reimagining, with a little help from his friends, how American movies should look and sound and feel. The anti-authoritarian spirit, the caught-on-the-fly dialogue and the invigoratingly original blend of slapstick and casual naturalism that had made "M*A*S*H" seem so new mutated into something even stranger and headier in "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" a year later.
That film, a western of an unusually lyrical kind, puts the controlled-chaos techniques of "M*A*S*H" to entirely different use: in "McCabe," the buzzing vitality of the frontier mining settlement called Presbyterian Church serves as counterpoint to an eccentric American tragedy. It's the only movie I know of in which you can watch a community come into existence, changing and growing before your eyes, and Mr. Altman's camera, seeming to catch the whole complex process unawares, is miraculously alert to both the pleasures and the melancholy ironies of growth.
It's among the greatest movies of its time, up there with Sam Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch" (1969) and the first two "Godfather" pictures (1972 and 1974). And like them it's the product of an era in which the nature of the American democratic experiment was being questioned constantly and, in the best of our films, unconventionally celebrated — celebrated, that is, not for our collective military and economic power but for our individual vigor and orneriness and goofy optimism. This was a cultural moment made for Mr. Altman, whose hopeful approach to making movies has always been to get a bunch of lively, interesting-looking actors together and watch what happens, see if they can make something grow.
Mr. Altman had, in the early 70's, assembled an unofficial repertory company around him, a group of performers he trusted to supply the quick jolts of energy — the funky humor and the wayward poignance — his lightning-in-a-bottle moviemaking required. Elliott Gould, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Bert Remsen, John Schuck, Gwen Welles, Michael Murphy and Henry Gibson were, in shifting combinations, the faces of an Altman movie, people who seemed to exist (or, in the case of Mr. Gould, to exist vividly) only in his fictional world. And he gathered them all, along with a few more of their unpredictable ilk, for his epic "Nashville," a movie whose multiple threads of stray narrative are held together by nothing more than a spirit, a sensibility: the weird buoyancy of Mr. Altman's take-it-as-it-comes fatalism.
What strikes you, in fact, when you watch "Nashville" or its three immediate predecessors, "The Long Goodbye," "Thieves Like Us" and "California Split," is how fundamentally grim Mr. Altman's vision of American life is — and how little that persistent, deep-seated, unshakable disillusion actually affects the tone of the movies. All the characters in those pictures are in one way or another disappointed, but disappointment doesn't appear to be a big deal for Mr. Altman. Maybe because he had to wait so long to fulfill his artistic ambitions, because he arrived so late to the Hollywood party, he seems to know (every one of his movies says it) that disappointment never killed anybody. "It's O.K. with me" is the dopey mantra of Mr. Gould's Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye"; the crowd at the end of "Nashville," shocked by an act of sudden violence, gets over its horror by singing along to a tune called "It Don't Worry Me." And although in both pictures the effect is ironic, in neither case is it wholly ironic. On some level, Mr. Altman shrugs along with his characters.
He would need, as it turned out, every bit of that world-weary insouciance in the years that followed "Nashville," when it gradually became clear that the moment for his sort of exploratory filmmaking was passing, and then simply past. His stock company slowly dispersed, his college-age audience grew up and entered the so-called real world (which proved to be rather like the prosperous, company-run town that in the end no longer needs beautiful dreamers like John McCabe), and the studios became, I think it's fair to say, less tolerant of box-office failure.
You could almost feel the air leaking out of Mr. Altman's balloon in the late 70's. And by the 80's this profoundly American filmmaker had moved to Europe and largely reinvented himself as a less ambitious sort of artist: a master craftsman and a miniaturist, not a fresco painter dangling perilously from cathedral ceilings. He found work directing operas, plays and, television dramas, and for the big screen contented himself with a series of filmed theater pieces, most of which involved just one set and a limited number of characters. (The most memorable of them, 1984's "Secret Honor," is a one-man show about Nixon.)
In a way, the Robert Altman of this period is like one of the aging outlaws of "The Wild Bunch": "It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do." And although his 80's movies are less exciting, their very smallness allows you to appreciate the beauty and resourcefulness of Mr. Altman's technique: the slow zooms, the fluid tracking shots, the elegantly timed cuts (usually on movement), the extraordinary assurance with which he explores the confined spaces and controls the dramatic rhythm, are immensely satisfying even when his material is second-rate.
He kept his instrument in tune, and when a terrific script finally came his way — Julian Mitchell's "Vincent & Theo," about the van Gogh brothers — he was more than ready. The movie he made, which was released in 1990 as an art-house picture (and is now available, in a gorgeous transfer, on DVD), seems to me the best of his post-"Nashville" films: moving, powerful, scary and in love with light. Mr. Altman's direction is somber and almost classical, which may partly explain why the picture is so good: he's often at his sharpest when he's doing something he hasn't done before.
The movie that put him, briefly, back on the Hollywood map, though, was familiar territory — the darkly comic ensemble piece "The Player" (1992), whose setting is Hollywood itself and whose rampaging energy seems to derive from the glee of consummating a long-nursed revenge fantasy. "The Player" is his funniest movie, and, in the end, a prime example of the O.K.-with-me attitude that has enabled Mr. Altman to get by, and occasionally thrive, in the funhouse-mirror culture of studio filmmaking.
He seized that moment, too, to try to recapture a bit of the early-70's exuberance. But he couldn't quite locate it, either in "Short Cuts" (which is brilliant but sour-spirited) or in the 1996 "Kansas City" (in which the cast let him down). What got his juices flowing again, peculiarly enough, was the elaborate English murder-mystery trifle "Gosford Park," which revealed, to his evident delight, that there was a whole new world of Altman actors waiting for him in the old world.
If honorary Oscars are to some degree awards for longevity and brute persistence, then Mr. Altman qualifies on that score, too: he's the unlikeliest imaginable survivor of the Hollywood system. When he steps onto the stage of the Kodak Theater on March 5 as this year's distinguished geezer, he might feel a twinge of is-this-all-there-is? disappointment, but his movies tell us that he'll get over it. He might even reflect that Sam Peckinpah — his junior by one day, and 20 years dead — blew out his heart fighting the studios, and never got his vindication. And Robert Altman, I expect, will accept his statuette with (perhaps slightly mordant) good grace, because it'll do.

