California Split
A common criticism of Robert Altman—not so common that I can produce a link, of course, but one that should ring at least plausible to viewers of Nashville and Short Cuts—is that he is callous and cruel towards his characters.
California Split, a movie about two men (
Elliot Gould and
George Segal) who turn their lives over to gambling, suggests that Altman is not callous, but the universe in which he sets his characters is, itself, indifferent to their fates.Movie universes tend to swaddle their characters in portent. Novels have the space to turn a room or two over to storing rich details that connect only distantly to the plot, but movies don't have the luxury to be useless to their characters, who require the complete devotion of the mise-en-scene to get them from A to B, whether that is an emotional blossoming or finding the Ark of the Covenant.
Here, the universe does not care. If it did, it would have taught Segal's character a thing or two by interrupting his run. But in California Split, you can meet misery after winning $80,000 or so, without blowing it; you can blithely seduce a prostitute in need of redemptive attention and leave the encounter unpunished, and her no smarter about her heart for the attention. (Note that the actress playing the prostitute, Gwen Welles, chronicled an American Idol foretold in Nashville, where she had the good fortune to strip for Nashville's finest political donors, and probably kicked off the Altman-is-a-heartless-bastard hypothesis.)
Garden State
Sometimes the whole of a movie can be less than the sum of its parts.
Garden State is very smart and clever, with an excellent eye for characters and situations. It is also often hillarious; I think it's a sign of some great filmmaking when a movie that isn't a comedy can be this comic.
J.D. fills the movie with excellent bits, any one of which is better than most filmic attempts at capturing detail: A character quietly fantasizing about dying calmly in a plane crash. Killing time hanging out with friends on ecstasy. Dealing with old friends who all of a sudden have money, through no real fault of their own, and they don't know what to do with it, or with themselves. Exploiting the weaknesses in the return policies of a retail store. Breakfasting with your friend's stoner mom. Even at its most cliche -- being stuck in traffic on the 101 -- this sort of imagistic storytelling is given new feeling here.
This is largely because Braff ensures that even the most bit players are real people. A neurologist (
Rachel Green's dad) with about three minutes of screen time didn't need to crack bad jokes before frowning at our protagonist and delivering a sincere medical opinion, but that's what they do.
The great combination of human insight and both writing and filmic skill is what makes it a little disappointing that Braff has chosen to,
at the end of the day, turn schlockily sentimental. It's not that the film suddenly veers that way, it's just that I enjoyed these discrete bits so much that I had to pause to look at the movie as a whole to recognize it for what it was. And it's not bad, I'm just not sure that what we need is another sentimental love story, even one that evokes
The Graduate as well as maybe no other film in a while. (Yes, even better than
this one, I'm guessing.)
Still, go see it. If you just lose yourself in the words and the images, and don't think too much about what it's all about, it's fucking great.
