Glad to see I'm not the only one with an indescribable love for Short Cuts; even most of the positive reviews I read seem to have some reservations, but I've always just been nothing if not one-hundred percent absorbed into the world of the film, from first frame to last. There is nothing else quite like the experience of watching this. Actually, the first time I saw it, I loved it so much I watched it again the next night, and then another time a few nights later. And I never do that -- and it's a three hour film! I think I've seen it 8 or 9 times now and it only gets better.
I agree, I wish there was more of it. I truly could watch another three hours. Some of the stories are so fascinating, but given just the tiniest sliver of screen time to reel you in, that you're left wanting more. But maybe it's best that the film isn't any longer, because it could be too much of a good thing. Narratively, it feels like some great novel that I can never put down once I pick it up, but the film could be told through no other medium, not with the same affects. The camera-work is never flashy, and we don't even get any of those great Altman long tracking shots, but its subtly masterful nonetheless, the work of a man who knows that oftentimes, less really is more. Any movement of the camera or sinuous Altman zoom is done for a reason, and not for cheap thrills. There's never a dull moment or scene, and the editing whips it all along so brilliantly, connecting disparate threads with a strategically placed cut, tying the whole picture together thematically yet never being too obvious or blunt. The movie just flows, flows, flows, like not even Altman's other great ensemble films do; it feels like an effortless piece of work, and deceptively so, because despite the offhand and casual sense it gives off, it's just as deliberate in structure and overall aesthetics as any Kubrick film.
Perhaps the film's greatest virtue is its omnipresent ambiguity. The film is one of the most lifelike I know, and this refusal to tie all loose threads, to give some arbitrary catharsis, to tell us the answers to all of its mysteries... this is what makes Short Cuts such a deeply haunting and endlessly re-watchable piece of art. It trusts its audience to make key realizations based on relatively subtle connections, or on dialogue that only implies and doesn't beat you over the head with what's going on. For example, the film tells us that Honey (Lili Taylor) was molested by her stepfather Earl (Tom Waits) when she was young. But this isn't explicitly stated. It is something only gathered by the viewer connecting a couple lines of dialogue between Honey and her mother, as well as the way Honey reacts to seeing Earl at the jazz club, or hearing Jennifer Jason Leigh's character tell of a pedophile phone-sex customer. There are countless other examples, but anyway, the point is this is a film that is refreshingly subtle and trusting of its audience's intelligence -- like most Altman movies. It trusts you to filter out the relevant information from the clutter and noise, even the interesting and funny noise, because that is what life is like. And nobody made those kinds of movies like Altman did. Sadly, nobody seems to anymore. Oh well. We'll always have Short Cuts.
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