Gonzales

February 8, 2006

THE ART OF SAYING NOTHING

We thought President Bush's two recent Supreme Court nominees set new lows when it came to giving vague and meaningless answers to legitimate questions, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made them look like models of openness when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday about domestic spying. Mr. Gonzales seems to have forgotten the promise he made to the same panel last year when it voted to promote him from White House counsel to attorney general: that he would serve the public interest and stop acting like a hired gun helping a client figure out how to evade the law.
The hearing got off to a bad start when Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican who leads the committee, refused to have Mr. Gonzales testify under oath. Mr. Gonzales repaid this favor with a daylong display of cynical hair-splitting, obfuscation, disinformation and stonewalling. He would not tell the senators how many wiretaps had been conducted without warrants since 2002, when Mr. Bush authorized the program. He would not even say why he was withholding the information.
On the absurd pretext of safeguarding operational details, Mr. Gonzales would not say whether any purely domestic communications had been swept up in the program by accident and what, if anything, had been done to make sure that did not happen. He actually refused to assure the Senate and the public that the administration had not deliberately tapped Americans' calls and e-mail within the United States, or searched their homes and offices without warrants.
Mr. Gonzales repeated Mr. Bush's claim that the program of intercepting e-mail and telephone calls to and from the United States without the legally required warrants was set up in a way that protects Americans' rights. But he would not say what those safeguards were, how wiretaps were approved or how the program was reviewed. He even refused to say whether it had led to a single arrest.
About the only senators Mr. Gonzales managed to answer directly were the more depressingly doctrinaire Republicans, who asked penetrating questions like whether Al Qaeda is a threat to the United States and whether Mr. Bush is trying hard to protect Americans from terrorists.
Generally, Mr. Gonzales stuck to the same ludicrous arguments the administration has continually offered for sidestepping the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expressly forbids warrantless spying on people in the United States. He said that the president could make his own rules in time of war and that Congress had authorized warrantless spying in giving the president the authority to invade Afghanistan. Only the panel's most blindly loyal Republicans bought that argument.
To his credit, Mr. Specter pressed the attorney general hard on a legal position that, he said, "just defies logic and plain English." Mr. Specter forcefully pointed out that this isn't just an issue of public relations, but of the bedrock democratic principle of checks and balances. He said it is not possible to judge a program without knowing what it involves and said Congress's intelligence panels should review the domestic spying "lock, stock and barrel."
"Because if they disagree with you," he said, "it's the equilibrium of our constitutional system which is involved."
Mr. Gonzales seemed to brush off this idea, something that should surprise no one since Mr. Bush clearly sees no limit to his powers. But even Bush loyalists on the Senate panel seemed at least faintly troubled. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas said it would be simple to amend the wiretapping law if it's too confining. And Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona suggested that some group — maybe even Congress — review the spying program regularly.
One hopeful sign of nonpartisan sanity came from the House yesterday. Representative Heather Wilson, the New Mexico Republican who heads the subcommittee that supervises the National Security Agency, told The Times that she had "serious concerns" about the spying and wanted a full investigation. With Karl Rove reported to be threatening Election Day revenge against anyone who breaks ranks on this issue, Ms. Wilson deserves support for a principled stand.

Editorial, The New York Times, 2/8/06

Questions for...

