A cynical satirical thriller with a heart

Movie Producer Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins): So what’s your pitch?

Screenwriter (screenwriter and director Alan Rudolph playing a character named Alan Rudolph): Does political scare you?

Mill: Political doesn’t scare me.  Radical political scares me.  Political political scares me.

Screenwriter:  This is politely politically radical.

Mill:  Is it funny?

Screenwriter: It’s funny.

Mill:  It’s a funny political thing.

Screenwriter:  It’s funny.  It’s a thriller too.

Mill:  So what’s the story?

Screenwriter:  Well, I want Bruce Willis.  I think I can talk to him.  It’s a story about a senator, a bad guy senator, at first---

Mill:  I see, so it’s sort of a cynical political thriller comedy.

Screenwriter:  Yeah, but it’s got a heart.  In the right spot.  Anyway, he has an accident.

Mill:  An accident?

Screenwriter: Yeah.  And he becomes clairvoyant.  Like a psychic.

Mill: Oh!  I see! It’s kind of a psychic political comedy.  With a heart.

Screenwriter:  With a heart.

---From The Player, directed by Robert Altman, adapted from Michael Tolkin's novel .

Robert Altman:  I put Cynthia Stevenson in the hot but with Tim because she’s not the girl Hollywood usually asks to take her shirt off.  When he saw the movie, Paul Newman told me, I get it.  You don’t get to see the tits you want to see.  You see the ones you don’t want to see”…

Paul Newman:  There was a more important point in that movie, I thought.  Tim Robbins’ character was talking to this young woman on a cell phone and he was watching her while he was talking to her and moving in closer.  It was just the most frightening scene in the world, to realize that you could be observed in your most private place.  And of course it raises the specter of all those questions of privacy which are now becoming paramount and the technology we have today.  Just a little hint.  Yeah, it certainly wasn’t about nudity, it was about how accessible everybody is.  It’s spooky.

---from the chapter on The Player in Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff.

My father was watching a movie on television late one night.  He’d come across it while channel-surfing and had missed the opening credits.  It was a weird movie, full of characters talking at cross-purposes and moving around a lot without actually seeming to say or do anything that moved the story along.  In fact, there seemed to be no story.  My father was baffled for a while, but then there came a shot of a character interacting with the reflection of another character in a window pane.  “Oh,” my father said to himself in an ah-ha moment of realization, “It’s a Robert Altman movie.”

It was A Wedding, and by that point in his career when he directed that one, 1978, shooting characters through windows and reflected in windows and in mirrors had become Altman’s signature.  He’d made a whole movie about reflections.  In a movie a reflection is as real and solid as the actual image the faces and bodies reflected, because the opposite is true, the images are as transient and ephemeral and insubstantial as the reflections.  Both are just tricks of light.  Which is not a profound observation and not the point anyway. 

The point is that what we’re looking at matters because we’re looking at it.  What we see is defined by how we see it.  Also not a profound observation, but it’s a trenchant lesson for anyone who wants to make movies.

Movies of course are meant to be looked at, but they’re often not made to be looked at closely.  What’s put up on the screen is there to distract the eye, not draw it in.  We’re not meant to notice that what we’re looking at usually isn’t worth taking the trouble to watch because we’ve watched it a hundred times before in umpteen numbers of movies and TV shows.

The scene in Newman was talking about in The Player is as spooky and foreboding as he says, although I was more frightened on Tim Robbins’ character’s behalf because even though he’s the spy and Greta Scacchi plays the spied upon, the one whose privacy is being violated, Robbins is the one taking the risk of being caught, that is, exposed.

But the scene is constructed from dozens of beautiful images.  The room Scacchi’s character, a painter and collage artist, is working in glows with the soft, watery blueness of her paintings and that blue is deepened and warmed where it reflects in the window panes.  It’s pretty, but it’s importance isn’t revealed until a few scenes later when the effect is re-created in a movie Robbins and his fellow movie studio types are watching or, really, not watching but sort of looking at as they focus on the business of getting this movie and a bunch of others made.  They don’t want to have to watch and it’s a point in the movie’s favor that they don’t have to watch it to know what’s going on.

Neither do we.

