Short Cuts
With Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison, Julianne Moore.
US, 1993, 35mm, color, 189 min.
Print source: Warner Bros
Prefiguring a string of turn-of-the-21st-century multi-narratives through which a large cast of characters crisscross, Short Cuts remains the most richly woven of the era—not due to a cleverly circular precision or overarching moral message, but rather because of its open, improvisational structure allowing for even more overlapping layers of connective tissue. Revising his ensemble method for a new age, Altman’s disconcerting symphony of several Raymond Carver stories and one original strand ingeniously creates links between the different tales’ disaffected, alienated denizens of Los Angeles—including a phone sex operator, a make-up artist, a news commentator, an artist, a doctor, a baker, a waitress, a chauffeur, a police officer, a pool cleaner, an alcoholic jazz singer and her suicidal daughter, a young boy, and an anonymous dead body found floating in the river. If anything, they are united by a faulty central nervous system of emotional and sexual repression expressed indirectly, inappropriately or violently. Altman’s miraculous ability to elicit natural performances from his large cast of actors and musicians combines with his orchestral sense of life’s construction—a delicate balance of the haphazardly entropic and the uncannily synchronous.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
Vincent & Theo
Fool for Love
Prêt-à-porter
California Split
Thieves Like Us
A Perfect Couple
A Prairie Home Companion
O.C. and Stiggs
That Cold Day in the Park
Corn's-A-Poppin'
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Gingerbread Man
Dr. T and the Women
Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
