Everybody agrees Robert Altman was a great filmmaker. Everyone knows he directed some of the greatest movies ever made, and some of the most self-indulgent, and some of the most boring. But try to figure out which film falls into which category, and you're on a fool's errand. Possibly unique among directors, Altman's films changed every time you watched them.
Take The Long Goodbye, his adaptation of Raymond Chandler's private eye novel. I first saw it years ago, when I was twelve or thirteen. I enjoyed it as a thriller, but even then, I thought it seemed a bit odd, not quite what I expected. Years passed, and I saw it again and again. Sometimes I'd watch it and it seemed like a failed spoof. Sometimes I thought it was a near-miss. Sometimes I thought it was a masterpiece.
The reason my feelings for the film kept shifting, I think, is because Altman wanted you to bring something to his work. Storytelling was never a priority for him, and he never told you what to think or how to feel. "Here are some people and situations I find interesting," he seemed to say. "What you make of them is entirely up to you."
Altman, of course, died Monday at the age of 81. Cancer was what finally did him in, but he'd had a number of health problems over the years, none of which sidelined him for long. He had a heart transplant ten years ago, but kept right on working, and so many of the films he made after that, such as Gosford Park and The Company, reveal surprising new aspects of his talent.
He was a hero of mine, not just for his awesome body of work, but as a model of how to grow old. He kept doing what he wanted to do, all the way to the end. Diagnosed with cancer, he could have sat back and waited to die. Instead, he made his final film, A Prarie Home Companion, and started work on another. His body may have been failing him, but he wasn't going to let that stop him.
There's so much to say about Altman's work, I don't even know where to begin, and I wouldn't know where to stop. His work is astonishingly influential--such movies as The Big Lebowski and Boogie Nights, such TV shows as The Office and Entourage are but a few of his spiritual children--and yet it remains singular. Lots of directors, even a hack like Paul Haggis with Crash, could do "Altmanesque".
But only Altman could do Altman, could surprise and astonish and bore and infuriate you, could make you laugh and cry simultaneously, could show you things you've seen a million times in ways you had never noticed. Only Altman could have made McCabe And Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Three Women, Popeye, Secret Honor, Vincent And Theo or Short Cuts. These are movies I have watched and will watch over and over again, and every viewing will be like a visit with an old friend, familiar yet somehow different.
Interviewed by NPR, old friend and collaborator Elliot Gould said Altman's body of work was about "life taking its course." A wonderful description and an accurate one, and as perfect a way to remember him as any artist could wish.