It’s a scene from a movie that’s instantly recognizable as yet another version of the kind of hard-boiled detective movie Hollywood cranks out the way McDonald’s does cheeseburgers with the same relation to the art of storytelling as those cheeseburgers have to the art of cooking.  We can tell ourselves the whole movie from the three lines of dialog we’re given.  The only thing about this scene that distinguishes it from any number of scenes like it in any number of other movies is that the two characters are played by Scott Glenn and Lily Tomlin and the prettiness of the lighting doesn’t change the fact that they are delivering performances that are as cliched as the seedy hotel room whose glowing blue window we’re looking at them through.

In this kind of movie thriller movie stars have the same function as pretty or tricky cinematography, to give the audience some reason to think they’re seeing something new and different.

Altman’s whole career was devoted to giving the audience something actually different to see.

And, just to be cheeky, he followed that scene from a “fake” movie with a scene of his own that begins with a shot of Tim Robbins seen from a long way off through the glass doors of a hotel lobby.

And we’re back to Newman’s point about our vulnerability to the gaze of strangers’, as good as any starting place for tonight’s discussion, although feel free to start any place you want.

Extra butter on the popcorn for whoever ties any of this in with my post from this morning about Don DeLillo as a movie maker.

Friday morning:  Called it a night around 11:30, but the comment thread’s still open and discussion’s ongoing.  Feel free to add your thoughts to this thread or the ones on California Split and Thieves Like Us anytime.

Next week’s feature:  Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson.

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Comments

[The Siren]

I'm here!

I love this movie and did from the first time I saw it. Hollywood movies about moviemaking are always a treat for a cinephile and he layers in so many references, and does it so well. I love the playfulness of this movie, as harsh as it is in spots.

[Lance]

Good to see you here, C. Hope all's well at your house. Do you have a favorite cameo in The Player?

[Lance]

What I got a kick out of is that Robbins' character, Griffin Mill, is said to be a writer's producer. Altman, of course, wasn't exactly a writer's director.

[The Siren]

Yes, absolutely. Malcolm McDowell. I like to imagine that scene getting played out in real life, with the actor changing to suit my moods.

The killing-the-writer angle is also very self-referentially funny.

[Lance]

McDowell is my favorite too! What I'd love is to find out that his line was a complete ad-lib that Robbins didn't know was coming.

[The Siren]

Where has McDowell been? such a great actor and I see him so seldom these days.

[Lance]

The way it comes across in Zuckoff's book, it sounds as though Michael Tolkin is still a little ticked off at what Altman did with his script.

[The Siren]

Well, it's a great movie but if I wrote a script and half of it got jettisoned I guess I'd be pissed too. Writers do not always know best in terms of what will play, though.

[Lance]

He's had a recurring role on Heroes. He looks pretty much the same as in The Player too. Jeremy Piven hasn't aged in 18 years either.

[Lance]

Fred Ward's another one who disappeared too fast and too completely.

[Lance]

I like Ward as the fixer. I also like Whoopi as the detective. One of her few good performances.

[The Siren]

Aha, serves me right for only watching What Not to Wear, and TCM of course. I think Peter Gallagher is great in The Player too; the "newspaper" meeting scene gets funnier every time I see it. In fact if we have another Newcritics meetup we should try it with blog posts.

[Lance]

Not if, when. I'm determined to get down there when the weather warms up.

[Lance]

Tim Robbins says he ad-libbed his line that scene about getting rid of actors and directors in. But I wonder if he'd heard what Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher thought was George Lucas' goal.

[The Siren]

So Lance, where does this movie stack up for you in the Altman pantheon? Major, Mid, or Minor with Compensations?

[Lance]

Although it wasn't Lucas I thought of when I was watching it tonight. It was James Cameron. Have you seen Avatar?

[The Siren]

Yes, I did. After that kerfuffle at Glenn's I kind of had to. Liked it very much. Where do you see Altman in it?

and what did they think was Lucas's goal?

[Lance]

Just below Nashville, tied with The Long Goodbye. MASH has its own special place in my heart, but I think it's a much better piece of movie-making than it or McCabe and Mrs Miller, which is my second favorite.

[Lance]

I mean The Player is better than MASH. Got to watch the pronouns.