Manohla Dargis...
A chief film critic for The Times answered readers' questions about the Oscars.

Q. Why do you care about the Oscars?— G. D. Avazrahani, New York City
A. Well, for starters I love Old Hollywood, so anything even remotely connected to the golden age of studio filmmaking interests me. New Hollywood pales by comparison, of course – though the specialty divisions are helping to ease the pain – but even its simulacrum of old-school glamour and sex is hard to resist. Then there’s the fact that while the Oscars are reliably irritating and often just plain stupid – and boring and silly and wrong – sometimes they draw attention to worthy films and give a boost to equally worthy filmmakers, like the 1997 multiple-nominee Curtis Hanson. (I also like the dresses.)
Q. My question is, how does one differentiate between the performance of a Terrence Howard and an Eric Bana or a Philip Seymour Hoffman? Each is brilliant. What does a film critic do to create a legitimate pecking order? What separates “gold from silver from bronze”? Incidentally, while I enjoyed "Brokeback Mountain," I can't put Heath Ledger in the same category this year as the aforementioned performers. — Ernest, Denver
A. There are a few variables that determine how I respond to an actor’s performance, some admittedly irrational. There are some actors, for instance, that I just don’t like – I don’t like the way they look, the way they talk, the way they take up space. And there are other actors who I like but who I can’t make any claims for; I just like watching them. I’ve almost always liked Heath Ledger, but I didn’t think he had anything going on as an actor until “Monster’s Ball.” But while he was amazing for the 10 seconds he was in that film, I wasn’t prepared for “Brokeback,” where he creates a world of pain with a tight mouth and a body so terribly self-contained it’s a wonder he can wrap his arms around another person. But here’s the thing – and this is the part that’s hard to explain – I don’t just admire the performance on the level of craft, I am also deeply moved by it, just as I am by the film. By contrast, while I think Philip Seymour Hoffman is really good in “Capote,” both the performance and the film leave me cold. I don’t care about either. And while I greatly enjoy watching the beautiful Terrence Howard (check him out in “Lackawanna Blues”), both his character in “Hustle & Flow” and the film itself are too laughable for me to take into consideration.
Q. In your review of “Something New” you commented on the pathetic lineup of Academy Award nominees for best actress. I'm curious to know your opinion on the lineup - is it the acting of the nominees, the failure to nominate actresses for finer performances, the lack of roles for women, or something else? — Kim Wittchow, San Francisco, CA
A. Have you seen “Junebug,” “Mrs. Henderson Presents” and “Transamerica”? All three are bad in degree, with the last being the worst, and their lead female performances pale next to those of Sibel Kekilli in “Head-On,” Ziyi Zhang in “2046” and Juliette Binoche in “Caché.” Amy Adams is certainly cute in "Junebug," and I like it when her dim bulb of a character feverishly declares that she loves Embeth Davidz's encroacher. That said I like Ms. Davidtz better in that film, partly because her big-city career woman is so mistreated both by the other characters and the director. As to “Mrs. Henderson Presents” – yeah, well, I like British accents, too. But isn’t it time Dame Judi started working for a living? And only in a year so profoundly devoid of juicy female performances (in English-language films that is) could Felicity Huffman’s graceless, unpersuasive turn in “Transamerica” be in contention. As to the other two nominees let’s just say that Reese Witherspoon should have won for “Election” and, man, can that Jane Austen chick write.
As to the Why and the How: I sound like a broken record, a broken record, a broken record…but American movies are now, overwhelmingly, made by men for men, which means that they are also primarily vehicles for male acting talent. There are still great female roles and performances, mind you, but you may need to travel through world cinema to find them.
Q. My friends and I seem to be asking each other the following two questions:
1. How did Reese Witherspoon become such a shoo-in when, as a lead actress, she doesn't have that much screen time, and worse, she seems to be playing Reese Witherspoon the whole time?
2. How did “Crash,” a somewhat obvious, over-the-top, contrived drama, score so many nominations and now come to be considered as a possible dark horse for best picture?—Danny, Austin, TX
A. Reese Witherspoon was nominated for “Walk the Line” because she’s beautiful, talented, has paid her dues (and I don’t mean by marrying Ryan Phillippe) and did a credible job in a big studio movie that made money and won kudos, if not across the board. (My pal A. O. Scott wasn’t wild about the movie, but he called her performance "lively" and "smart." Her performance seems more supporting than not, true, but given the paucity of good female lead performances (see above) the Academy’s choice of Ms. Witherspoon this year was a no-brainer.
