First time watching this
The law of Six Degrees of Separation is we are all connected by 6 or fewer people. Robert Altman seems particularly interested in this in “Short Cuts”, his three-hour ensemble about the lives of 9 couples in L.A. and how they intersect with each other. The film was basically an early blueprint for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia”, and while I feel Anderson really improved on the concept, the tree and its various connections Altman crafts here is never less than engaging.
Telling nine separate tales based on Raymond Carver short stories, Altman gives us a pair of parents (Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison) hoping their son wakes up from a coma after being hit by a car, a waitress (Lily Tomlin) and a chauffeur (Tom Waits) who spend much of their downtime sloshed at the trailer park, a birthday clown (Anne Archer) and the husband (Fred Ward) who leaves a dead body in the lake while fishing with his pals, a high strung patrolman (Tim Robbins) living in a sexless marriage with a nagging wife (Madeleine Stowe) and kids and yappy dog, a single mother (Frances McDormand) looking for any father she can get for her kid, a pair of depressed mother-daughter musicians (Annie Ross, Lori Singer), a pool cleaner (Chris Penn) pissed off cause his phone sex operator wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) doesn’t talk dirty to him, an artist (Julianne Moore) who has never been able to live down cheating on her doctor husband (Mathew Modine), and (FINALLY!) a make-up artist (Robert Downey Jr.) and his girlfriend (Lilli Taylor) deciding to take some risque pictures while house sitting.
It can be tough to keep all these storylines straight but the throughlines are where Altman makes his best points: that we can never totally be sure of what the people we meet are going through, that every marriage is work and comes with some degree of discord, and that selfishness leads to society dysfunction. Some of these stories are heartbreaking, such as the parents and the little boy, some are funny (Robbins, a serial cheater, has a thing for Archer’s clown), and the petty jealousies, resentments, and flaws of these build in promising and believable ways. It’s only when he starts looking for resolutions, and in some cases redemptions, that the film starts to feel a bit contrived.
MacDowell and Davison get the most to work with, and throw in Jack Lemmon as Davison’s absentee, insensitive old codger dad. Ross gives a soulful performance as well as the woman who feels hurt and also can’t see it in her own daughter. Downey Jr. has some fun with a skirt-chasing character with a thing for morbidity, and Leigh is very funny as a woman who views her job so passively that she doesn’t even see its effect on her husband or how weird it is to be doing it while taking care of her young children.
The performances work and while the structure of the movie can sometimes distract from the stories he’s trying to tell, Altman’s “Short Cuts” still traces strong characters and happenstances for which one will meet and influence the next. If he fails at true profundity or solid resolution, his people come with layers worth getting to know and their lives feel real. It ultimately comes off like an experimental film, but one well worth spending time with.