[Lance]

Ford and Fisher thought Lucas wouldn't be happy until he could make movies without any actors.

I didn't see any of Altman's influence in Avatar. I think Cameron managed to make a movie that proved *he* didn't need actors or a scriptwriter anymore.

[The Siren]

I would rank it near the top too. It is one of Altman's most sheerly enjoyable movies.

[The Siren]

But Cameron's always written his own movies, no?

I am glad you didn't see any Altman in there because that was messing with my head. I think Avatar would have given Altman the shrieking blue fantods, if you'll excuse the expression.

[Lance]

What Alan Rudolph says about his proposed political thriller in his pitch to Griffin early in The Player? It has a heart and the heart is in the right place. I think The Player has the biggest heart in the rightest place of all Altman's movies. Dr T and the Women and Cookie's Fortune aren't as good but they are the other ones where Altman seems to have been in a good mood from beginning to end.

[Lance]

The first time I saw The Player, back when it came out, I didn't have much sympathy for Griffin. This time I felt sorry for him all the way through.

[The Siren]

Yes, it's funny, because it's about Hollywood, a place Robert Altman dissed all his life, but the movie does have heart. Actually I think Gosford Park does too, but it's much more melancholy heart.

[Cassandra]

A question for one or both: does the satire in this movie strike you as more bitter, or playful?

[Cassandra]

Now I see you already addressed my question, Lance.

[Lance]

If you call what Cameron does writing, yeah. Avatar is written as much as it's borrowed. I think the blue fantods is probably exactly what Altman would have suffered if he'd lived to see Avatar. Supposedly, though, he didn't see many movies because they made him jealous. So maybe he'd have skipped Avatar and saved himself the aggravation.

[The Siren]

I am going to have to turn in, but before I go, one query: Lance, should I go ahead and get the Altman book?

[Lance]

Hello Cassandra, glad you're here. Altman was definitely in a playful mood, but I think his criticism of the usual Hollywood by the numbers movie making was in angry earnest.

[The Siren]

I think the satire of the actors and their egos and personas is playful, but the satire of the suits is pretty savage.

[Lance]

Siren, get it but get it from the library. I don't think it's a book someone like you needs to own. Know what I'm saying?

[The Siren]

I believe I do. Will do. And so to bed...thanks for The Player talk Lance!

[Lance]

Goodnight, Siren. Thanks for stopping in.

[Lance]

Cassandra, the thing I found surprising about the satire this time around is how little of it was personal. Altman clearly doesn't like the way Hollywood works, but except for Peter Gallagher's character and the writer who speaks at the murdered writer's funeral, Altman doesn't seem to think any of his Hollywood types are malign of vicious people.

[Lance]

In fact, their main fault seems to be that they have allowed themselves to become too busy "working" to do any actual work.

[Cassandra]

Just removed from the consequences of their actions, with all the corruption that accompanies that.

[Lance]

Exactly, they keep themselves detached by keeping busy.

[Lance]

But the two characters with the most artistic integrity---or who seem to have the most---the writer Griffin murders and the British director who pitches the movie that saves Griffin's career are each in their way fakes.

[Cassandra]

I love the scenes in the Pasadena police station, the interaction of Griffin and these working-class stiffs. (And yes, I liked Goldberg too, first time I can remember being able to say that.)

[Cassandra]

Yes, they are fakes... no one really emerges unscathed. And that does seem very good-humored of Altman.

[Lance]

That director also spouts a lot of things about keeping things real and no happy endings that Altman really believed in. So he went after himself a bit too.

[Cassandra]

Last comment- I always enjoy seeing Lyle Lovett in any context. And with that, its time for bed. Thanks a lot, Lance, and good night.

[Lance]

I can't believe The Player is almost 20 years old. But it's interesting how my perception of the characters has changed. When I saw the movie in the theater, I was on the side of the murdered writer but since then I've gotten to know Vincent D'Onforio in a differnt light, and now I root for Griffin to win that fight

[Lance]

Goodnight, Cassandra.

[Lance]

I'm calling it a night too. But the discussion is ongoing. Anyone stopping by should feel free to add their thoughts, whenever.

Don't forget. Buffalo Bill and the Indians next week.