There are a few obvious reasons why “Crash” connected with the Academy. First, Los Angeles, where most of Academy members live, is a profoundly segregated city, so any movie that makes it seem like its white, black, Asian and Latino inhabitants are constantly tripping over one another has appeal. If nothing else it makes Los Angeles seem as cosmopolitan as, well, New York or at least the Upper West Side. Second, no matter how many times the camera picks out Oprah Winfrey on Oscar night, the Academy is super white. Third, the Academy is, at least in general terms, socially liberal. You see where I’m going, right? What could better soothe the troubled brow of the Academy’s collective white conscious than a movie that says sometimes black men really are muggers (so don’t worry if you engage in racial profiling); your Latina maid really, really loves you (so don’t worry about paying her less than minimum wage); even white racists (even white racist cops) can love their black brothers or at least their hot black sisters; and all answers are basically simple, so don’t even think about politics, policy, the lingering effects of Proposition 13 and Governor Arnold. This is a consummate Hollywood fantasy, no matter how nominally independent the financing and release. I also think it helped the film’s cause that its distributor sent out more than 130,000 DVD's to the industry, insuring easy viewing.
Q. Does the Academy use any technical process for distinguishing between best supporting and best actor performances – celebrity level of actor, deservedness of award, romantic lead, screen time? Seems kind of arbitrary – how is Jake Gyllenhaal a supporting actor in “Brokeback Mountain”? — Rachel Weidenfeld, Cambridge, Mass.
A. As far as I can tell, the Academy doesn’t actually have any rules about what constitutes a lead or a supporting performance; it leaves it to the voters to make that decision at the time of balloting. Even so, while the approximately 1,300 actors and actresses who choose the acting nominees decide whether a role is a lead or a support, film companies generally position actors for one or the other slot – hence those “for your consideration” (FYC) advertisements that fatten newspaper coffers this time of year. As far back as October 2005, Focus Features, the Universal Pictures specialty films unit that is releasing “Brokeback,” was running FYC advertisements that placed Mr. Gyllenhaal in the supporting role. Focus obviously did not want one great male performance canceling out the other. (Check out Oscarwatch.com for a gallery of such advertisements.)
Q. Why do you think Bill Murray's performance in “Broken Flowers” was overlooked this award season? — James, Berkeley, Calif.
Maybe because the various organizations realized that it wasn’t any good. Listen, I usually love Bill Murray (I even suffered through “Garfield” because of him) and I think he should have received an Oscar and every other possible prize in creation for his performances in “Groundhog Day” and “Rushmore.” In preparation for reviewing Harold Ramis’s latest film, “The Ice Harvest” (sigh), I recently watched “Caddyshack,” “Stripes” and “Groundhog Day” back-to-back for the umpteenth time. Ivan Reitman’s “Stripes” is slapdash if a lot of fun – the other two, meanwhile, both directed by Mr. Ramis, are genius – but what struck me this time around was how much more present and engaged Mr. Murray seemed in these earlier films than he did in either “Broken Flowers” or “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” He was wonderful in Mr. Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes,” but since "Lost in Translation" he sometimes seems content to coast on his cool, which, while very considerable indeed does not a fine performance make. His cause this year was not helped by the fact that “Broken Flowers” is a “small” movie that made relatively little money (always a consideration at Oscar time) and was directed by a filmmaker more beloved by critics than the industry.
Q. Why wasn't Andy Serkis nominated for best actor for his portrayal of King Kong? — Stephen Santangelo, South Plainfield, N.J.
A. There are no rules in the Academy guidelines that bar an animated or CGI character being nominated for best actor or actress, as either a lead or support; in fact, a few years ago DreamWorks even tried (and failed) to snare a nomination for Eddie Murphy’s voice work in “Shrek.” My guess – and given how the process is swathed in secrecy, a guess is all you’re going to get – is that both the hard-working and barely working actors and actresses of the Academy do not like what Mr. Serkis’s supple characterization may portend: namely, the end of human screen actors as we know and sometimes love them. (By the way, “King Kong” was nominated for “achievement in visual effects,” which indicates that the Visual Effects Award Nominating Committee is not nearly as nervous about the future as the Actors Branch.)
Q. I know you loved “The New World” and so did I. I've seen it twice in the past two weeks, with the second viewing even better than the first. I think it's an unqualified masterpiece. Why do you think it's being left out of the field of Oscar nominations? — Kay Flaminio Durham, N.C.
A. The film’s brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki was nominated, so it wasn’t completely ignored. Mr. Lubezki was previously nominated for “The Little Princess” (he lost to John Toll for, bleech, “Braveheart”) and “Sleepy Hollow” (that time he lost to Conrad L. Hall for "American Beauty"). Here’s hoping that this time around talent outweighs popularity. In any event, there is only one possible explanation for why Terrence Malick’s glorious film, one of the most aesthetically and intellectually ambitious, emotionally devastating and politically resonant works of American art in recent memory, was overlooked by the Academy: with the exception of my few dear friends in that august body, they are idiots.