News of Robert Altman’s death was not enough to stop me running today but neither have I been able to stop thinking about him. I first became aware of him about the same time I really became aware of film as an art form, a means of expression that could be shaped by this person called a director. Watching Beth Orton sing Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” in I’m Your Man last night I thought of how that song is now inextricably linked to a whorehouse in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, just one of many cultural artifiacts Altman casually appropriated.
Nothing he stole ever stayed that way, though. There was something very lacksadaisical about the look and feel of his films (might have has something to do with all that pot he smoked) and what he borrowed it always felt like he returned. His intentions beneath were of steelier stuff; conned by the easy-going feel of his films, viewers were always surprised when he slapped them back out of the druggy haze. Like the moment when the bad guys shoot sweet Keith Carradine in McCabe. Or when Chris Penn attacks the girls he and Robert Downey picked up at the end of Short Cuts. Or in my favorite of his films, The Long Goodbye, when Mark Rydell as the gangster Marty Augustine ends a loving tribute to his mistress by smashing a Coke bottle against her face.
When I interviewed him in 1993 for Vogue, he was working on the post-production of Short Cuts, talking casually in the editing bay while playing solitaire with a pack of Tarot cards: a game of chance played with the deck of destiny. That was the way The Long Goodbye seemed to me: he took a Phillip Marlowe novel and bent it out of shape in the hippie-dippie West LA of the seventies, added drugs and naked models doing yoga, but at the end it still comes out with the right guy dead, the guy who’d underrated the shamus. Have your fun, the director seemed to be saying. It all ends in the grave.
You’ll hear a lot about how much actors loved him (everyone worked for scale with Bob) and small wonder: He loved them back. I remember Julianne Moore describing how he would follow his actors just off camera, sort of cheering them on as they improvised, like a little kid who just loved to watch. Artists saw things we didn’t see, he believed. His favorite joke that year was about two jazz musicians working a gig on an ocean cruise. They go out on the deck to smoke a joint and one of them says, “Man, look at all that water.”
“Yeah,” says the other, “and that’s just the top.”
Float on, o maestro.